Jungian Wholeness, Part 4

In this, my ongoing Jungian Wholeness series of posts, I have been exploring what is also the subject of Murray Stein's book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction.

The Swiss psychologist Carl Jung plumbed the depths of the personal unconscious each one of us harbors, hidden away out of sight. He found beneath that seeming bottom level of the psyche ... yet more depths. He discovered the collective unconscious, populated by images shared by every human being.

These images or patterns of experience he called "archetypes." They come built in; they don't have to be learned. They correspond to stock life experiences. Thus there is a father archetype, a mother archetype, an archetype for life and one for death, and on and on.

Some of the archetypes have a human face, such as the archetype of the hero.

Other archetypes are quite abstract, such as the archetype for wholeness — a super-important one, since it represents what we are all ultimately after, psychologically speaking. In the very final analysis we will all, sooner or later, come to nurture the impossible dream of integrating every archetype, every "complex" of learned mental images that become related to the individual archetypes in the unconscious, into one grand vision of our consciousness, a sort of "theory of everything" that (no matter how unsavory) represents part of our psyche's content.


This is the ultimate goal of what Jung called "individuation" or "self-actualization." We start out life, at least in concept, in a paradisal state with everything in the psyche accessible to consciousness, but soon our nominally sinful, antisocial urges get repressed, in order that we may gain acceptance in our family, peer group, tribe, or whatever. The "bad" parts of us get moved into the unconscious, where they are not totally forgotten. Instead, they hook up with preexisting archetypal images in ways that can, under certain circumstances, make for deep, high-energy structural units of the psyche. These energetic complexes are often capable of charging back into consciousness and usurping the privileged position of the ego.

Images, ideas, archetypes ... whatever you call them, each have a quantum of psychic energy or libido. How much energy/libido each has depends on, among other things, how much repressed psychic content it bonds with in the unconscious. If a lot, the complex can totally upend the ego when it, the complex, gets "constellated." That's exactly what happens when, as we say today, someone "pushes our buttons."

The ego is also a complex. It is is the special, one-of-a-kind complex at the center, or focal point, of consciousness — which means that it is not like most of our complexes, most of the time. We are uniquely aware of the images the ego "sees" from its vantage point at the center of consciousness.

Among these visible images are representations of the external, sensory world — e.g., a rose, a cloud, the face of our infant daughter — and likewise mental representations of our conscious internal states, such as the state of being hungry. When we dream, images come up from the unconscious depths and appear at the focal point of consciousness. These dream images are coded in the form of symbols. Properly decoded, these symbols are capable of transforming us in small ways or radically, such that our ego grows ever stronger, more resilient, and better adapted to life.


For instance, if I am an alcoholic or abuser of habit-forming substances, then I need, Stein writes, "a powerful symbol ... to bring about ... a major transformation ... [through] a conversion experience. Symbols emerge out of the archetypal base of the personality, the collective unconscious. They are not artificially invented by the ego but rather appear spontaneously from the unconscious especially during times of great need. Symbols are the great organizers of libido ... " (pp. 81-82).

But, before their power to attract energy, organize libido, and transform consciousness can come into play, symbols first need interpreting. To Jung, a symbol is not identical to an unconscious archetype, which basically is nothing more than a what-you-see-is-what-you-get image, no matter how abstract in nature. Rather, a symbol is a coded pointer to an archetype, or to a complex having that archetype at its core.

Basically, a Jungian symbol is

the best possible statement or expression for something that is either essentially unknowable or not yet knowable given the present state of consciousness. Interpretations of symbols are attempts to translate the symbol's meaning into a more understandable vocabulary and set of terms, but the symbol remains the best present expression of the meaning it communicates. (p. 82)

If an alcoholic is to reform, a symbol must come along to sufficiently perturb his consciousness: one that, when decoded aright, will constellate a complex that is able to overwhelm the one his ego is presently in thrall to. If he is in thrall to his "mother complex" — the complex centered on the universal mother archetype — the "bottle" he can't stop swigging symbolizes, very likely, his mother's breast. It accordingly is the hero archetype to which he may need to look for his transformative symbol:

The hero is a basic human pattern — characteristic of women equally as of men — that demands sacrificing the "mother," meaning a passive childish attitude, and assuming the responsibilities of life and meeting reality in a grown up way. (p. 91)

To Jung, clearly, libido is not just sexual energy, not just the mental energy devoted to base desires and tricked by means of the defense mechanism of repression into powering the better angels of our nature, as Freud had it. It is also the energy that informs symbols and thus can transform (not just constrain) our consciousness into a form that is higher, larger, and more noble.

Every symbol, Jung showed, necessarily weds the base to the ideal:

Symbols open one up to mystery ... [and] combine elements of spirit [which represents that which is ideal] and instinctuality [base], of image [ideal] and drive [base]. For that reason, descriptions of exalted spiritual states and mystical experiences frequently refer to physical and instinctual gratifications like nourishment and sexuality. Mystics talk about the ecstasy of uniting with God as an orgasmic experience ... . The experience of the symbol unites body and soul in a powerful, convincing feeling of wholeness. For Jung the symbol holds so much importance because of its ability to transform natural energy into cultural and spiritual forms. (p. 82)

It is by this almost mystical wedding of the ideal-and-noble to the base-and-corrupting that the mind is able to create "analogues to instinctual goals and activities. Such analogues function as symbols ... [to] channel libido in new directions" (p. 80).

By diverting libido away from self-preservation's mandates — to eat and eliminate waste; to have sex and procreate so as to propagate our individual bloodlines and our species; and to attack our enemies and engage in other human exercises of the will to power — these near-mystical symbols empower us to pursue our pure and noble life's work. The result, aggregated over huge swaths of time and countless human individuals, is civilized culture, religion, morality, ethics, aesthetics — everything we take pride in accomplishing or creating.

Thus, this paradox: the notion which is the meaning of a symbol invariably has one foot in the realm of the base-and-tempting, the other in the realm of the noble-and-inspiring. For example, symbols which evoke, by coded references to the breast, the archetypal idea of motherhood combine the salacious (the breast as capable of arousing male lust) with the holy (images of the Madonna and Child).

And phallic symbols which naughtily represent penises also represent male generative power in the abstract, without which all progress would stall.

Jungian wholeness is intrinsically the possession of every symbol in the psyche of every human being. The symbol falls flat without a mystical parity between its base-and-corrupt half and its noble-and-uplifting side. Honoring this paradoxical reality, leveraging it, can bring Jungian wholeness to the psyche itself, such that nothing of which the psyche is made needs to be consigned to oblivion.