AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

        Jung uncovered in the depths of  his most pathologically psychotic patients patterns that seemed to him to be non-personal. They seemed to belong more to the mythological past and the history of the mind and spirit of man, than to the present. All this he termed as 'memory of the collective unconscious of humanity'. This, together with what he was learning from neurosis (held to be a 'purely imaginary' illness of a neurotic) from many of his patients gave him a conviction that psychology must be freed from identification with the pathological and given much wider and greater relevance in the world.

        From this self-acquired centre of perception and understanding, Jung declared that unless he had a psychological framework that was valid for humanity as a whole, its pathological confinement to mental hospitals would never work for the patients there in the way that was expected. The world of the so-called normal, he suspected, was even more in need of healing than the abnormal, not least of all because it was in command of the day. He was amazed that a world which moved to instant concern and succour of a person with broken limbs could be so blind and indifferent to the suffering manifesting itself as 'neurosis'. This seemed to Jung to be far graver, more painful and considerably more difficult to heal than any shattered bone. He had come to this conclusion with great conviction on account of the fact that the news of his success in treating the mentally-ill in the Burgholzli had spread to all the corners of the world even before he had reached the age of 35.

        Jung's theory divides the psyche into three parts. The first is the ego, which Jung identifies with the conscious mind. Secondly and closely related to it is the personal unconscious, which includes anything that is not presently conscious, but can become so at any time. The personal unconscious is like most people's understanding of the unconscious in that it includes both memories that are easily brought to mind and those that have been suppressed for some reason. But it does not include the instincts which Freud would have included but Jung did not. Further Jung adds the third part of the psyche that makes his theory quite different from all the others: the collective unconscious. We can call it our 'psychic inheritance'. It is the reservoir of our experiences as a species, a kind of knowledge we are all born with. And yet we can never be directly conscious of it. It influences all of our experiences and behaviours, most especially the emotional ones, but we only know about it indirectly, by looking at those influences.

There are some experiences that show the effects of the collective unconscious more clearly than others: the experiences of love at first sight, of deja vu (the feeling that you've been here before), and the immediate recognition of certain symbols and the meanings of certain myths, could all be understood as the sudden conjunction of our outer reality and the inner reality of the collective unconscious. Grander examples are the creative experiences shared by artists and musicians all over the world and in all times, or the spiritual experiences of mystics of all religions, or the parallels in dreams, fantasies, mythologies, fairy tales, and literature. In this context, Jung's words in his autobiographical narrative 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections' are very relevant: 'It is, of course, ironical that l, a psychiatrist, should at almost every step of my experiment have run into the same psychic material which is the stuff of psychosis and is found in the insane. This is the fund of unconscious images which fatally confuse the mental patient. But it is also the matrix of mythopoetic imagination which has vanished from our rational age'.         Jung stated with clarity that the essential thing is to differentiate oneself from these unconscious contents by personifying them, and at the same time to bring them into relationship with consciousness. He spoke like 'Ramana Maharishi' when he said: 'My life is a story of the self-realisation of the unconscious. Everything in the unconscious seeks outward manifestation, and the personality too desires to evolve out of its unconscious conditions and to experience itself as a whole.

Sigmund Freud, Stanley Hall & Carl Jung at Worcester College Massachussetts in USA in 1909.

         I cannot employ the language of science to trace this process of growth in myself, for I cannot experience myself as a scientific problem. What we are to our inward vision, and what man appears to be 'Sub specie aeternitatis' can only be expressed by way of myth. Myth is more individual and expresses life more precisely than does science. Science works with concepts of the averages which are far too general to do justice to the subjective variety of an individual life. We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct'.

        Personality theorists had argued for many years about whether psychological processes function in terms of mechanism or teleology. Mechanism is linked with determinism and with the natural sciences. Teleology is linked with free will. It is still common among moral, legal, and religious philosophers, and, of course, among personality theorists. In the light of this analysis, we can say that Freudians and behaviorists tend to be mechanists, while the neo-Freudians, humanists, and existentialists tend to be teleologists. Jung believed that both play a part. But he added a third alternative called synchronicity. Synchronicity is the occurrence of two events that are not linked causally, nor linked teleologically, yet are meaningfully related. Jung, like Arthur Schopenhauer in Germany, Emerson and Thoreau in USA, was greatly influenced by the Hindu view of reality. In the Hindu view, our individual egos are like islands in a sea: We look out at the world and each other and think we are separate entities. What we don't see is that we are connected to each other by means of the ocean floor beneath the waters.

        According to Jung, whether we are introverts or extroverts, we need to deal with the world, inner and outer. And each of us has our preferred ways of dealing with it, ways we are comfortable with and good at. Jung suggests that there are four basic ways, or functions: The first is sensing. Sensing means getting information by means of the senses. The second is thinking. Thinking means evaluating information or ideas rationally and logically. The third is intuiting. Intuiting is a kind of perception that works outside of the usual conscious processes. It is irrational or perceptual, like sensing, but comes from the complex integration of large amounts of information, rather than simple seeing or hearing. Jung said it was like seeing around corners. The fourth is feeling. Feeling, like thinking, is a matter of evaluating information, this time by weighing one's overall emotional response.

        When Jung published his first major work on alchemy at the end of World War II, most reference books described this discipline as nothing more than a fraudulent and inefficient forerunner of modern chemistry. Today, more than forty-five years after Jung's death, alchemy is once again a respected subject of both academic and popular interest, and alchemical terminology is used with great frequency in textbooks of depth-psychology and other disciplines. It may be said without exaggeration that the contemporary status of alchemy owes its very existence to the writings of Carl G Jung.

        Jung in the last days of his life was very worried about the fact men round the world have become more bigoted, sloganised, abstracted from their natural selves and caught up in shallow collective power groups. He felt that the individual, made specific in a self capable of holding out against collective and totalitarian pressures of all kinds, is in greater danger than he has been for centuries. It seemed to him that the world itself had gone insane. Today the worst fears of Jung have been confirmed. The feelings, values, considerations of love and emotion are not only fast vanishing but also people appear increasingly incapable not just of experiencing them but even recognising and honouring their reality in others; all classic symptoms of a schizophrenic man. The miracle of life seems to have been extinguished without sound reason or meaning. The natural reverence for life which the first man took for granted in himself is vanishing from all but a few. All the symptoms, of which these are more obvious examples, are of an invasion of consciousness that we call disturbance, delinquency or madness. It is in this context that Jung's words become very pertinent: 'Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves'.

        Jung declared for all time to all mankind that we can no longer speak to one another out of pure knowledge alone. The knowledge which is peddled in so great abundance in so ready a market today is the kind of sham knowledge that is being bartered without human commitment, historical evaluation or moral obligation. Knowledge is no longer a vehicle of legitimate exchange because it only communicates the facts and statistics of itself and nothing of the person who passes it on, nor anything of the one who receives it. In the last days of his life Jung came to the conclusion that the world into which we are born is both brutal and cruel and at the same time of divine beauty. As a devoted scholar, philosopher and doctor, he had seen and experienced both meaning and meaninglessness; both worth and worthlessness. He wanted to return into his own being, into the eternal unknowable meaning. His mission statement as a research scientist and as a medical doctor can be summed up in his own words: 'As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being'.