At the bottom of this post there are a number of labels. If you click on any one of them, you'll see a list of earlier posts I've made. In many cases, the same posts show up in more than one list. That's because they all revolve around the thought of the late Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung.
Jung mapped the depths of the human psyche. Among the things he found buried there, according to Murray Stein in his book Jung's Map of the Soul: An Introduction, are a "plurality of unconscious images and fantasies" (p. 153).One of these images, or as Jung called them, "archetypes," depicts from the perspective of any male of our species an idealized bearer of humankind's feminine qualities: the perfect woman, so to speak. This female-ideal is the Anima (see Addressing the Anima). Jung's own Anima, once he had addressed it sufficiently and at great length — a process that took several years — led Jung to a interior experience of an even deeper archetype: the Self.
Stein calls the Self the "most fundamental feature of [Jung's] theory" of the human soul, as well as its "capstone" (p. 151). But the Self is even harder to describe than the Anima (or, in women, the Animus, an image of the masculine ideal which likewise serves its female possessor as a "spirit guide" to the Self).
The Self is, in fact, exquisitely hard to talk about precisely. Specifically because of what Jung called the Self's "transcendence," every correct statement that can be made about the Self is to some extent inadequate to conveying the Self's full truth in its entirety. (Stein, by the way, does not capitalize terms like "Self"; I usually do because I think it makes the discussion clearer.)
"Transcendence" is a term of convenience Jung used to suggest a realm of thought and experience past all opposites, beyond every either-or polarity. Jung thought of the Self as transcendent in this specific sense: if we say the Self is this, we naturally need to add that the Self could not also be that, where that is the opposite of this. But in the case of the Self, Jung taught, such conclusions are unwarranted, precisely because the Self is by its very nature a bridge uniting — or, again, transcending — all the various polarities of our human identity.
First of all, the Self lies beyond the usual subjectivity-objectivity divide, the conceptual opposition between our personal, subjective attitudes and what purports to be the objective truth about the world. For example, Stein writes:
For Jung, the self is paradoxically not oneself. It is more than one's subjectivity, and its essence lies beyond the subjective realm. The self [instead] forms the ground for the subject's commonality with the world, with the structures of Being. In the self, subject and object, ego and other are joined in a common field of structure and energy. (p. 152)
In Jungian terms, the "ego" is the part of the conscious mind we ordinarily think about whenever we say "I": it is what we believe (in the end, erroneously) to be the center of our being. Our own identity is intrinsically different, or so we think, from that of every other being, and any assertion that "ego and other are joined in a common field of structure and energy" is bunk. Hence, much of what we do in life is aimed at furthering the apparent needs of this supposedly unique ego which rules our individual consciousness, potentially at the expense of failing to serve or even opposing the true needs of our fellow men and women. We might be by virtue of our evolutionary heritage self-serving in the way any animal is self-serving, but we couldn't be truly selfish without having evolved an ego.
Yet Jung's interior experience, documented in his autobiography and in his many other writings, went beyond such ego/other oppositions to the realization that:
When the ego is well connected to the self, a person stands in relationship to a transcendent center and is precisely not narcissistically invested in nearsighted goals and short-term gains. In such persons there is an ego-free quality, as though they were consulting a deeper and wider reality than merely the practical, rational, and personal considerations typical of ego consciousness. (Stein, p. 152)
It is one of my preoccupations, in the many posts I've been making and continue to make about Jung in this blog, to try to peer into what his thought has to say about my Christianity, such as it is.
I say "such as it is" because it is regrettably an attenuated notion of God that I find I have in my personal experience, just now in my life.
Yet when I read books like Stein's and the several others I've mentioned in this group of posts about Jung, I find that contemplating Jung's ideas about the Self helps me regain something of the wonder and awe I formerly associated with my contemplation of a Judeo-Christian God.
Why? What's the connection? At a basic level, the answer is a simple one: Jung spoke of the Self as the imago Dei, the image of God within each one of us. Christian theology has it that we all bear such a stamp or spark of divinity, and Jung affirms the exact same thing in different terms:
At the most immediate level [in the hierarchy of agencies within the depths of the psyche] is the shadow, and over this the anima/animus ... stands as a superior authority and power. Presiding over the entire psychic government is the self, the ultimate authority and highest value: [Jung wrote that] "unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei." Jung contends that every one of us bears the God-image — the stamp of the self — within ourselves. We carry the mark of the archetype: typos [in Greek] means a stamp impressed on a coin, and arche means the original or master copy. Each human individual bears an impression of the archetype of the self. This is innate and given.
Since each of us is stamped with the imago Dei by virtue of being human, we are also in touch with [per Jung] "unity and totality [which] stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values." When needed, this intuitive knowledge can come to our assistance ... (Stein, pp. 158-9)
This idea that our intuitive, archetypal knowledge of God as imago Dei comes to our assistance when needed is like, to me as a Christan, the answer to a prayer.
Let me try to be as clear as I can: to Jung the Self is the imago Dei, a supreme, supernal archetype which in turn enshrines certain values above all others: unity, totality, and wholeness.
Bringing the Self into the field of conscious awareness takes power away from the unconscious Shadow by bringing it, too, into the province of ego-consciousness. The Shadow, which represents our "lower" nature — basically, the urges we inherit from our evolutionary forebears — is not destroyed, but it is "depotentiated" and brought into harmony with our other, "higher" nature, our spiritual destiny.
Realizing the Self likewise defuses the power of the Anima or Animus, in its destructive, negative aspect, to take over and ruin the personality.
In short, there is nothing in the psyche, no matter how unsavory at first blush, which cannot be redeemed through Self-realization. Parallels with the Christian message of redemption are obvious here.
Which leads me to the subject of Sin and Evil. (These words are not part of the Jungian vocabulary per se, but I am capitalizing them in deference to their importance in the Christian lexicon.)
It seems likely to me that many Christian theologians as well as lay believers would feel uncomfortable with the implications of Jung's theory towards traditional religious notions of Sin and Evil. In order to try to put my finger on why there would be such controversy, such resistance, let me begin by discussing Jung's thoughts about serpent-symbols.
According to Stein (pp. 162-168), Jung constructed an elaborate schema of wholeness as it pertains to the human soul. There are four levels represented by four three-dimensional double pyramids. I won't go into detail about those four structures, but these doubled pyramids, each pair having a single base in common, are bounded by five separating or terminating circles, each representing a level of attainable wholeness. It is the circles I want to concentrate on.
The highest circle of attainable wholeness is Anthropos, Jung's name for the spiritual ideal he identifies also as the ultimate goal of Self-realization. In Christian terms, Anthropos corresponds to angels, saints, and us after we die and go to heaven, or are redeemed and resurrected into a heaven-come-to-earth. Next lower in the hierarchy of circles is Homo, which corresponds to our everyday ideal of human perfection, rooted in our ordinary ego-consciousness. Below that is Serpens, the serpent, which is the symbolical root source of all animal wisdom and (perhaps surprisingly) deserves its own circle of wholeness on the diagram. The remaining two levels are Lapis, the wholeness associated with minerals and plant life, and Rotundum, the circle which roots the hierarchy of wholeness in the place where physical matter emerges from pure energy.
Of these five levels of wholeness which humans can know or experience, the serpent, according to Stein:
... symbolizes the self in its strongest and most blatant paradoxicality. On the one hand, it represents everything that is "snaky" in human nature: cold-blooded instincts of survival, territoriality, base physicality. On the other hand, it symbolizes the wisdom of the body and the instincts — somatic awareness, gut intuitions and instinctual knowledge. The serpent has traditionally been a paradoxical symbol, referring both to wisdom and to evil (or to the temptation to do evil). The serpent therefore symbolizes the most extreme tension of opposites within the self. (p. 165)
Christians know, of course, that Jesus advised his followers to be "wise as serpents and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). Yet it is a serpent who tempts Eve, and through her, Adam, in the Garden of Eden.
In his schematic diagram of psychic wholeness, Jung placed the Serpens circle on a line or axis whose extremes are labeled Christus and Diabolus, Christ and the Devil. To me this line is evocative of a very natural Christian ambivalence toward the serpent-symbol. One the one hand, we have Christ affirming the wisdom of serpents. On the other, the Devil disguises himself as a serpent to tempt humankind into original sin.
As a Catholic Christian, I am attuned to Catholic ideas about Sin and Evil, which are different in nuanced ways from Evangelical ideas. Yet as the son of (lapsed) Baptist and Methodist parents, I respond to Evangelical ideas, too. When Pastor Rick Warren, during his Saddleback Civil Forum (see transcript here), asked presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain, "Does evil exist? And if it does, do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it, do we defeat it?", I pricked up my ears.
As one who is interested in following Jung's recommendations for heightened Christian awareness through Self-realization, I find I am made uncomfortable by the does-evil-exist question. Upon reflection, I have come up with this as an explanation. Christians who are deeply concerned with how presidential candidates answer such questions are, I imagine, intensely concerned to stay on the safe side — the "Christ side" — of the Christus-Diabolus line.
I find that staying on the "Christ side" of the line and not worrying about straying over to the "Diabolus side" is of less and less concern for me personally, on the other hand, as my spiritual trajectory takes me more and more into a Jungian perspective.
The Serpens circle is right in the middle of this Christus-Diabolus crucial line, though, and out of it spring the higher levels of Jungian wholeness represented by Homo, and then, above that, Anthropos. In bringing Jung's ideas about wholeness into my conscious awareness, I find I have already had to get used to the idea that what we might term the vertical axis of wholeness, the one that passes down through Anthropos, Homo, Serpens, etc., is located as close to Diabolus as it is to Christus.
Some years ago, I found my imagination stimulated by the new scientific ideas concerning chaos and, specifically, the "edge of chaos." The latter is an abstract dynamical region between predictable order and unpredictable chaos; evolution takes place there. The unique dynamics of the edge of chaos are such that rank novelty can emerge gracefully there, embodied in new life forms, and then be sustained indefinitely as life evolves into forms of greater and greater complexity.
In those days I wrote incessantly about the edge of chaos and made repeated mental pictures of it. I now believe these word pictures and mental images were versions of a standard Jungian symbol of the Self. For I imagined the evolutionary "tree of life" as being planted smack at the edge of chaos. To Jung, the tree, in that it represents growth and ascent, is a Self-symbol.
I quickly got hung up, though, on what seemed to me an obvious problem: the edge of chaos is as close to chaos, which is seemingly bad, as it is to order, which is seemingly good. The symbolism, in fact, precisely mimics the notion that in Jung's wholeness diagram, Serpens is equidistant from Christus and Diabolus.
I'll deal with the implications of that in Part 2 of this series.
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