quote whether primitive or not mankind always stands on the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control the whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war to take but one example mankind is powerless against Mankind and the gods as ever show it in the ways of Fate today we call the gods factors which comes from fer to make the makers stand behind the wing of the World Theater it is so in great things as in small in the realm of Consciousness we are our own masters we seem to be the factors themselves but if we step through the door of the Shadow we discover with Terror that we are the objects of unseen factors to know this is decidedly unpleasant for nothing is more disillusioning than the discovery of our own inadequacy it can even give rise to primitive panic because instead of being believed in the anxiously guarded supremacy of Consciousness which is in truth one of the secrets of human success is questioned in the most dangerous way end quote that's from Coral Jung's essay archetypes of the collective unconscious and in that passage Yung puts forward the central idea of his philosophy of the psyche his most important and also his most terrifying here he raises the prospect of mankind as a creature who is not the maker of his own fate a creature who is in the hands of the Gods in modern times we've renamed these divinities we've made them Accord with a mechanistic scientific understanding of the world and we've presumed that on this basis we can dispense with these Gods we can regard the ego Consciousness as its own self-governing autonomous entity Carl yung's project is in some sense as simple as the project of restoring our awareness of these unseen factors driving our thought and action and restoring a sense of respect and awe for them the project to restore a healthy respect for the gods which we now call unconscious factors and in doing this Yung seeks to revive the religious or Mythic Language by which we used to speak about these things which he believes still dwell deep within the human psyche not as part of our Consciousness not as subjects within the power of the Consciousness but as the master behind the Throne of Consciousness as straightforward as this may seem however such a prospect remains a daunting challenge for the modern man because we have not found gods and goddesses in our search of the stars and of galaxies we have not found that the atoms are moved by mystical forces we've come to regard past mythologies as so many childish Fables which may serve as a source of historical Fascination but which elucidates nothing about the objective world or the human condition as such the various mystical Pursuits of man whether it was the practice of astrology in which we attempted to discover our future through the interpretation of the movement of celestial bodies or the great work of the Alchemists the those Proto scientists who believed that the laws which govern the Divine are the same as the laws that govern the material world or The Many religious stories and prophecies recorded in our holy books that endeavored to tell us the origin and meaning of life through divine revelation the the modern mind looks at all of this and sees nothing but a series of outdated and unscientific assertions these were merely culturally and geographically bound folk tales in the modern view they reveal nothing about the real meaning of human life that is if we even permit that life may have a meaning which in itself is regarded as a disagreeable presumption we might say that we see all of these artifacts of religious thought as childish things coming from the youth and ignorance of Youth of our race and uh to put it in the language of the Bible the scientific modern mind says it is high past time to put away childish things and yet throughout yung's work in psychoanalysis he steadily began to believe that these mythical figures and stories are far more than the mere play things of a more childish mankind that could simply be put to the side upon the scientific maturity of the human race the reason for yung's suspicion is based on the observation that his patience would recreate the imagery of myth and religion in their dreams or in the case of schizophrenics in their hallucinations further when Yung had his patients draw or paint freely as a form of therapeutic exercise he found they would do peculiar things they would draw mandelas for example a type of circular sigil common to the imagery of Eastern spirituality but completely unknown Yung tells us among his European patients at that time they would draw upon the same kinds of allegories used by esoteric Christians such as the rosac crucian order but without having any knowledge that they were doing so and began to suspect that there was a language a lexicon being employed here a language of images and symbols that seemed to derive from a deeper well than the mere personal experience of his patients or their cultural upbringing that his patients were drawing upon something deep within the psyche that was not individual but Universal the collective psychic contents of all mankind which we use when we attempt to discuss the most significant ific aspects and events of Our Lives the most transformative experiences of Life draws upon this language given the material that we've already covered this season one can see the mark of n's thought on yung's already from this description as well as the ways in which Yung develops the thought of his Ur while friend and Mentor Sigman Freud unlike Freud Yung was never interested in hiding his influences or claiming originality for himself or his IDE is I mean in some sense yung's whole project is oriented around the idea that he is not an original thinker that he's simply returning us to the knowledge that we have already held since time immemorial but we've forgotten this with the death of our Mythic language or Mythic understanding or perspective that allowed us to talk about it Yung uh also credits previous thinkers such as Kus and Von Hartman as those who had brought to light the power of the unconscious but where you goes beyond all these previous figures is in so far as he presents us with a comprehensible system for approaching and understanding this vast and confusing Realm of the unconscious contents it is through psychology that we can once again approach the Mythic and reintegrate these two seemingly in congruous elements of our rational moral and outward Persona with the mysterious powerful numinous archetypes which are the secret makers of our destiny Carl Gustaf Yung was born in 1875 in Switzerland broadly speaking his life Bears some similarities to niches as a young man he initially thought of attending Seminary and becoming a minister and then as a teenager he began to study philosophy and this changed his plans for life he opted to pursue the Sciences instead while in n's case the path leads the young Fredick n to the discipline of philology Carl Yung pursued Psychiatry he attended the University of bosil where he studied Medicine by the early 1900s he was in correspondence with Sigman Freud the two men leave us a considerable volume of letters Freud was much older than Yung and over the period of six years during which they collaborated extensively Freud famously wanted Young to become you know his successor in some sense he was uh trying to push yung in that direction he wanted him to become the lifetime president of the International psychoanalytical Association uh and Freud was overruled in this Yung instead served as president for two years instead of a lifetime appointment but he referred to Yung as his adoptive son his sort of Crown Prince and successor as is commonly known however there was always a rift between the two men that would only grow as the years went by Yung was dissatisfied with Freud's focus on sexuality as the primary driver of human psychology furthermore he respected Freud's work as regards repression and his work on the ID as a repository for all that which the Consciousness has attempted to suppress but Yung began to suspect that there was something far vaster than a mere personal unconsciousness beneath the surface world of the ego with the publication of yung's lectures on the psychology of the unconscious in 1913 a book which you can now find under the title of symbols of transformation the disagreement between the two men would only increase in its intensity and as a matter of fact Yung said that this book's publication was the thing that ended their friendship as yung in that text made it clear just how seriously he differed with Freud's account of the psyche Freud it seems had only wanted Crown Prince and successor so long as they agreed with him and carried on Freud's own project on Freud's own terms furthermore Freud is an atheist and he's enrolled in a completely different kind of task in the field of psychology than Yung is whereas Freud's psychoanalysis sought to explain the human being within a Godless world a world in which man's higher aspirations could be seen as outgrowths of Base urges all of man's moral sentiments could be born on the power of the libido yung's tendency is almost the exact opposite in the depths of the unconsciousness Yung does not see mere animal impulses or something reducible to the basis strives of man he sees a well where we can reach down deep in it into truths so profound and inexpressible by the Consciousness that they can only be understood in religious terms whereas Freud found in psychology the reputation of religious thinking as a Curative to the pathological complexes of the Modern Man Yung found the affirmation of the value of such thinking to be the very cure that the modern man was seeking the break with Freud had professional consequences for Yung while Freud has been left behind in the psychology of our time in the early Decades of the 20th century Freud was the preeminent figure of the psychoanalysts he was essentially its founder and its greatest celebrity Yung more or less has a midlife crisis at this point he had what can only be described as an extended psychological episode that we could characterize as either hysteria or depression or perhaps both at many times he was borderline suicidal and during this time in which Yung spent extended periods in solitude he authored his red book a series of diaries with Fant Fantastical religious imagery which Yung saw as his way of working through what he perceived as a Dark Knight of the Soul which is a perennial theme in one's path of mystical or spiritual transformation Yung however made it through this trying period and he began publishing his work again in various academic journals he served as an army doctor during World War I in the inter War years he embarked on some of his most famous and influential projects including his book psychological types and during World War II a fun tidbit about his life that was not known until recently uh because if I recall correctly it was classified but Yung wrote reports that he sent to the oss the American intelligence branch that would later become the CIA advising The Americans on Hitler's mental state he traveled the world visiting America Britain Africa India acquainting himself with the Mythic underpinnings of the various world religions he was productive until his final year until he passed away at the age of 85 in the Year 1961 the origins of yung's theory of archetypes dates all the way back to his first major publication on the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena published in 1902 this was the work that had drawn Freud's attention at the time in this work Yung described the hallucinatory fantasies of a hysterical spiritual medium whose sances Yung attended in the late 1890s should be noted there was something of a craze surrounding sances and mediums during the late 1800s and the first Decades of the 1900s so this wasn't a terribly unusual uh social outing Yung notes how the patient the spirit medium would have these somnambulic attacks she would lose control of her motor function be confronted by VIs of spirits however the patient's ego her sense of her individual conscious Persona was present and intact during these incidents that is she did not display multiple personalities herself she seemed to remain the conscious subject merely encountering these avatars of her unconscious mind we see the first intimation of archetypes in this work and that Yung comes to understand that even though the spirits that the patient encounters are numerous they could be grouped so to speak into two definite types that in some sense all the different iterations of these Spirit personalities were in fact reiterations of the same two unconscious subpersonalities or complexes Yung writes in this article quote it seems that many secondary series of ideas must have split off quite early from the primary unconscious personality for already after the first to sances Spirits appeared by the Dozen the names were inexhaustible in variety but the differences between the personalities were soon exhausted and it became apparent that they could all be subsumed under two types the seror religious type and the gay hilarious so far it was really only a matter of two different unconscious personalities which appeared under different names but had no essential differences end quote this Insight is the germ of much of your later thought it's a theme he would see play out time and again with multiple patients the same cast of characters more or less innumerable in terms of the exact name or the image attributed to the character by the patient but nevertheless the same in essence as other iterations of the same character type yung's research in the various world religions was spurred on by this same underlying idea he began to perceive that types appear in the mythmaking of the various World cultures Yung writes quote primitive man impresses us so strongly with his subjectivity that we should really have guessed long ago that myths refer to something psychic end quote but unlike Freud Yung did not seek to make our myths small and insignificant on that basis instead he grows to see the depths of human psychology as being just as profound as our oldest stories and in fact it's the Well from which these stories are drawn now as our main focus for this episode we're going to turn to volume 9 of yung's collected works which includes his essays written from the time of 1933 onward on the subject of the archetypes and the collective unconscious from the very beginning of that volume in the first essay included there entitled archetypes of the collective unconscious Yung makes clear the operative difference between his own thought and that of Freud quote at first the concept of the unconscious was limited to denoting the state of repressed or forgotten contents even with Freud who makes the unconscious at least metaphorically take the stage as acting subject it is really nothing but the Gathering Place of Forgotten and repressed contents and has a functional significance thanks only to these for Freud accordingly the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature although he was a aware of its archaic and mythological thought forms a more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal I call it the personal unconscious but this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition but is inborn this deeper layer I call the collective unconscious I have chosen the name Collective because this part of the unconscious is not individual but Universal in contrast to the personal psyche it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals it is in other words identical in all men and thus constitutes the common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of us end quote the collective unconscious is often wrongly characterized as a sort of Supernatural Claim about Humanity if we have some sort of psychic link between our minds or sort of hive mind unconsciousness something of the like the actual claim is simply that in the same way that we're all born with certain instincts we're also all born with certain unconscious knowledge that we have a preal lexicon of imagery or symbolism that exists in all human Minds it's a starting uh basic kit of information that's contained in the unconscious prior to any inculturation or upbringing it's really no stronger of a claim than any Claim about inborn traits or knowledge that exists in every human being which I think would be fairly hard to argue against to say that there is no Universal relatable pallet of human emotions or impulses would simply be patently false all human beings experience anger experience sexual urges experience hunger and thirst all human beings have a fight ORF flight mechanism we can easily accept such ideas is the troubling assertion that Yung makes really is that human nature also contains unconscious information uh not just unconscious Instinct this is not to be considered knowledge or information of a kind that would necessarily be parsed by a rational discursive intellect uh wherever it makes itself known it appears not in the form of word Concepts or of abstract ideas but in the form of these figures in the form of images or narratives we can see how yung's work draws upon Freud or serves as an elaboration upon it and that Yung also believes that the repressed personal unconsciousness is What Lies Beneath the surface of the ego but Yung thinks that this repressed unacceptable psychic content is itself only another surface layer sitting upon this wide world of the ID Yung describes in this essay a number of profound religious dreams in which this vaster unconsciousness is likened to a sea or a dark Lake the association of the unconsciousness with water is a common symbol found in such dreams and experiences Yung describes one dreamer who often saw the castle of the Grail sitting on a high Mountaintop but found that he could only reach it by passing quote a darksome Gorge with underworld water rushing ring along the bottom end quote another patient a Protestant Theologian had a recurring dream in which he was standing on a high mountain slope looking down into the deep valley below in which there was a dark Lake in the dream he felt that something always held him back from going down to the lake but he decided to venture there anyway as he approached the water quote everything grew dark and uncanny and a gust of wind suddenly rushed over the face of the water he was seized by a panic fear and awoke end quote water is only one of the common symbols for a confrontation with the unconsciousness and a theme we can already see developing in these two example dreams is that in order to reach a place perceived as above the psyche uh the ideal the spiritual however we may interpret it one must first journey downward the imagery of water of a lake or sea seems natural for the human in mind it indicates something of which we can only see the surface but beneath which there is an unfathomable depth to approach the unconsciousness is always a somewhat fearful experience because the first layer of it contains those very repressed contents of the uh the contents that were repressed by the Consciousness that characterize the Freudian version of the ID far from being strictly sexual this unconscious layer represents everything about our public outward facing Persona that we cannot show the world or manifest in our conscious life and thought it is just as much our self as our waking self but it's the dark reflection of that waking self Yung writes quote whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself the mirror does not flatter it Faithfully shows whatever looks into it namely the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the Persona the mask of an actor but the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face end quote this is what Yung calls the shadow it is the sum total of everything about ourselves which we have judged as negative but it would be a mistake to think that the shadow does not operate in the world through our conscious personality it does not remain confined to our unconscious thoughts or dreams on the contrary Yung says that quote the shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form it cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness end quote the way that Yung describes the shadow as a phenomenon a psychic phenomenon is exceedingly fascinating because the shadow is both a terrible figure but it is also the Herald of a great personal transformation just as one must find their way across the terrible rushing waters of a dark gorge in order to find their way to the Holy Grail The Shadow is the gateway to a deeper understanding of oneself Yung writes in paragraph 45 of that same essay quote the meeting with oneself is at first the meeting with one's own shadow the shadow is a tight passage a narrow door whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well end quote in order to understand how the shadow makes itself felt in our daily lives it's essential that we understand yung's concept of projection civilization naturally raises certain aspects of the self into a state of conscious sovereignty and so long as the conscious Persona is healthy functioning flourishing those unconscious contents which are unacceptable for the social life are deprived of energy so to speak they're kept ordinated but if the conscious domain of the psyche becomes unbalanced unhealthy in some way is challenged or disturbed in some serious way those unconscious complexes will start to take charge of it and furthermore the unconscious contents are experienced as something foreign to the conscious self Yung writes quote the collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system it is sheer objectivity as wide as the world and open to all the world there I am the object of every subject and complete reversal of my ordinary Consciousness where I am always the subject that has an object end quote and so when someone's unacceptable unconscious content that Yung calls their Shadow begins to make itself forceful over the conscious personality it is natural that we should experience this as something external that we should therefore project that feeling that complex that type onto the external World Yun clarifies in one section that this term projection should not be taken to mean that the psyche has actually reached out into the objective world and exercised a power over the external he says another term one could use for projection would be introjection the use of external objects or entities to symbolize some process which is actually internal to the subject that really we're not so much pitching the psyche out with projection so much as we are bringing the external in so for an example of the Shadow crashing into the psyche of an otherwise Healthy Mind suppose we have an individual who feels that aggressiveness in competition whether it be sports or one's career or simply social life in general that it's inappropriate and it's mean-spirited that one should not ever express hostility towards one's fellow competitors you should comport yourself with a kind of mutual respect we would probably all say these are admirable values for one to hold but perhaps we can imagine someone who feels this value of a desire for mutual respect in competition so strongly that he always suspects that his competitors are hostile toward him when he loses on the football field he assumes his opponents must be putting his team down in their own locker room after the game when a cooworker passes him and gets the promotion he assumes that this person secretly hates him or looks down upon him and accordingly because all of our sportsmanship is just a false veneer in the first place perhaps he ends up feeling that hostility towards all of his competitors around him this fills him with a sense of guilt but he reminds himself that it's really the fault of all of those around him who have disrespected him over the years a yungan might look at such a person and see that he's become possessed by his shadow to some extent and in this process he has experienced it as something foreign something alien to his ego Consciousness with all of his moral pretentions that mutual respect is the basis of all friendly competition but he always projects his own shadow onto the behaviors of his friends and his co-workers the fact that it is really he who feels this deep hostility and disrespect towards others is masked by this projection and it becomes a way for him to to deal with the guilt that he feels for feeling that way all of this would be in the patient Shadow Self Yung gives an explanation in broad somewhat poetic terms of what the person possessed by the Shadow or by their quote inferior functions is like uh this is in concerning rebirth paragraph uh 222 of archetypes and the collective unconscious quote the inferior function is practically identical with the dark side of the human personality the darkness which clings to every personality is the door into the unconscious and the Gateway of our dreams from which those two twilight figures the Shadow and the Ana step into our nightly Visions or remaining invisible take possession of our ego Consciousness a man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps whenever possible he prefers to make an unfavorable impression on others in the long run luck is always against him because he is living below his own level and at best only attains what does not suit him and if there is no doorstep for him to stumble over he manufactures one for himself and then fondly believes he has done something useful end quote Yung mentions Thea there which we will address in a little bit but the main thing to remember about the shadow it's the unacceptable side of ourselves which nevertheless exists and sometimes motivates our actions and that we therefore project unto the external in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance that that brings we would sooner see the contents of our own shadow adow in our friends in our neighbors and our interlocutors than in ourselves and such a person who is possessed by their Shadow will consequently bring forth the very aspect of himself that he despises and then experience it as something alien we will get in our own way and then perceive that obstacle as the other in dreams the shadow can appear as numerous images sometimes as a hostile animal or a predator uh sometimes as a primitive human being the shadow appears throughout the mythology of mankind as an adversary or as a dark inversion of the heroic figure because the origin of these unacceptable drives or impulses is within our animal nature the association of the Shadow with less conscious animals or more instinctive forms of life seems somewhat obvious but in many cultures Yung argues the shadow appears in the mythology as a trickster figure such a figure is something of a riddle because the trickster entities of many religions and superstitious Traditions is a sort of mixed and paradoxical character Yung says that there is something of the trickster in the image of the shaman and the medicine man the the wild figure who lives at the boundaries of society but has a connection with the world of spirits the Poltergeist is another such example within popular folklore in this case of a trickster Spirit Yung also brings up the contrad iciness of the trickster in European folklore in the form of the devil regarded as the ape of God who is sometimes portrayed in the Legends as a simpleton who's easily fooled or cheated by ordinary human beings there are also the figures out of folktales such as Tom Thumb or stupid Hans and one of Grim's fairy tales the spirit mercurious who takes his name from the Greek god Mercury is outwitted by a simple peasant Yung argues in his essay psychology of the trickster figure that quote if the myth were nothing but an historical Remnant one would have to ask why it has not long since vanished into the great rubbish heap of the Past end quote instead the trickster still fascinates us whether it's misto and Gus fa Loki and the Norse myths or for that matter lowkey in the latest Marvel production or in the horror stories of poltergeists and other such mischievous Spirits uh Yung references the strange European tradition of celebrating the trickster Yung believes that these fests and carnivals were in some sense rooted in the Roman Holiday of satalia in which societal roles were reversed slaves ordered around their masters and so on in medieval Europe the new year was celebrated with singing and dancing called the Fool's feast in the year 1198 apparently the festivities got so out of hand that Pope Innocent III railed against the quote gests and Madness that make the clergy a mockery end quote and the quote Shameless frenzy of their play acting end quote and even 200 years later a letter to the theological faculty of Paris complained that even the clergy was getting involved with these Fool's feasts and that they were farcically electing a Fool's Pope during these festivities there was also the fesum asinorum the ass festival or donkey Festival as Yung mentions this is referenced by Nisha himself in thus book zerra the chapter named the ass festival and in yung's estimation that chapter of zarathustra is quote a deliberately Blasphemous parody of the mass end quote as Yung explains we cannot Source this apparently farsal celebration to nche himself these strange ecclesiast iCal Customs are the organic products of the Middle Ages A procession of men marched with a donkey decked with a golden canopy and they marched all the way into the church and there the priest would conclude mass by braying three times like a donkey and the priests and archbishops then played a ball game inside the church Yung writes quote in picaresque Tales in carnivals and Revels and Magic rights of healing and man's religious fears and and exaltations the Phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages sometimes in quite unmistakable form sometimes in strangely modified guys end quote and a bit further in the essay Yung continues quote the trickster Motif does not crop up only in its mythical form but appears just as naively and authentically in the unsuspecting Modern Man whenever in fact he feels himself at the mercy of annoying quote accidents which thwart his will and his actions with apparently malicious intent he then speaks of quote hudos and jinxes or of the mischievousness of the object here the trickster is represented by counter tendencies in the unconscious and in certain cases by a sort of second personality of a purile and inferior character not unlike the personalities who announce themselves at spiritualistic sciences and cause all those ineffably childish phenomenon so typical of poltergeists I have I think found a suitable designation for this character component when I called it the shadow on the Civilized level it is regarded as a personal Gaff slip faux paaw Etc which are then chocked up as defects of the conscious personality we are no longer aware that in carnival customs and the like there are remnants of a collective shadow figure which proved that the personal Shadow is in part descended from a numinous collective figure end quote and just a few observations about that I mean to this very day people reference the uh Legend of Gremlins right which uh you know was very popular apparently during uh uh Air Force pilots during World War II they have like random problems with a part or you know something of that nature they would say oh the Gremlins right these little uh malicious elves who get into the machinery and and mess it up and I still will say that phrase myself and I my I know people who will use it of like oh damn Gremlins right uh when it's just apparently a random accident will attribute it to a mischievous little elf or a mischievous little fiend or as Yung says something of a pure ale and inferior character and you know furthermore what Yung brings up toward the end there of gaffs slips of fopa that is the Freudian slip finding its way into Jung's uh uh psychology to some extent that the slips the gaffs the mistakes we make when we say the reverse of what we mean to say or an unwanted inappropriate word finds our way in its way into our speech that what's happening there is a slippage of the unacceptable contents of Consciousness or the of unconsciousness at the Consciousness has suppressed I.E the shadow that's what the fian slip is now the trickster as a figure when it's treated as a collective figure in the mythology it's paradoxical because as Yung points out in some respects he's stupider than the animals he gets himself into trouble again and again in the fairy tales and is seemingly helpless in this even though the shadow as trickster figure is not necessarily evil quote he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness end quote and yet the trickster such as when he appears in the form of mercurious is he from whom mortal man could win the magic power of healing the trickster in yung's view is a prefiguration of the Savior figure because he leads man on his way from a Placid state of ignorance about his animal nature he uh he gives us the red pill to use modern language about our animal nature um rather than uh we might say the naive notion of the supremacy of consciousness Yung writes quote the trickster is a primitive Cosmic being of a Divine animal nature on the one hand Superior to man because of his superhuman qualities and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and his unconsciousness end quote so to recapitulate Yung asserts that the first thing we have to confront as we begin to integrate what is unconscious and the psyche into the conscious mind is those unacceptable animal impulses within us and in fact we find that much of our behavior is driven by these impulses as Freud argued in fact you could say all of our impulses have this animal origin but because we've gone through the process of civilization we've become Afflicted with this kind of Amnesia where certain aspects have been suppressed and the shadow is a terrifying reminder that they're still there even though they've been subordinated and they're right beneath the surface and therefore we portray that figure as a paradoxical half God half animal something that both Lies Beneath our humanity and beckons us to what might be above our Humanity as it is now because the confrontation with the shadow is that first encounter with the unconscious which is the beginning of the psychic work needed in order to fully integrate and understand oneself still the shadow is an incredibly dangerous thing it may be precisely because we have ceased to pay the Ive Shadow it's due that the shadow might even pose more danger now than ever this is a recurring theme with Yung that which we do not bring into Consciousness or that which tries to breach into Consciousness and that we continually attempt to ignore that is always what poses the most frightful danger whatever it is that remains in the dark Yung writes quote the so-called civilized man man has forgotten the trickster he remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically when irritated by his own ineptitude he speaks of Fate Playing Tricks on him or of things being Bewitched he never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless Shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams as soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual the shadow is mobilized and as history shows may even be personified and incarnated end quote this is part of how Yung understands the psychology of crowds what we might call Mass psychology and it entails a real consequence uh if we fail to understand the arc typle contents of the psych because when lots of individuals aggregate together what happens is not an Ever more multifarious expression of their individuality but erase to the most universal thought patterns and complexes that's what overwhelms the individuality of each member accordingly as all of this unconscious content is collective those archetypes of the collective unconsciousness will begin to more strongly Express themselves the more powerful the collective is the more overwhelming it is the more the ego Consciousness is submerged within the multitude Yung believed this was a large part of the psychology of the dangerous collectivist movements in Europe at that time just as a man who is not integrated his shadow might project that individual Shadow onto his neighbor so too might an entire Society construct a collective Shadow quote in consequence of the increasing repression and neglect of the original mythology as a corresponding projection on other social groups and Nations end quote now as the shadow is only a Gateway into this world of the unconscious we might wonder about some of these other archetypes we've already mentioned one of them Thea Yung argues that Thea like all of these other figures is not sheer mythology which he names as a constant Prejudice of so-called scientifically minded men whenever they encounter his theories he argues that quote the concept of the anima is a purely empirical concept whose sole purpose is to give a name to a group of related or analogous psychic phenomena the concept does no more and means no no more than shall we say the concept anthropods which includes all animals with articulated body and Limbs and so gives a name to this phenomenological group end quote this passage is useful not just for understanding how Yung thinks about the anima but how he thinks about all of these archetypes even though he constantly brings in the content of myths and of dreams and of fantasies the point is to notice similarities across all of these and across individuals and cultures to classify these so-called dreams and Fantasies as definite types and therefore to have a basis for inquiring empirically about these types Yung explains Thea in the essay archetypes of the collective unconscious In this passage quote whoever looks into the water sees his own image but behind it living creatures soon Loom up fish is presumably harmless dwellers of the deep harmless if only the lake were not haunted Ed they are water beings of a peculiar sort sometimes a Nixie gets into the Fisherman's Net a female half human fish nixes are entrancing creatures half Drew she him half sank he down and never more was seen the Nixie is an even more instinctive version of a magical feminine being whom I call the anima she can also be a siren a mermaid wood nymph Grace or kling's daughter or alamia or succubus who infatuates young men and sucks the life out of them end quote so all of these mythical figures the Nixie the siren the succubus these beings are a source of infatuation but they're also a source of fear Thea is beautiful and yet Dreadful Yung writes that many would dismiss such figures as merely Flights of Fancy worthless erotic fantasies and he admits there is some TR truth to this but it is not the whole truth for such fantasies are not explained merely by calling them fantasies and may quote complicate our psychic life in a most painful way she comes upon us just as a Nixie might she sits on top of us like a succubus she changes into all sorts of shapes like a witch and in general displays an unbearable Independence that does not seem at all proper in a psychic content end quote these types of myths appear all over the world and are probably relatively familiar to most of us Yung uses the term Ana because the meaning of Ana is soul to which the German word seal is uh related if we trace the atmology of this word to its Greek Origins we find its meaning as quick moving changeful of hue twinkling likened to the butterfly the soul is the breath the magic breath that animates living beings that which has soul is Spirited it is moving accordingly Yung writes that Thea quote makes us believe incredible things that life may be lived end quote and we might think here of schopenhauer's view of the feminine tied in with his view of women as that which seduces us to continue pursuing the will to live Yung says that the anima the feminine representation of the soul is that which continually ens snares us bringing us back to Earth Back To Nature in fact one can find such a representation of the feminine as both alluring and deadly in the very judaic creation myth found in Genesis Eve must convince Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit along with her of course in the Jewish and in the Christian religious morality this makes Eve the first Sinner and Adam along with her but Yung also brings out this element that the feminine Spurs man on to his betterment and to his elevation which is sort of at tension with that and perhaps a literalist uh take on the biblical creation myth that's a theme in Gus fa as well it is in fact the final couplet of the play sung by the chorus mysticus quote the Eternal feminine lurs to Perfection end quote and that connection is not lost on Yung who would argue that G's play is just as much an expression of these unconscious contents as any of our myths or ancient rituals were faou is the man who has ever drawn forward with his insatiable thirst for Life Never Satisfied and the thing that draws him forward whether it is Gretchen as he sees her image in the witch's mirror or the image of Helen of Troy conjured into the modern day it's the feminine that represents that for which fa is always striving but can never reach Helen of Troy quite literally transfigures into a cloud that fa then grabs hold of and then Rises es up into the heavens Yung quotes luko who writes accordingly were it not for the leaping and twinkling of The Soul Man Would rot away in his greatest passion idleness end quote Yung clarifies that he does not call Thea the soul in the sense of the immortal Soul found in for example the Catholic Doctrine Yung refers us instead to classical sources such as macrobius or to the DST religion and the philosophical system of classical Chinese thought wherein the PO or the qu quote is regarded as the feminine and cthonic part of the Soul end quote Yung writes of the anima in archetypes of the collective unconscious quote it is a factor in the proper sense of the word man cannot make it on the contrary it is always the a priori element in his moods reactions impulses or whatever else is spontaneous in psychic life it is something that lives of itself that makes us live it is a life behind Consciousness that cannot be completely integrated with it but from which on the contrary Consciousness arises for in the last analysis psychic life is for the greater part an unconscious life that surrounds Consciousness on all sides although it seems as if the whole of our unconscious psychic life could be ascribed to the animal she is yet only one archetype among many therefore she is not characteristic of the unconscious in its entirety she is only one of its aspects this is shown by the very fact of her femininity what is not I not masculine is most probably feminine and because the not ey is felt as not belonging to me and therefore as outside me the Ana image is usually projected upon women either sex is inhabited by the opposite sex up to a point for biologically speaking it is simply the greater number of masculine genes that tips the scales in favor of masculinity the smaller number of feminine genes seems to form a feminine character which usually remains unconscious because of its subordinate position with the archetype of the anima we enter the realm of gods or rather the realm that metaphysics has reserved for itself everything the anima touches becomes numinous unconditional dangerous taboo magical she is the serpent in the paradise of the harmless man with good resolutions and still better intentions she affords the most convincing reasons for not prying into the unconscious an occupation that would break down our moral inhibitions and unleash forces that had been better left unconscious and undisturbed end quote so a few observations that many of you have probably already taken note of for one yung's assessment of this first major character within the metaphysical world of the collective unconscious is that its gender is going to be the opposite of the conscious subject so in the case of women they would not possess Ana but an animus Thea for men or animus for women is called the soul because it's the strongest most powerful subpersonality within the unconscious contents the most powerful factor in determining our thoughts and actions it's the cathic part of the Soul because it's buried beneath the surface of Consciousness but it remains Soul the thing that animates that draws us forward seduces us to life it is our image of the opposite gender contained within ourselves and usually as with the shadow we never consciously perceive the psychic force and thus we project it onto the opposite sex a man will project onto women His image of the feminine which is something coming from deep within his own unconsciousness and representative of his own wants and fears and then he'll experience his own image of the feminine as something outside of himself something not me Yung relates a number of religious Visions from Christian figures including a cian monk in the 1300s and a Swiss Mystic in the 1500s in which they saw alongside God the Father God the mother or alongside the king of Heaven the Queen of Heaven such Visions were completely inexplicable within the religious framework of European Christianity at that time such feminine interpretations of the Divine had long since been excised from European religious thought and God was the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit a trinity which is holy male I mean maybe there's some ambiguity with the Holy Spirit but there's not a whole lot of female energy in that uh metaphor so where did such Visions come from in which a holy man in Europe is confronted with the Divine as female again independently of tradition we have record of such sistic Visions Cy is the conjunction of two apparently opposite aspects in this case the masculine and feminine as both uh perceived as Divine it's only natural that these two should appear as a mother father pair as they often do and this is what is signified by God the father and God the mother it should be noted at this point that this is yung's way of dealing with the insights of Freud of incorporating what Freud had learned about the centrality of the family relationships to our psychic life but without elevating the relationship with one's father and mother to the status of ultimate importance as if the actual tangible father and mother in your upbringing are the determinative thing of how your psyche operates that there is this Collective unconscious contents of the image of the Father the image of the mother in effect the mother complex is another manifestation of Thea another mask or face of Thea because Thea is a numinous and alluring thing the cathic soul within you know a young man or young boy will naturally project Thea at first onto his mother the natural thing however is for Thea image to gradually lose its Grandeur over the course of growing up and eventually when you know we come to understand our parents as just being ordinary human beings and over time the Ana sinks back into the unconsciousness um although Yung argues it loses none of its tension or its productivity Yung then discusses the psychic effects it would have on a man to project hisa archetype in light of this this is in concerning the archetypes and the Ana concept quote the love life of a Man reveals the psychology of this archetype in the form either of boundless Fascination overvaluation and infatuation or of misogyny in all its gradations and variants none of which can be explained by the real nature of the quote object in question but only by a transference of the mother complex the complex however was caused in the first place by the assimilation of the mother in itself a normal and ubiquitous phenomenon to the pre-existent feminine side of an archetypal male female pair of opposites and secondly by an abnormal delay in detaching from the primordial image of the the mother actually nobody can stand the total loss of the archetype when that happens it gives rise to that frightful discontent in our culture where nobody feels at home because a father and mother are always missing end quote and a bit further in the essay Yung writes quote the Ana is a factor of utmost importance in the psychology of a man wherever the 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 end quote so you may have also noted thus far Yung says that completely integrating 's anima is an impossible task um you know the well of the soul is very deep no matter how fully you try to bring it into Consciousness uh some of it always recedes back into the depths of the mind and so it should be right because to become fully identified with this subordinate unconscious personality would not be a good idea it would be the destruction of your actual conscious personality but it's also not a good idea to completely banish these archetypes from our cultural or spiritual lexicon to attempt to excise them or to to smother them entirely in unconsciousness and Jung does say that for young men those who are 35 and younger the most important thing in his view is for a man to be a man and that they can live with even the almost total Destruction of the enema it may be different he admits with artists and other such types who might need Thea for their work but it's primarily as a man begins to get older that the loss of the anima becomes particularly dangerous quote after the middle of Life permanent loss of Thea means a diminution of Vitality of flexibility and of hum kindness the result as a rule is premature rigidity crustiness stereotypy fanatical one-sidedness obstinacy pedantry or else resignation weariness sloppiness irresponsibility end quote what one realizes over the course of studying archetypes is that Yung truly thinks that these are independent subpersonalities they have their own life and character one has to reconcile with them to some extent which means recognizing their existence and the role they play in your psychic life but to become completely identified with an archetype would be just as catastrophic as trying to go to war with it as you may have gleaned and neither of the types we've considered so far the Shadow or the Ana can be considered as wholly positive or wholly negative as terrifying as the shadow is as the trickster he's a sort of gateway to the ideal self to the Savior or the Redeemer the anima draws forward the subject into the unknown into unknown Seas but also threatens the subject with the danger of drowning so these types are multifaceted they also have multiple faces to them that Express different aspects of the archetype so the great mother archetype is a subset of Thea which could appear as one's personal mother or grandmother she can appear as the mother of God as the Virgin or as Sophia these are all generally positive these are inspiring forms of the mother type but Yung writes quote all these symbols can have a positive favorable meaning or a negative evil meaning an ambivalent aspect is seen in the goddesses of fate Moira grae norns evil symbols are the witch the dragon or any devouring or entwining animal such as a large fish or serpent the grave sarcophagus Deep Water Deep nightmares and Bogies impusa Lilith Etc the relationship that one will have with such archetypes will reflect their psychological realities and the realities of Their Own lives and often times the appearance of such a symbol is an unconscious hint as to some imbalance or pathology like if one is having repeated visitations of mahakali in their dreams you know constantly experiencing the great mother as something terrible and all devouring it may be an indication of Anima inflation in the person's psychology the the subpersonality of Thea becoming all conquering and unchallenged and beginning to dominate and uh to push the conscious subject's behavior in ways that might not even be perceptible to him we'll consider a few other important archetypes that Yung identifies Yung writes quote the archetype of the child God is extremely widespread and intimately bound up with all the other mythological aspects of the child Motif end quote of course in European Christianity we have the symbolism of the Christ child uh to which we return every Christmas it's a celebration of God's birth on Earth where we see God as the child Yung also however uh brings in a discussion of folklore of dwarves and elves and little people who inhabit the Deep places and the Min shafts and on the other hand the child appears as a recurring theme in mystical experience Meister eckart's vision of the naked boy it appears in English ghost stories The Apparition of the radiant boy Yung writes in psychology of the child archetype quote the child Motif not infrequently occurs in the field of Psychopathology the quote imaginary child is common among women with mental disorders and is usually interpreted in a Christian sense homunculi also appear as in the famous straber case where they come in swarms and plague the sufferer but the clearest and most significant manifestation of the child Motif in the therapy of neurosis is in the maturation process of Personality induced by the analysis of the unconscious which I have termed the process of individuation here we are confronted with preconscious processes which in the form of more or less well-formed fantasies gradually pass over into the conscious mind or become conscious as dreams or lastly are made conscious through the method of active imagination this material is rich in archetypal motifs among the frequently that of the child often the child is formed after the Christian model more often though it develops from earlier altogether non-Christian levels that is to say out of cathic animals such as crocodiles dragons serpents or monkeys sometimes the child appears in the cup of a flower or out of a golden egg or as the center of a Mandela in dreams it often appears as the dreamer's son or daughter or as a boy youth or young girl occasionally it seems to be of exotic origin Indian or Chinese with a Dusky skin or appearing more cosmically surrounded by stars or with a starry Coronet or as the King's son or the witch's child with demonic attributes seen as a special instance of the treasure hard to attain Motif the child Motif is extremely variable and assumes all manner of shapes such as the jewel the Pearl the flower the Chalice the golden egg the quern the Golden Ball and so on it can be interchanged with these and similar images almost without limit end quote so what are we to make of a passage like this I mean on the one hand Yung seems to include so many images of the child archetype that its very coherence might seem to be hard to grasp on the other hand what Yung is doing here is pointing to in his view in a rational and arbitrary series of associations that the psych has made between seemingly unrelated objects or symbols that this is really what we might call poetic license it's one of the main things that seems to differentiate our thought as human beings we have the capability to make uh poetic leaps but you know what this involves is associating two different phenomena by way of metaphor and the unconscious is similarly artistic in this way it makes these metaphorical associations as the child Arc type is the treasure hard to attain the child could appear as a radiant Jewel or as a radiant infant Yung believes that the child archetype appears when one has in some way sundered themselves from their own character what he means by this is that we can occasionally act in ways that Accord more with an arbitrary Persona that we have adopted than in line with our actual values the way that we feel we should act deep in our gut in our intuition the demands of the social life lead us to adopt such arbitrary personas a mask that one puts on due to the requirements of his job or his social relationships or his church or his marriage and family life whatever it might be and we might be forced to make ourselves appear as something that we're not in so far as our inner feelings might be completely at odds with our outward Persona and if we then act according to the needs or desires of this artificial character that we've created created we may then encounter the child archetype Yung says that one sees the child for example in dreams when he becomes quote unchildlike and artificial end quote and when he quote has lost his roots end quote the thing hard to attain then somewhat conjures the imagery of one's childhood but Yung argues this is not purely a yearning for some romantic version of of one's youth or one's Childhood Days Yung says that quote the child Motif represents not only something that existed in the distant past but also something that exists now that is to say it is not just a vestage but a system functioning in the present whose purpose is to compensate or correct in a meaningful manner the inevitable one-sidedness and extravagances of the conscious mind end quote this is why the child Motif occurs when patients are undergoing what Yung calls individuation they come to realize the ways in which artificial personas have compromised their values the child is a symbol of one's creativity of the innocent self-absorption in one's setting uh a a presentness of thought and attitude the child Motif therefore suggests to us that yes we have lived in this manner in the past and that there is a possibility to return there in the future to get over the one-sidedness as Yung calls it often of being pulled in One Direction or another by some particularly tyrannical subcomplex or drive the child therefore represents not the past but the future the child promises some future possibility of individuation or wholeness and therefore its appearance is like Virgil appearing to Dante when he's lost in the wood of error the radiant child appears to you when you become lost the child Motif therefore often depicts a child hero or a child God a figure which is at once vulnerable but indestructible he's often born into danger or privation as Moses was placed into the river by his birth mother so that he could survive or Jesus's mother giving birth to him in a Manger he's smaller than small and bigger than big at the same time the child is always there in our mind as an eternal warning or a sign that we have gone astray in order that we may set right our course a child is vulnerable because we know that in this world we're often in real danger of completely losing our connection to that innocence that creativity that is the healthy state of the soul and obviously at this point Bears mentioning the child is that final Transfiguration of the spirit in n's schema as he gives it in zarathustra's prologue and so from this a unian analysis might lead us to suspect that n gravitated to the child Motif because he unconsciously understood the role of the child as a sign and symbol of self- transformation and individuation and perhaps n was able to perceive this because he himself may have been uh someone at odds with his uh between his outer Persona and his inner values so to speak perhaps during the latter days of his teaching at basil or his time spent among the vagians another important archetypal figure is the wise old man he can appear as an Old King a wisened magician a father or a grandfather in mythology he is Odin Osiris Jupiter arguably the image of the wise old man as an archetype is painted on the ceiling of the cistin chapel this seems to have been the archetype that Michelangelo used to portray God the wise old man is the superior the master the teacher and in some way represents the anchoring wisdom on which one's life is based the wise old man is the super structure of one's thought one's morality their understanding of the reality they inhabit and how they fit into that reality Jung says that when one's worldview their way of comprehending themselves is profoundly challenged this is often when the wise old man appears perhaps for example when one is losing their religion Yung relates the story of a young Theologian who had a dream in which two Wise Old magicians appeared to him a white magician wearing black robes and a black magician wearing white robes in the dream the black magician tells the story of an Old King from a far away land who had scoured all the land searching for a tomb for himself in his land were many great old tombs and he wished to find the best but when they found one one in which a virgin had been buried they exhumed her bones the bones didn't stay dead but got up formed into a black horse which then galloped across the desert the magician followed the horse until he found grassland and the horse grazing there he' now found the keys to paradise and did not know what to do with them this is perhaps the most yian dream I've ever heard so kudos to Yung for managing to get this one from someone he says he did not even know personally I mean it's just incredible but in any case this Theologian was going through something in his life at the time which was of monumental importance a a shift or a transformation that could have life-altering consequences that is Yung says quote he was in great Straits because of his religious beliefs end quote uh which is a bit vague but if we read between the lines we can infer that in some ways the Theologian beliefs probably drifted from those which were acceptable maybe according to the dogma of the Seminary perhaps he was losing his faith altogether we don't really know in any case he was confronted with the strong drive to leave behind the current mental structure of his worldview to lay to rest the Old King so to speak and thus to strike out across the desert and what is it that strikes out across the desert well it's the black horse which is formed from the bones of the Virgin buried in the Tomb in the old country so Thea the soul we might say has become dead dry Dusty bones within the reign of an Old Kingdom and once the king decided to lay himself to rest so to speak the soul jumps up it runs out into the unknown until it finds a new green pasture and by following it following the drive of the soul the black magician finds the keys to Paradise the treasure hard to obtain the Holy Grail The Return to the Walled Garden Yung wres quote the two magicians are indeed two aspects of the wise old man the superior master and teacher the archetype of the spirit who symbolizes the pre-existent meaning hidden in the chaos of life he is the father of the soul and yet the soul in some miraculous manner is also his virgin mother for which reason he was called by the Alchemists the first son of the mother the black magician and the black horse correspond to the sent into darkness and the dreams mentioned earlier what an inappropriately hard lesson for a young student of theology fortunately he was not in the least sense aware that the father of all prophets had spoken to him in the dream and placed a great secret almost within his grasp one Marvels at the inappropriateness of such occurrences end quote there is another famous idea of the archetype of the wise man that can be found in the literature and we're all familiar with it here zarathustra himself Yung writes that zarathustra is nich's psychic image of quote the enlightener the master and teacher a psychopomp whose personification even nche that breaker of tablets could not Escape end quote Yung continues in the same passage and I'm reading here in an Abridged form quote for him God was dead but the driving demon of wisdom became as it were his bodily double zorus ra is more for n than a poetic figure he is an involuntary confession a testament end quote Yung argues that in the nihilistic darkness that n in the wake of abandoning God and abandoning Christianity uh he created a void that required a figure that would speak in the hieratic language of zaratustra he chooses as the image of this figure one of the founders of the world religions a prophet of ancient times a man who divided good and evil zarra proclaims the relativity and relatedness of Good and Evil in nich's version of offense this is zarathustra as the first man to make the distinction also being the first to realize his mistake but we might also notice in the dream of the Theologian that Yung described we see the symbol ISM of the relativity of Good and Evil there too and the figures of the white and black magicians both of whom are wise men both of whom have mismatched names Yung argues that this perceived interdependence of Good and Evil far from being an invention of nich's mind is one of the oldest bits of wisdom in human religiosity Yung cites a saying from India that the man who loves God will take seven lifetimes to reach Perfection while the man who hates him will take three lifetimes and this is because the man who hates God will think of him more often Yung also suggests that this relativity this freedom from opposition due to a perception of their functional equivalence is also found in DST Philosophy for that one might look to the xanga or to the DA Ching while this may offend Mainline Christian sensibilities there are even strains of Christian thought in which God's allowance of evil in the world is seen as a good thing because it allows for the overcoming of sin or in Hebrew the yahar the evil inclination the inclination of man to sin which is considered to be in itself valuable it was placed there by God for a good reason because in the overcoming of sin we glorify God zarathustra then speaks some of that same wisdom of the ultimate relativity of Good and Evil the dependence of one upon the other and he stands as a wise religious teacher in a world darkened by the death of God he's nich's creation of a mystical wise man out of a deep need the deeply felt absence of this anchoring structure for our thought and so uh zarth thyra becomes yet another figure who teaches us the pre-existent meaning behind the chaos of life which is the meaning of the wise old man that figure of the wise man as teacher Jung says is one of the types definite aspects appearing in mythology as Hermes trism magistus th orus quote if the name Lucifer were not prejudicial it would be a very suitable one for this archetype but I have been content to call it the archetype of the wise old man or of meaning like all archetypes it has a positive and a negative aspect end quote every one of these archetypes we've discussed so far has so many variations in which it can appear and there's just so much more that can be said about each of these archetypes than could be said in a single episode and Yung wishes to stress that what he is imparting to us in his work is more than anything a language a lexicon a kind of rough guide a guide to the perplexed for those who wish to embark on that project of individuation moving from a state of inner turmoil to a state of health yung's understanding of the psyche is not by any means to be taken as a dogmatic set of inflexible truths that we should refer to in lie of experience furthermore he stresses that when it comes to dealing with these archetypes these subcomplexes of the mind there is nothing that he can give us that will serve as an easy set of do-it-yourself instructions that will work in all cases the concrete situation of the person is what matters everyone has their own unique battle ified Yung writes quote it is not sufficient just to know about these Concepts and to reflect on them nor can we ever experience their content by feeling our way into them or by appropriating other people's feelings it is no use at all to learn a list of archetypes by heart archetypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate and their effects are felt in our most personal life Thea no longer crosses our path as a goddess but it may be as an intimately personal misadventure or perhaps as our best Venture when for instance a highly esteemed professor in his 70s abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress we know that the gods have claimed another victim this is how demonic power reveals itself to us until not so long ago it would have been an easy matter to do away with the young woman as a witch end quote and so young thinks that we are not in any way wiser than the type of people Yung here calls Primitives people who have continue to live according to the life patterns of say pre-industrial Society or even pre-agricultural Society who continue to see the world in terms of these uh myths and rituals Yung writes quote the Primitive mentality does not invent myths it experiences them end quote their way of thinking about their own mind is more honest than ours they still speak in a language of gods and spirits but their understanding of the self is not corrupted by these modern Notions of the voluntarily governing ego who lives autonomously and acts autonomously thinks autonomously such a way of thinking just ignores the reality of the unconscious drives and so Yung writes and this is in psychology of the child archetype uh this say paragraph 260 of the collected works volume 9 quote in the individual the archetypes appear as involuntary manifestations of unconscious processes whose existence and meaning can only be inferred whereas the myth deals with traditional forms of incalculable age they hark back to a prehistoric World whose spiritual preconceptions and general conditions we can still observe today in existing Primitives myths on this level are as a rule tribal history handed down from generation to Generation by Word of Mouth primitive m ality differs from the Civilized chiefly in that the conscious mind is far less developed in scope and intensity functions such as thinking willing Etc are not yet differentiated they are preconscious and in the case of thinking for instance this shows itself in the circumstance that the Primitive does not think consciously but that thoughts appear the Primitive cannot assert that he thinks it is rather something that thinks in him the spontaneity of the act of thinking does not lie causally in his conscious mind but in his unconscious end quote this is in effect the nitian picture of thought as well as he discusses in Beyond Good and Evil that the true vital germ of thought even philosophical thought is a drive some sort of unconscious motivation which may be moral or immoral that the constitutive element of thought is not truth or the will to seek the truth but that it's the will to truth of a drive yung's further elaboration on this notion of niches is simply that he dares to identify the different types of certain definite complexes of thought we might call them complexes of feelings or of sentiments or of impulses but all such complexes have their own form of reasoning as well to return to that first essay uh we discussed archetypes of the collective unconscious Yung makes it clear that this way of thinking understood by the Primitive mythologically is how Yung would describe our thought albe it with the modern language of psychoanalysis quote there is no single important idea or view that does not possess historical antecedence ultimately they are founded on primordial archetypal forms whose concreteness dates from a time when Consciousness did not think but only perceived thoughts were objects of inner perception not thought at all but sensed as external phenomena seen or heard so to speak thought was essentially Revelation not invented but forced upon us or bringing conviction through its immediacy and actuality thinking of this kind precedes the Primitive ego Consciousness and the latter is more its object than its subject but we ourselves have not yet climbed the last peak of Consciousness so we have a pre-existent thinking of which we are not aware so long as we are supported by traditional symbols or to put it in the language of dreams so long as the father or the king is not dead end quote what Yung offers us is in a description that may seem somewhat reductivist or anti-climatic a table of categories and I should note I don't mean it in a reductive way I think his table of categories is incredibly useful and that it is at least hard to argue that there aren't certain definite repeated types that appear in the Mythic landscape of human thought many today still bulk at these ideas however but I would simply ask what is their alternative there is no recognizable pattern no recognizable meaning within the human psyche whatsoever there's nothing that unites Humanity cross-culturally that you know the individual pathologies of human beings are so peculiar or unique or random that we can't make any descriptive sense of them at all as categories I think that is funnily enough a fairly unscientific way of viewing the human mind which is it's funny because people often accuse Yung of being unscientific I think whether you agree with Yung or not he provides us with a useful tool set a useful lexicon for approaching the human mind and a fascinating commentary on the relation of psychology to the world's religions and cultures but of course Yung also relates to n in a far deeper way than merely carrying on his influence in many ways Yung was a Critic of nche he strongly disagreed with many of n's moral conclusions and furthermore he was one of the first critics to analyze n's philosophy in consideration of his mental illness this critical relationship between Yung and N however I think is a very rich one much like the criticism of Socrates by n Yung is oftentimes in a kind of struggle with n in his writing and even though his philosophy thoroughly rebukes the niichan moral and cultural project there's a sense in which Yung recognizes n's Viewpoint as valuable and as indispensible for the development of his own thought it's in response to n that some of yung's most profound ideas are created we're going to talk about that next time when we invite n to come in take a seat lie down whatever makes you more comfortable n because you're about to be psychoanalyzed join me then for n on yung's couch yung's psychoanalytic critique of N and his ideas signing off if you enjoyed the N podcast or found it helpful you can visit us and support the show at patreon.com untimely Reflections the link is in the description or just share the show with any of your friends that you think might enjoy it or on social media thank you for your [Music] support