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The Jung and the Restless

© John McManamy

"In the unconscious, Jung saw not only a cause to our madness but a means to our healing."

An anxious Freud pulled aside his young protege and designated successor. "My dear Jung," he cautioned, "promise me never to abandon the sexual theory. That is the most essential thing of all."

The older man was concerned that his controversial ideas would be watered down and diluted to nothing. "You see, we must make dogma of it," he urged, "an unshakable bulwark."

But Carl Jung saw the Gospel According to Freud as narrow and limiting. The sex thing was only part of the picture, he was convinced. "A bulwark - against what?" he asked.

To which Freud replied: "Against the black tide of mud" - he hesitated a moment and then added - "of occultism."

Freud had discovered the realm of the unconscious and successfully mapped its shoreline to our conscious behaviors, but he had never ventured more than a few miles inland. In Freud's view, the unconscious was a chamber of horrors involving death, sex taboo, and traumatic childhood experiences. He based these views on his work with Vienna's anxiety-ridden upper-middle class.

Jung, on the other hand, spent his formative years amongst a far broader range of patients - inmates across all walks of life condemned to asylums. In the unconscious, Jung saw not only a cause to our madness but a means to our healing.

Nowhere was the Freud/Jung dichotomy more apparent than in their respective approaches to dreams. Where Freud viewed dreams as a difficult lock to be picked - and only leading into sex and death at that - Jung saw our dreams as speaking to us - with no limitations - but in an archaic fashion that required interpretive assistance.

Here, Jung found his analytical tools in the occult, alchemy, mythology, and eastern religion. From his research, he came across common symbols he called archetypes - hero, goddess, trickster, etc - that provided models for various types of human behavior.

At a certain point in his career Jung crossed over from being a disinterested observer of mystical lore into positing mysticism as science. The unconscious - once little more than a substrata of the mind - suddenly became the universe around us simply by adding the adjective, "collective".

The collective unconscious became the taproot of all our behaviors as well as the home of Jung's archetypes. It was almost as if all our individual minds were connected to a vast mysterious universal mind, but he didn't quite go that far.

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