In 1914, the year when the First World War exploded across Europe, Jung broke publicly with Freud and, turning inward, took a plunge into the tremendous feelings and forces that burst from below. Lost in their turbulent currents, he could no longer agree with his prior mentor that psychical life amounted to derivatives of sexual instincts. As Jung worked what he called the “fiery magma” of the images and personifications that walked in his dreams and waking fantasies, he discovered fundamental themes whose appearance in all times and places was confirmed by his more external researches.
These themes he called archetypes, the primordial patterns of mental life. The Hero, the Divine Child, the Sacred Marriage, the Night Sea Journey, Death, Rebirth: these mythic motifs crop up agelessly, their imagery filled in by the specific era and locale of their emergence. To the analytically informed eye, for instance, the legends of Moses, Buddha, Muhammad, and Jesus, however different from one another, echo the archetype of the Redeemer.
In his struggle to come to terms with them and with himself, Jung realized that seeing one’s sufferings in a wider, collective context offered a healing power unavailable to theories that reduced the self to genes, social influences, or childhood trauma. Psyche needed to be taken on its own terms, an independent realm between matter and spirit, and not reducible to either.
“He who has a why to live,” wrote Nietzsche, “can bear with almost any how.” Jung agreed. Patients who could make sense of their sufferings endured them with greater strength and dignity. In other words: meaning redeems.
Jungian psychology takes redemption out of its Judeo-Christian context and places it in relation to individuation, the tendency of all living things to move toward wholeness. As the imaginal realities pummeling Jung gradually expanded his awareness of himself, he saw that while plants and animals individuate automatically, human beings are healthy to the degree we become ourselves consciously.
During the first half of life, a lot of human energy goes into learning from and adapting to the environments in which we live. Eventually, however, when the symbols and images and impulses from the unconscious begin to approach the waking self, we encounter opportunities to embark on the path of self-realization through confrontation with themes Jung recognized as mythical—mythical not as pre-scientific explanation of natural events, but as the metaphorically expressed inner wisdom of an age, a people, a culture.
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