90: Carl Jung - Archetypes & The Collective Unconscious

[Music] This is the Nietzsche Podcast. "Quote, whether primitive or not mankind always stands in the brink of actions it performs itself but does not control. The whole world wants peace and the whole world prepares for war to take but one example. Mankind is powerless against mankind and the gods as ever show it in the ways of fate. Today we call the gods Factors, which comes from Fasere to make. The makers stand behind the wings of the world theater. It is so in great things as in small. In the realm of consciousness we are our own masters. We seem to be the factors themselves. But if we step through the door of the shadow we discover with terror that we are the objects of unseen factors. To know this is decidedly unpleasant for nothing is more disillusioning than the discovery of our own inadequacy. It can even give rise to primitive panic because instead of being believed in the anxiously guarded supremacy of consciousness, which is in truth one of the secrets of human success is questioned in the most dangerous way." That's from Carl Jung's essay, "Arctypes of the Collective Unconscious." And in that passage Jung puts forward the central idea of his philosophy of the psyche, his most important and also his most terrifying. Here he raises the prospect of mankind as a creature who is not the maker of his own fate. A creature who is in the hands of the gods. In modern times we've renamed these divinities and we've made them accord with a mechanistic scientific understanding of the world. And we've presumed that on this basis we can dispense with these gods. We can regard the ego consciousness as its own self-governing autonomous entity. Carl Jung's project is in some sense as simple as the project of restoring our awareness of these unseen factors, driving our thought and action, and restoring a sense of respect and awe for them. The project to restore a healthy respect for the gods, which we now call unconscious factors. And in doing this, Jung seeks to revive the religious or mythic language by which we used to speak about these things, which he believes still dwell deep within the human psyche, not as part of our consciousness, not as subjects within the power of the consciousness, but as the master behind the throne of consciousness. As straightforward as this may seem, however, such a prospect remains a daunting challenge for the modern man, because we have not found gods and goddesses in our search of the stars and of galaxies. We have not found that the atoms are moved by mystical forces. We've come to regard past mythologies as so many childish fables, which may serve as a source of historical fascination, but which elucidates nothing about the objective world, or the human condition as such, the various mystical pursuits of man, whether it was the practice of astrology, in which we attempted to discover our future through the interpretation of the movement of celestial bodies, or the great work of the alchemists, those proto-scientists who believed that the laws which govern the divine are the same as the laws that govern the material world, or the many religious stories and prophecies recorded in our holy books that endeavour to tell us the origin and meaning of life through divine revelation. The modern mind looks at all of this and sees nothing but a series of outdated and unscientific assertions. These were merely culturally and geographically bound folk tales in the modern view. They reveal nothing about the real meaning of human life, that is, if we even permit that life, may have a meaning, which in itself is regarded as a disagreeable presumption. We might say that we see all of these artifacts of religious thought as childish things coming from the youth and ignorance of youth of our race, and to put it in the language of the Bible, the scientific modern mind says it is high past time to put away childish things. And yet, throughout Jung's work in psychoanalysis, he steadily began to believe that these mythical figures and stories are far more than the mere playthings of a more childish mankind. That could simply be put to the side upon the scientific maturity of the human race. The reason for Jung's suspicion is based on the observation that his patients would recreate the imagery of myth and religion, and their dreams or in the case of schizophrenia and their hallucinations. Furthermore, when Jung had his patients draw or paint freely as a form of therapeutic exercise, he found they would do peculiar things. They would draw mandalus, for example, a type of circular sigil common to the imagery of Eastern spirituality, but completely unknown Jung tells us among his European patients at that time. They would draw upon the same kinds of allegories used by esoteric Christians such as the Russo-Crucian Order, but without having any knowledge that they were doing so. And Jung began to suspect that there was a language, a lexicon being employed here, a language of images and symbols that seemed to derive from a deeper well than the mere personal experience of his patients or their cultural upbringing. That his patients were drawing upon something deep within the psyche that was not individual but universal. The collective psychic contents of all mankind, which we use when we attempt to discuss the most significant aspects and events of our lives, the most transformative experiences of life draws upon this language. Given the material that we've already covered this season, one can see the mark of Nietzsche's thought on Jung's already from this description, as well as the ways in which Jung develops the thought of his erstwhile friend and mentor, Sigmund Freud. Unlike Freud, Jung was never interested in hiding his influences or claiming originality for himself or his ideas. I mean, in some sense, Jung's whole project is oriented around the idea that he is not an original thinker. That he's simply returning us to the knowledge that we have already held since time immemorial, but we've forgotten this with the death of our mythic language, our mythic understanding or perspective that allowed us to talk about it. Jung also credits previous thinkers such as Karrus and Von Hartman as those who had brought to light the power of the unconscious. But where Jung goes beyond all these previous figures is insofar as he presents us with a comprehensive system for approaching and understanding this vast and confusing realm of the unconscious contents. It is through psychology that we can once again approach the mythic and reintegrate these two seemingly incongruous elements of our rational, moral, and outward persona with the mysterious, powerful, numerous archetypes which are the secret makers of our destiny. Karl Gustav Jung was born in 1875 in Switzerland, broadly speaking his life bears some similarities to Nietzsche's as a young man, he initially thought of attending seminary and becoming a minister. And then as a teenager, he began to study philosophy and this changed his plans for life. He opted to pursue the sciences instead. While in Nietzsche's case, the path leads the young Friedrich Nietzsche to the discipline of philology, Karl Jung pursued psychiatry. He attended the University of Basel or he studied medicine. By the early 1900s, he was in correspondence with Sigmund Freud. The two men leave us a considerable volume of letters. Freud was much older than Jung and over the period of six years during which they collaborated extensively, Freud famously wanted Jung to become, you know, his successor in some sense. He was trying to push Jung in that direction. He wanted him to become the lifetime president of the International Psychological Association. And Freud was overruled in this. Jung instead served as president for two years instead of a lifetime appointment. But he referred to Jung as his adoptive son, his sort of crown prince and successor. As is commonly known, however, there was always a rift between the two men that would only grow as the years went by. Jung was dissatisfied with Freud's focus on sexuality as the primary driver of human psychology. Furthermore, he respected Freud's work as regards repression and his work on the id as a repository for all that, which the consciousness has attempted to suppress. But Jung began to suspect that there was something far faster than a mere personal unconsciousness beneath the surface world of the ego. With the publication of Jung's lectures on the psychology of the unconscious in 1913, a book which you can now find under the title of "Simbals of Transformation." The disagreement between the two men would only increase in its intensity. And as a matter of fact, Jung said that this book's publication was the thing that ended their friendship. As Jung in that text made it clear, just how seriously he differed with Freud's account of the psyche. Freud, it seems, had only wanted a crown prince and successor so long as they agreed with him, and carried on Freud's own project, on Freud's own terms. Furthermore, Freud is an atheist, and he's enrolled in a completely different kind of task in the field of psychology than Jung is. Whereas Freud's psychoanalysis sought to explain the human being within a godless world, a world in which man's higher aspirations could be seen as outgrowth of base urges. All of man's moral sentiments could be born on the power of the libido. Jung's tendency is almost the exact opposite. In the depths of the unconsciousness, Jung does not see mere animal impulses, or something reducible to the basis drives of man. He sees a well where we can reach down deep in it into truth so profound and inexpressible by the consciousness that they can only be understood in religious terms. Whereas Freud found in psychology the reputation of religious thinking as a curative to the pathological complexes of the modern man, Jung found the affirmation of the value of such thinking to be the very cure that the modern man was seeking. The break with Freud had professional consequences for Jung, while Freud has been left behind in the psychology of our time. In the early decades of the 20th century, Freud was the preeminent figure of the psychoanalysts. He was essentially its founder and its greatest celebrity. Jung more or less has a midlife crisis at this point. He had what can only be described as an extended psychological episode that we could characterize as either hysteria or depression or perhaps both. At many times he was borderline suicidal. And during this time in which Jung spent extended periods in solitude, he authored his red book, A Series of Diaries with a fantastical religious imagery, which Jung saw as his way of working through what he perceived as a dark knight of the soul, which is a perennial theme in one's path of mystical or spiritual transformation. Jung, however, made it through this trying period and he began publishing his work again in various academic journals. He served as an army doctor during World War I. In the interwar years, he embarked on some of his most famous and influential projects, including his book Psychological Types. And during World War II, a fun tidbit about his life that was not known until recently, because if I recall correctly, it was classified. But Jung wrote reports that he sent to the USS the American Intelligence Branch that would later become the CIA, advising the Americans on Hitler's mental state. He traveled the world, visiting America, Britain, Africa, India, acquaining himself with the mythic underpinnings of the various world religions. He was productive until his final year, until he passed away at the age of 85 and the year 1961. The origins of Jung's theory of archetype states all the way back to his first major publication on the psychology and pathology of so-called occult phenomena published in 1902. This was the work that had drawn Freud's attention at the time. In this work, Jung described the hallucinatory fantasies of a hysterical spiritual medium, whose sciences Jung attended in the late 1890s. Should be noted, there was something of a craze surrounding sciences and mediums during the late 1800s in the first decades of the 1900s, so this wasn't a terribly unusual social outing. Jung notes how the patient, the spirit medium, would have these some nambulic attacks. She would lose control of her motor function, be confronted by visions of spirits. However, the patient's ego, her sense of her individual conscious persona, was present and intact during these incidents. That is, she did not display multiple personalities herself. She seemed to remain a conscious subject, merely encountering these avatars of her unconscious mind. You see the first intimation of archetypes in this work, and that Jung comes to understand that even though the spirits that the patient encounters are numerous, they could be grouped, so to speak, into two definite types. That in some sense, all the different iterations of these spirit personalities were in fact re-iterations of the same two unconscious subpersonalities were complexes. Jung writes in this article quote, "It seems that many secondary series of ideas must have split off quite early from the primary unconscious personality. For already after the first two sciences, spirits appeared by the dozen. The names were inexhaustible in variety, but the differences between the personalities were soon exhausted and it became apparent that they could all be subsumed under two types, the serial religious type, and the gay hilarious. So far, it was really only a matter of two different unconscious personalities, which appeared under different names but had no essential differences." This insight is the germ of much of Jung's later thought. It's a theme he would see play out time and again with multiple patients. The same cast of characters, more or less, innumerable in terms of the exact name or the image attributed to the character by the patient, but nevertheless, the same in essence as other iterations of the same character type. Jung's research in the various world religions was spurred on by this same underlying idea. He began to perceive that types appear in the myth-making of the various world cultures. Jung writes, "Permit of man impresses us so strongly with his subjectivity that we should really have guessed long ago that myths refer to something psychic." But unlike Freud, Jung did not seek to make our myths small and insignificant on that basis. Instead, he grows to see the depths of human psychology as being just as profound as our oldest stories, and in fact, it's the well from which these stories are drawn. Now, as our main focus for this episode, we're going to turn to volume 9 of Jung's collected works, which includes his essays written from the time of 1933 onward on the subject of the archetypes and the collective unconscious. From the very beginning of that volume, in the first essay, included their entitled archetypes of the collective unconscious, Jung makes clear the operative difference between his own thought and that Freud quote, "At first, the concept of the unconscious was limited to denoting the state of repressed or forgotten contents. Even with Freud, who makes the unconscious, at least metaphorically, take the stage as acting subject, it is really nothing but the gathering place of forgotten and repressed contents, and has a functional significance thanks only to these. For Freud, accordingly, the unconscious is of an exclusively personal nature, although he was aware of its archaic and mythological thought forms. A more or less superficial layer of the unconscious is undoubtedly personal. I call it the personal unconscious. But this personal unconscious rests upon a deeper layer, which does not derive from personal experience and is not a personal acquisition, but is inborn. This deeper layer I call the collective unconscious. I have chosen the name collective because this part of the unconscious is not individual but universal. In contrast to the personal psyche, it has contents and modes of behavior that are more or less the same everywhere and in all individuals. It is, in other words, identical in all men, and thus constitutes the common psychic substrate of a super personal nature, which is present in every one of us. The collective unconscious is often wrongly characterized as a sort of supernatural claim about humanity, as if we have some sort of psychic link between our minds or sort of hive mind and consciousness, something of the like. The actual claim is simply that in the same way that we're all born with certain instincts, we're also all born with certain unconscious knowledge that we have a pre-rational lexicon of imagery or symbolism that exists in all human minds. It's a starting basic kit of information that's contained in the unconscious prior to any enculturation or upbringing. It's really no stronger of a claim than any claim about inborn traits or knowledge that exist in every human being, which I think would be fairly hard to argue against, but to say that there is no universal, relatable palette of human emotions or impulses would simply be patently false. All human beings experience anger, experience sexual urges, experience hunger and thirst, all human beings have a fight or flight mechanism. We can easily accept such ideas. The troubling assertion that human makes, really, is that human nature also contains unconscious information, not just unconscious instinct. This is not to be considered knowledge or information of a kind that would necessarily be parsed by a rational cursive intellect, wherever it makes itself known, it appears not in the form of word concepts or abstract ideas, but in the form of these figures, the form of images or narratives. We can see how Jung's work draws upon Freud or serves as an elaboration upon it, in that Jung also believes that the repressed personal unconsciousness is what lies beneath the surface of the ego. But Jung thinks that this repressed, unacceptable psychic content is itself only another surface layer sitting upon this wide world of the id. Jung describes in this essay a number of profound religious dreams, in which this vaster unconsciousness is likened to a sea or a dark lake. The association of the unconsciousness with water is a common symbol founded such dreams and experiences. Jung describes one dreamer who often saw the castle of the grail sitting on a high mountain top, but found that he could only reach it by passing "a darksome gorge with underworldly water rushing along the bottom." A another patient, a Protestant theologian, had a recurring dream in which he was standing on a high mountain slope, looking down into the deep valley below, in which there was a dark lake. In the dream he felt that something always held him back from going down to the lake, but he decided to venture there anyway. As he approached the water, "everything grew dark and uncanny, and a gust of wind suddenly rushed over the face of the water." He was seized by a panic fear and a woke. Water is only one of the common symbols for a confrontation with the unconsciousness. And a theme we can already see developing in these two example dreams is that in order to reach a place perceived as above the psyche, the ideal, the spiritual, however we may interpret it, one must first journey downward. The imagery of water of a lake or sea seems natural for the human mind. It indicates something of which we can only see the surface, but beneath which there is an unfathomable depth. To approach the unconsciousness is always a somewhat fearful experience because the first layer of it contains those very repressed contents of the contents that were repressed by the consciousness that characterize the Freudian version of the id. Far from being strictly sexual, this unconscious layer represents everything about our public outward facing persona that we cannot show the world or manifest in our conscious life and thought. It is just as much our self as our waking self, but it's the dark reflection of that waking self. Jung writes, "Whoever looks into the mirror of the water will see first of all his own face." Whoever goes to himself risks a confrontation with himself. The mirror does not flatter. It faithfully shows whatever looks into it, namely the face we never show to the world because we cover it with the persona, the mask of an actor. But the mirror lies behind the mask and shows the true face." This is what Jung calls the shadow. It is the sum total of everything about ourselves, which we have judged as negative. But it would be a mistake to think that the shadow does not operate in the world through our conscious personality. It does not remain confined to our unconscious thoughts or dreams. On the contrary, Jung says that, "The shadow is a living part of the personality and therefore wants to live with it in some form. It cannot be argued out of existence or rationalized into harmlessness." The way that Jung describes the shadow, as a phenomenon, a psychic phenomenon, is exceedingly fascinating because the shadow is both a terrible figure, but it is also the herald of a great personal transformation. Just as one must find their way across the terrible rushing waters of a dark gorge, in order to find their way to the holy grail, the shadow is the gateway to a deeper understanding of oneself. Jung writes in paragraph 45 of that same essay, "The meeting with oneself is at first the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well." In order to understand how the shadow makes itself felt in our daily lives, it's essential that we understand Jung's concept of projection. Civilization naturally raises certain aspects of the self into a state of conscious sovereignty. And so long as the conscious persona is healthy, functioning, flourishing, those unconscious contents which are unacceptable for the social life are deprived of energy, so to speak. They're kept subordinated. But if the conscious domain of the psyche becomes unbalanced, unhealthy in some way, is challenged or disturbed in some serious way, those unconscious complexes will start to take charge of it. And furthermore, the unconscious contents are experienced as something foreign to the conscious self. Jung writes, "The collective unconscious is anything but an encapsulated personal system. It is sheer objectivity as wide as the world and open to all the world. There I am the object of every subject and complete reversal of my ordinary consciousness where I am always the subject that has an object." And so when someone's unacceptable unconscious content that Jung calls their shadow begins to make itself forceful over the conscious personality, it is natural that we should experience this as something external, that we should therefore project that feeling, that complex, that type, onto the external world. Jung clarifies in one section that this term "projection" should not be taken to mean that the psyche has actually reached out into the objective world and exercised a power over the external. He says another term one could use for projection would be "interjection". The use of external objects or entities to symbolize some process which is actually internal to the subject. That really we're not so much pitching the psyche out with projection so much as we are bringing the external in. So for an example of the shadow crashing into the psyche of an otherwise healthy mind, suppose we have an individual who feels that aggressiveness and competition, whether it be sports or one's career or simply social life in general, that it's inappropriate and it's mean-spirited. That one should not ever express hostility towards one's fellow competitors. You should comport yourself with a kind of mutual respect. We would probably all say these are admirable values for one to hold. But perhaps we can imagine someone who feels this value of a desire for mutual respect and competition, so strongly that he always suspects that his competitors are hostile toward him. When he loses in the football field, he assumes his opponents must be putting his team down in their own locker room after the game. When a coworker passes him and gets the promotion, he assumes that this person secretly hates him or looks down upon him. And accordingly because all of our sportsmanship is just a false finira in the first place, perhaps he ends up feeling that hostility towards all of his competitors around him. This fills him with a sense of guilt, but he reminds himself that it's really the fault of all of those around him who have disrespected him over the years. A Jungian might look at such a person and see that he's become possessed by his shadow to some extent. And in this process, he has experienced it as something foreign, something alien to his ego consciousness. With all of his moral pretentions, that mutual respect is the basis of all friendly competition, but he always projects his own shadow onto the behaviors of his friends and his coworkers. The fact that it is really he who feels this deep hostility and disrespect towards others is masked by this projection and it becomes a way for him to to deal with the guilt that he feels for feeling that way. All of this would be in the patient's shadow self. Jung gives an explanation and broad somewhat poetic terms of what the person possessed by the shadow or by their quote, "Inferior Functions" is like this is in concerning rebirth paragraph 222 of archetypes and the collective unconscious quote. The inferior function is practically identical with the dark side of the human personality. The darkness which claims to every personality is the door into the unconscious in the gateway of our dreams, from which those two twilight figures, the shadow and the anima, step into our nightly visions, or remaining invisible, take possession of our ego consciousness. A man who is possessed by his shadow is always standing in his own light and falling into his own traps. Whenever possible he prefers to make an unfavorable impression on others. In the long run, luck is always against him because he is living below his own level and at best only attains what does not suit him. And if there is no doorstep for him to stumble over, he manufactures one for himself and then finally believes he has done something useful. End quote. Jung mentions the anima there which we will address in a little bit, but the main thing to remember about the shadow is the unacceptable side. of ourselves, which nevertheless exists and sometimes motivates our actions, and that we therefore project unto the external in order to deal with the cognitive dissonance that that brings. We would soon receive the contents of our own shadow and our friends and our neighbors and our interlocutors then in ourselves, and such a person who is possessed by their shadow will consequently bring forth the very aspect of himself that he despises and then experience it as something alien. We will get in our own way and then perceive that obstacle as the other. In dreams, the shadow can appear as numerous images, sometimes as a hostile animal, or a predator, sometimes as a primitive human being. The shadow appears throughout the mythology of mankind as an adversary or as a dark inversion of the heroic figure, because the origin of these unacceptable drives or impulses is within our animal nature, the association of the shadow with less conscious animals or more instinctive forms of life seems somewhat obvious. But in many cultures, Jung argues, the shadow appears in the mythology as a trickster figure. Such a figure is something of a riddle, because the trickster entities of many religions and superstitious traditions is a sort of mixed and paradoxical character. Jung says that there is something of the trickster in the image of the shaman and the medicine man, the wild figure who lives at the boundaries of society, but has a connection with the world of spirits. The poltergeist is another such example within popular folklore, in this case of a trickster spirit. Jung also brings up the contradictoriness of the trickster in European folklore, in the form of the devil, regarded as the ape of God, who is sometimes portrayed in the legends as a simpleton, who is easily fooled or cheated by ordinary human beings. There are also the figures out of folk tales such as Tom Thum or Stupid Hans, and one of Grims' fairy tales, the spirit mercurious, who takes his name from the Greek god Mercury, is outwitted by a simple peasant. Jung argues in his essay Psychology of the Trickster figure that, quote, "If the myth were nothing but an historical remnant, one would have to ask why it has not long since vanished into the great rubbish heap of the past." Instead, the trickster still fascinates us, whether it's Mephisto and Gautus Faust, Loki in the Norse myths, or for that matter, Loki in the latest Marvel production, or in the horror stories of poltergeists and other such mischievous spirits. Jung references the strange European tradition of celebrating the trickster. Jung believes that these fests and carnivals were in some sense rooted in the Roman holiday of Saturnalia, in which societal roles were reversed, slaves ordered around their masters, and so on. In medieval Europe, the New Year was celebrated with singing and dancing, called the Fools Feast. In the year 1198, apparently the festivities got so out of hand that Pope Innocent III railed against the "gests and madness that make the clergy a mockery." And the "shameless frenzy of their play acting." And even 200 years later, a letter to the theological faculty of Paris complained that even the clergy was getting involved with these Fools feasts, and that they were farcically electing a Fools Pope during these festivities. There was also the Festum Ascenorum, the Asfestival, or Donkey Festival. As Jung mentions, this is referenced by Nietzsche himself in the Spokes' Earththustra, the chapter named the Asfestival. And in Jung's estimation, that chapter of Zerathustra is, quote, "a deliberately blasphemous parody of the mass." As Jung explains, we cannot source this apparently farcical celebration to Nietzsche himself. These strange ecclesiastical customs are the organic products of the Middle Ages. A procession of men marched with a donkey, decked with a golden canopy, and they marched all the way into the church, and there the priest would conclude mass by braiding three times, like a donkey, and the priests and archbishop's then played a ballgame inside the church. Jung writes, quote, "in picker-esque tales, in carnivals and revels, and magic rights of healing, and man's religious fears, and exaltations, the phantom of the trickster haunts the mythology of all ages, sometimes in quite unmistakable form, sometimes in strangely modified guys." In a bit further in the essay, Jung continues, quote, "the trickster motif does not crop up only in its mythical form, but appears just as naively and authentically in the unsuspecting modern man. Whenever, in fact, he feels himself at the mercy of annoying, quote, "accidents," which thwart his will and his actions with apparently malicious intent. He then speaks of, quote, "hudos in jinxes, or of the mischievousness of the object." Here the trickster is represented by counter-tendencies in the unconscious, and in certain cases by a sort of second personality of a purile and inferior character, not unlike the personalities who announce themselves at spiritualistic sciences, and cause all those ineffably childish phenomena so typical of poltergeists. I have, I think, found a suitable designation for this character component when I called it the shadow. On the civilized level, it is regarded as a personal gaff, slip, faux pas, etc., which are then shocked up as defects of the conscious personality. We are no longer aware that in carnival customs and the like, there are remnants of a collective shadow figure which proved that the personal shadow is in part descended from a newmenous collective figure. And just a few observations about that. I mean, to this very day, people reference the legend of Grimmlands, which was very popular apparently during Air Force pilots during World War II. They have random problems with the part or something of that nature. They would say, "Oh, the Grimmlands, these little malicious elves who get into the machinery and mess it up." And I still will say that phrase myself and I know people will use it of like, "Oh, damn Grimmlands." When it's just apparently a random accident, will it tribute it to a mischievous little elf or a mischievous little fiend? As Jung says, something of a purile and inferior character. And, you know, furthermore, Jung brings up toward the end there of gaffes, slips of faux pas. That is the Freudian slip, finding its way into Jung's psychology, to some extent, that the slips, the gaffes, the mistakes we make when we say the reverse of what we mean to say or an unwanted inappropriate word finds our way into its way into our speech. That what's happening there is a slippage of the unacceptable contents of consciousness, or the of unconsciousness that the consciousness has suppressed, i.e. the shadow. That's what the Freudian slip is. Now, the trickster as a figure when it's treated as a collective figure in the mythology, it's paradoxical because as Jung points out in some respects, he's stupider than the animals. He gets himself into trouble again and again in the fairy tales and is seemingly helpless in this. Even though the shadow as trickster figure is not necessarily evil, quote, "he does the most atrocious things from sheer unconsciousness and unrelatedness," end quote. And yet, the trickster, such as when he appears in the form of Mercurius, is he from whom mortal man could win the magic power of healing. The trickster in Jung's view is a prefiguration of the Savior figure because he leads man on his way from a placid state of ignorance about his animal nature. He gives us the red pill to use modern language about our animal nature rather than, we might say, the naive notion of the supremacy of consciousness. Jung writes, quote, "the trickster is a primitive cosmic being of a divine animal nature on the one hand superior to man because of his superhuman qualities, and on the other hand inferior to him because of his unreason and his unconsciousness." End quote. So to recapitulate Jung asserts that the first thing we have to confront as we begin to integrate what is unconscious and the psyche into the conscious mind is those unacceptable animal impulses within us. And in fact, we find that much of our behavior is driven by these impulses as Freud argued. In fact, you could say all of our impulses have this animal origin, but because we've gone through the process of civilization, we've become afflicted with this kind of amnesia or certain aspects have been suppressed. And the shadow is a terrifying reminder that they're still there even though they've been subordinated and they're right beneath the surface. And therefore, we portray that figure as a paradoxical half-god, half animal, something that both lies beneath our humanity and beckons us to what might be above our humanity as it is now. Because the confrontation with the shadow is that first encounter with the unconscious, which is the beginning of the psychic work needed in order to fully integrate and understand oneself. Still the shadow is an incredibly dangerous thing. It may be precisely because we have ceased to pay the collective shadow its due that the shadow might even pose more danger now than ever. This is a recurring theme with you. That which we do not bring into consciousness or that which tries to breach into consciousness and that we continually attempt to ignore. That is always what poses the most frightful danger. Whatever it is that remains in the dark. Jung writes quote, "The so-called civilized man has forgotten the trickster. He remembers him only figuratively and metaphorically, when irritated by his own ineptitude, he speaks of fate playing tricks on him or of things being bewitched. He never suspects that his own hidden and apparently harmless shadow has qualities whose dangerousness exceeds his wildest dreams. As soon as people get together in masses and submerge the individual, the shadow is mobilized and as history shows, may even be personified and incarnated." This is part of how Jung understands the psychology of crowds, what we might call mass psychology, and it entails a real consequence if we fail to understand the archetypal contents of the psyche. Because when lots of individuals aggregate together, what happens is not an ever more multifarious expression of their individuality, but a race to the most universal thought patterns and complexes. That's what overwhelms the individuality of each member. Accordingly, as all of this unconscious content is collective, those archetypes of the collective unconsciousness will begin to more strongly express themselves the more powerful the collective is, the more overwhelming it is, the more the ego-consciousness is submerged within the multitude. Jung believed this was a large part of the psychology of the dangerous collectivist movements in Europe at that time. Just as a man who is not integrated as shadow might project that individual shadow onto his neighbor, so too, might in entire society construct a collective shadow, "In consequence of the increasing repression and neglect of the original mythologims as a corresponding projection on other social groups and nations." End quote. Now as the shadow is only a gateway into this world of the unconscious, we might wonder about some of these other archetypes. We've already mentioned one of them, the anima. Jung argues that the anima, like all of these other figures, is not sheer mythology, which he names as a constant prejudice of so-called scientifically-minded men whenever they encounter his theories. He argues that, quote, "the concept of the anima is a purely empirical concept, whose sole purpose is to give a name to a group of related or analogous psychic phenomena. The concept does no more and means no more than, shall we say, the concept anthropods, which includes all animals with articulated body and limbs, and so gives a name to this phenomenological group." This passage is useful, not just for understanding how Jung thinks about the anima, but how he thinks about all of these archetypes. Even though he constantly brings in the content of myths and of dreams and of fantasies, the point is to notice similarities across all of these and across individuals and cultures, classify these so-called dreams and fantasies as definite types, and therefore to have a basis for inquiring empirically about these types. Jung explains the anima in the essay "Arctypes of the Collective Unconscious" in this passage, quote, "Whoever looks into the water sees his own image, but behind it, living creatures soon loom up. Fishes, presumably, harmless dwellers of the deep. Unless if only the lake were not haunted. They are water beings of a peculiar sort. Sometimes a nixie gets into the fisherman's net, a female half-human fish. Nixies are entrancing creatures. Half drew she/him, half sank he/down, and never more was seen. The nixie is an even more instinctive version of a magical feminine being whom I call the anima. There can also be a siren, a mermaid, woodnymph, grace, or Eirklings' daughter, or alamia, or succubus, who infatuates young men and sucks the life out of them." So all of these mythical figures, the nixie, the siren, the succubus, these beings are a source of infatuation, but they are also a source of fear. The anima is beautiful and yet dreadful. Fantasy writes that many would dismiss such figures as merely flights of fancy, worthless erotic fantasies. And he admits there is some truth to this, but it is not the whole truth, for such fantasies are not explained merely by calling them fantasies. And may, quote, "complicate our psychic life in a most painful way." She comes upon us just as a nixie might. She sits on top of us like a succubus. She changes into all sorts of shapes, like a witch, and in general displays an unbearable independence that does not seem at all proper in a psychic content. End quote. These types of myths appear all over the world and are probably relatively familiar to most of us. Young uses the term anima because the meaning of anima is soul to which the German word "seal" is related. If we trace the etymology of this word to its Greek origins, we find its meaning as quick moving, changeful of hue, twinkling, likened to the butterfly. The soul is the breath, the magic breath that animates living beings. That which has soul is spirited, it is moving. Accordingly, Jung writes that the anima, quote, "makes us believe incredible things that life may be lived." And we might think here of Schopenhauer's view of the feminine, tied in with his view of women, as that which seduces us to continue pursuing the will to live. Jung says that the anima, the feminine representation of the soul, is that which continually ensnairs us, bringing us back to earth, back to nature. In fact, one can find such a representation of the feminine as both alluring and deadly, in the very Judeic creation myth found in Genesis. Eve must convince Adam to eat of the forbidden fruit along with her. Of course, in the Jewish and in the Christian religious morality, this makes Eve the first sinner and Adam along with her. But Jung also brings out this element that the feminine spurs man on to his betterment, to his elevation, which is sort of attention with that, and perhaps a literalist take on the biblical creation myth. That's a theme in Gertus Faust as well. It is in fact the final couplet of the play sung by the chorus Mysticus, quote, "the eternal feminine lures to perfection," end quote. And that connection is not lost on Jung, who would argue that Gertus play is just as much an expression of these unconscious contents as any of our myths or ancient rituals were. Faust is the man who has ever drawn forward with his insatiable thirst for life, never satisfied. And the thing that draws him forward, whether it is Gretchen, as he sees her image in the witch's mirror, or the image of Helen of Troy conjured into the modern day, it's the feminine that represents that for which Faust is always striving but can never reach. Helen of Troy quite literally transfigures into a cloud that Faust then grabs hold of and then rises up into the heavens. Jung quotes La Rochefico, who writes accordingly, quote, "Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul? Man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness," end quote. Jung clarifies that he does not call the anima the soul in the sense of the immortal soul found in, for example, the Catholic doctrine. Jung refers us instead to classical sources such as Macrobius or to the Taoist religion and the philosophical system of classical Chinese thought. Wherein the Po, or the Quai, quote, "is regarded as the feminine and cathonic part of the soul." Jung writes of the anima in archetypes of the collective unconscious quote, "It is a factor in the proper sense of the word. Man cannot make it. On the contrary, it is always the a priori element in his moods, reactions, impulses, or whatever else is spontaneous in psychic life. It is something that lives of itself, that makes us live. It is a life behind consciousness that cannot be completely integrated with it, but from which, on the contrary, consciousness arises. For in the last analysis, psychic life is for the greater part in unconscious life that surrounds consciousness on all sides. Although it seems as if the whole of our unconscious psychic life could be ascribed to the anima, she is yet only one archetype among many. Therefore, she is not characteristic of the unconscious in its entirety. She is only one of its aspects. This is shown by the very factor for femininity. What is not I, not masculine, is most probably feminine, and because the not I, is the is felt as not belonging to me, and therefore as outside me, the anima image is usually projected upon women. Either sex is inhabited by the opposite sex up to a point. For biologically speaking, it is simply the greater number of masculine genes that tips the scales in favor of masculinity. The smaller number of feminine genes seems to form a feminine character, which usually remains unconscious because of its subordinate position. With the archetype of the anima we enter the realm of gods, or rather the realm that metaphysics has reserved for itself. Everything the anima touches becomes luminous, unconditional, dangerous, taboo, magical. She is the serpent and the paradise of the harmless man with good resolutions and still better intentions. She affords the most convincing reasons for not prying into the unconscious, an occupation that would break down our moral inhibitions and unleash forces that had been better left unconscious and undisturbed. So a few observations that many of you have probably already taken note of, for one, Jung's assessment of this first major character within the metaphysical world of the collective unconscious is that its gender is going to be the opposite of the conscious subject. So in the case of women, they would not possess an anima but an animus, the anima for men or animus for women is called the soul because it's the strongest, most powerful subpersonality within the unconscious contents, the most powerful factor in determining our thoughts and actions. It's the catholic part of the soul because it's buried beneath the surface of consciousness, but it remains soul, the thing that animates, that draws us forward, seduces us to life. It is our image of the opposite gender contained within ourselves. And usually, as with the shadow, we never consciously perceive this psychic force. And thus we project it onto the opposite sex. A man will project onto women his image of the feminine, which is something coming from deep within his own unconsciousness and representative of his own wants and fears. And then he'll experience his own image of the feminine as something outside of himself, something not me. Jung relates a number of religious visions from Christian figures, including a Sustertian monk in the 1300s and a Swiss mystic in the 1500s, in which they saw alongside God the father, God the mother, or alongside the king of heaven, the queen of heaven. Such visions were completely inexplicable within the religious framework of European Christianity at that time. Such feminine interpretations of the divine had long since been excised from European religious thought. And God was the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit, a trinity which is holy male. I mean, maybe there's some ambiguity with the Holy Spirit, but there's not a whole lot of female energy in that metaphor. So where did such visions come from? In which a holy man in Europe is confronted with the divine as female. Again, independently of tradition, we have records of such sysigistic visions. Sysigie is the conjunction of two apparently opposite aspects. In this case, the masculine and feminine as both perceived as divine. It's only natural that these two should appear as a mother, father, pair, as they often do. And this is what is signified by God, the father, and God, the mother. It should be noted at this point that this is Jung's way of dealing with the insights of Freud, of incorporating what Freud had learned about the centrality of the family relationships to a psychic life. But without elevating the relationship with one's father and mother to the status of ultimate importance, as if the actual tangible father and mother in your upbringing are the determinative thing of how your psyche operates, that there is this collective unconscious contents of the image of the father, the image of the mother. And in fact, the mother complex is another manifestation of the anima, another mask or face of the anima, because the anima is a numinous and alluring thing, the catholic soul within, you know, a young man or a young boy will naturally project the anima at first onto his mother. The natural thing, however, is for the anima image to gradually lose its grandeur over the course of growing up. And eventually, when we come to understand our parents as just being ordinary human beings, and over time, the anima sinks back into the unconsciousness, although young argues it loses none of its tension or its productivity. Young then discusses the psychic effects it would have on a man to project his anima archetype in light of this. This is in concerning the archetypes and the anima concept, quote, "The love life of a man reveals the psychology of this archetype in the form either of boundless fascination, overvaluation, and infatuation, or of misogyny in all its gradations and variants," none of which can be explained by the real nature of the "object in question" but only by a transference of the mother complex. The complex, however, was caused in the first place by the assimilation of the mother, in itself a normal and ubiquitous phenomenon, to the pre-existent feminine side of an archetypal male-female pair of opposites, and secondly by an abnormal delay in detaching from the primordial image of the mother. Actually nobody can stand the total loss of the archetype. When that happens, it gives rise to that frightful discontent in our culture where nobody feels at home because a father and mother are always missing. And a bit further in the essay, Jung writes, quote, "The anima is a factor of utmost importance in the psychology of a man wherever the emotions and effects are at work. She intensifies, exaggerates, falsifies, and mythologizes all emotional relations with his work and with other people of both sexes. The resultant fantasies and entanglements are all her doing. When the anima is strongly constilated, she softens the man's character and makes him touchy, irritable, moody, jealous, vain, and unadjusted." So you may have also noted thus far Jung says that completely integrating one's anima is an impossible task. So well of the soul is very deep, no matter how fully you try to bring it into consciousness, some of it always recedes back into the depths of the mind. And so it should be, right? Because to become fully identified with this subordinate unconscious personality would not be a good idea. It would be the destruction of your actual conscious personality. But it's also not a good idea to completely banish these archetypes from our cultural or spiritual lexicon to attempt to excise them or to smother them entirely in unconsciousness. And Jung does say that for young men, those who are 35 and younger, the most important thing in his view is for a man to be a man, and that they can live with even the almost total destruction of the anima. It may be different he admits with artists and other such types who might need the anima for their work. But it's primarily as a man begins to get older that the loss of the anima becomes particularly dangerous. "After the middle of life, permanent loss of the anima means a diminution of vitality, of flexibility, and of humankindness. The result as a rule is premature rigidity, crustiness, stereotypy, fanatical one-sidedness, indecency, pedantry, or else resignation, weariness, sloppiness, irresponsibility." What one realizes over the course of studying archetypes is that Jung truly thinks that these are independent subpersonalities. They have their own life and character. One has to reconcile with them to some extent, which means recognizing their existence and the role they play in your psychic life, but to become completely identified with an archetype would be just as catastrophic as trying to go to war with it. As you may have gleaned, neither of the types we've considered so far, the shadow or the anima can be considered as wholly positive or wholly negative. As terrifying as the shadow is, as the trickster, he's a sort of gateway to the ideal self, to the savior or the redeemer. The anima draws forward the subject into the unknown, into the unknown seas, but also threatens the subject with the danger of drowning. These types are multifaceted. They also have multiple faces to them that express different aspects of the archetype. The great mother archetype is a subset of the anima, which could appear as one's personal mother or grandmother, which can appear as the mother of God, as the virgin, or as Sophia. These are all generally positive. These are inspiring forms of the mother type. But Ewing writes, quote, "All these symbols can have a positive favorable meaning or a negative evil meaning. An ambivalent aspect is seen in the goddesses of fate, moira, grache, norms. Evil symbols are the witch, the dragon, or any devouring or entwining animal, such as a large fish or serpent, the grave, sarcophagus. Deep water, deep nightmares and bogies in pusah." Lillith, etc. The relationship that one will have with such archetypes will reflect their psychological realities and the realities of their own lives. And oftentimes the appearance of such a symbol is an unconscious hint as to some imbalance or pathology. If one is having repeated visitations of Mahakali in their dreams, you know, constantly experiencing the great mother as something terrible and all devouring, it may be an indication of anima inflation and the person's psychology. The subpersonality of the anima becoming all-conquering and unchallenged and beginning to dominate and to push the conscious subjects behavior in ways that might not even be perceptible to him. We'll consider a few other important archetypes that Jung identifies. Jung writes, quote, "The archetype of the child God is extremely widespread and intimately bound up with all the other mythological aspects of the child motif." Of course, in European Christianity we have the symbolism of the Christ child to which we return every Christmas. It's a celebration of God's birth on Earth where we see God as the child. Jung also, however, brings in a discussion of folklore of dwarves and elves and little people who inhabit the deep places and the mind shafts. And on the other hand, the child appears as a recurring theme in mystical experience, Meister Eckhart's vision of the naked boy. It appears in English ghost stories, the apparition of the radiant boy. Jung writes in "The child motif not infrequently occurs in the field of psychopathology." The "imaginary child" is common among women with mental disorders and is usually interpreted in a Christian sense. Hamunkylai also appear as in the famous Schreiber case where they come in swarms and plague the sufferer. But the clearest and most significant manifestation of the child motif in the therapy of neuroses is in the maturation process of personality induced by the analysis of the unconscious, which I have termed the process of individuation. Here we are confronted with pre-conscious processes which in the form of more or less well-formed fantasies gradually pass over into the conscious mind or become conscious as dreams, or lastly are made conscious through the method of active imagination. This material is rich in archetypal motifs among them frequently that of the child. Often the child is formed after the Christian model, more often though it develops from earlier altogether non-Christian levels. That is to say, out of catholic animals, such as crocodiles, dragons, serpents or monkeys. Dreams the child appears in the cup of a flower or out of a golden egg or as the center of a mandala. And dreams it often appears as the dreamer's son or daughter or as a boy, youth or young girl. Occasionally it seems to be a exotic origin, Indian or Chinese, with a dusky skin or appearing more cosmically surrounded by stars or with a starry core and net or as the king's son or the witch's child with demonic attributes. Seen as a special instance of the treasure hard to attain motif, the child motif is extremely variable and assumes all manner of shapes such as the jewel, the pearl, the flower, the chalice, the golden egg, the quaternity, the golden ball, and so on. It can be interchanged with these and similar images almost without limit. End quote. So what are we to make of a passage like this? I mean on the one hand, young seems to include so many images of the child archetype that it's very coherence might seem to be hard to grasp. On the other hand, what young is doing here is pointing to in his view an irrational and arbitrary series of associations that the psyche has made between seemingly unrelated objects or symbols. That this is really what we might call poetic license. It's one of the main things that seems to differentiate our thought as human beings. We have the capability to make poetic leaps, but what this involves is associating two different phenomena by way of metaphor. And the unconscious is similarly artistic in this way. It makes these metaphorical associations. As the child archetype is the treasure hard to attain, the child could appear as a radiant jewel or as a radiant infant. Young believes that the child archetype appears when one has in some way, sunned themselves from their own character. What he means by this is that we can occasionally act in ways that accord more with an arbitrary persona that we have adopted then in line with our actual values. The way that we feel we should act, deepen our gut and our intuition. The demands of the social life lead us to adopt such arbitrary personas, a mask that one puts on due to the requirements of his job or his social relationships or his church or his marriage and family life, whatever it might be. And we might be forced to make ourselves appear as something that we're not. And so far as our inner feelings might be completely at odds with our outward persona. And if we then act according to the needs or desires of this artificial character that we've created, we may then encounter the child archetype. Young says that one sees the child, for example in dreams, when he becomes, quote, "unchildlike" and artificial, end quote, and when he quote, has lost his roots, end quote. The thing hard to attain then somewhat conjures the imagery of one's childhood. But Young argues this is not purely a yearning for some romantic version of one's youth or one's childhood days. Young says that, quote, "The child motif represents not only something that existed in the distant past, but also something that exists now." That is to say, it is not just a vestige, but a system functioning in the present, whose purpose is to compensate or correct in a meaningful manner, the inevitable one-sidedness and extravagances of the conscious mind." End quote. This is why the child motif occurs when patients are undergoing what Young calls "individuation." They come to realize the ways in which artificial personas have compromised their values. The child is a symbol of one's creativity, of the innocent self-absorption and one's setting, of a presentness of thought and attitude. The child motif therefore suggests to us that yes, we have lived in this manner in the past, and that there is a possibility to return there in the future, to get it over the one-sidedness, as Young calls it, often of being pulled in one direction or another by some particularly tyrannical, sub-complex or drive. The child therefore represents not the past, but the future. The child promises some future possibility of individuation or wholeness, and therefore its appearance is like Virgil appearing to Dante when he's lost in the wood of error. The radiant child appears to you when you become lost. The child motif therefore often depicts a child hero or a child god, a figure which is at once vulnerable but indestructible. He's often born into danger or pervasion, as Moses was placed into the river by his birth mother so that he could survive for Jesus' mother giving birth to him in a manger. He's smaller than small and bigger than big at the same time. The child is always there in our mind as an eternal warning or a sign that we have gone astray in order that we may set right our course. A child is vulnerable because we know that in this world we're often in real danger of completely losing our connection to that innocence, that creativity that is the healthy state of the soul. And obviously at this point, it bears mentioning, the child is that final transfiguration of the spirit in Nietzsche's schema as he gives it and so our thuss draws prologue. And so from this a Jungian analysis might lead us to suspect that Nietzsche gravitated to the child motif because he unconsciously understood the role of the child as a sign and symbol of self-transformation and individuation. And perhaps Nietzsche was able to perceive this because he himself may have been someone at odds with his between his outer persona and his inner values, so to speak. Perhaps during the latter days of his teaching at Basel or his time spent among the Vognarians. Another important archetypal figure is the wise old man. He can appear as an old king, a wiseened magician, a father or a grandfather. In mythology he is Odin Osiris Jupiter. Arguably the image of the wise old man as an archetype is painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. This seems to have been the archetype that Michelangelo used to portray God. The wise old man is the superior, the master, the teacher, and in some way represents the anchoring wisdom on which one's life is based. The wise old man is the super structure of one's thought, one's morality. They're understanding of the reality they inhabit and how they fit into that reality. Jungsa says that when one's worldview, their way of comprehending themselves, is profoundly challenged. This is often when the wise old man appears. Perhaps for example, when one is losing their religion. Jung relates the story of a young theologian who had a dream in which two wise old magicians appeared to him. A white magician wearing black ropes and a black magician wearing white ropes. In the dream, the black magician tells the story of an old king from a faraway land, who had scoured all the land searching for a tomb for himself. In his land were many great old tombs and he wished to find the best. But when they found one in which a virgin had been buried, they exhumed her bones. The bones didn't stay dead, but got up, formed into a black horse, which then galloped across the desert. The magician followed the horse until he found grassland and the horse grazing there. He'd now found the keys to paradise and did not know what to do with them. This is perhaps the most Jungian dream I've ever heard, so kudos to Jung for managing to get this one from someone he says he did not even know personally. I mean, it's just incredible. But in any case, this theologian was going through something in his life at the time, which was of monumental importance. A shift or a transformation that could have life altering consequences. That is, Jung says quote, "He was in great straits because of his religious beliefs." Which is a bit vague, but if we read between the lines, we can infer that in some ways that theologian's beliefs probably drifted from those which were acceptable, maybe according to the dog move, the seminary, perhaps he was losing his faith altogether, we don't really know. In any case, he was confronted with the strong drive to leave behind the current mental structure of his worldview, to lay to rest the old king, so to speak, and thus to strike out across the desert. And what is it that strikes out across the desert? Well, it's the black horse, which is formed from the bones of the virgin buried in the tomb in the old country. So the anima, the soul, we might say, has become dead, dry, dusty bones within the reign of an old kingdom. And once the king decided to lay himself to rest, so to speak, the soul jumps up. It runs out into the unknown until it finds a new green pasture. And by following it, following the drive of the soul, the black magician finds the keys to paradise, the treasure hard to obtain, the holy grail, the return to the Waldgarten. Jung writes quote, "The two magicians are indeed two aspects of the wise old man. The superior master and teacher, the archetype of the spirit who symbolizes the pre-existent meaning hidden in the chaos of life. He is the father of the soul, and yet the soul in some miraculous manner, is also his virgin mother, for which reason he was called by the alchemists, the first son of the mother. The black magician and the black horse correspond to the descent into darkness, and the dreams mentioned earlier. And an inappropriately hard lesson for a young student of theology. Fortunately, he was not in the least sense aware that the father of all prophets had spoken to him in the dream and placed a great secret almost within his grasp, one marvels at the inappropriateness of such occurrences." There is another famous idea of the archetype of the wise man that can be found in the literature, and we're all familiar with it here. Zerathustra himself, "Young writes that Zerathustra is Nietzsche's psychic image of quote, 'The Enlightener, the Master and Teacher,' a psychopomp whose personification even Nietzsche, that breaker of tablets, could not escape." Young continues in the same passage, and I'm reading here in an abridged form, quote, "For him God was dead, but the driving demon of wisdom became as it were his bodily double. Zerathustra is more for Nietzsche than a poetic figure. He is an involuntary confession, a testament." Young argues that in the nihilistic darkness that Nietzsche, in the wake of abandoning God and abandoning Christianity, he created a void that required a figure that would speak in the hieratic language of Zerathustra. He chooses as the image of this figure one of the founders of the world religions, a prophet of ancient times, a man who divided good and evil. Zerathustra proclaims the relativity and relatedness of good and evil. In Nietzsche's version of events, this is Zerathustra as the first man to make the distinction also being the first to realize his mistake. But we might also notice in the dream of the theologian that Jung described, we see the symbolism of the relativity of good and evil there too. In the figures of the white and black magicians, both of whom are wise men, both of whom have mismatched names. Young argues that this perceived interdependence of good and evil far from being in invention of Nietzsche's mind is one of the oldest bits of wisdom and human religiosity. Jung cites a saying from India that the man who loves God will take seven lifetimes to reach perfection, while the man who hates him will take only three lifetimes. And this is because the man who hates God will think of him more often. Jung also suggests that this relativity, this freedom from opposition due to a perception of their functional equivalence, is also found in Taoist philosophy. For that one might look to the Shwanza or to the Dao-Dijing. While this may offend mainline Christians and disabilities, there are even strains of Christian thought in which God's allowance of evil in the world is seen as a good thing, because it allows for the overcoming of sin. Or in Hebrew the Yetsah-Hara, the evil inclination, the inclination of man to sin, which is considered to be in itself valuable. It was placed there by God for a good reason, because in the overcoming of sin we glorify God. Zarathostra then speaks some of that same wisdom of the ultimate relativity of good and evil, the dependence of one upon the other. And he stands as a wise religious teacher in a world darkened by the death of God. He's Nietzsche's creation of a mystical wise man out of a deep need, the deeply felt absence of this anchoring structure for our thought. And so Zarathostra becomes yet another figure who teaches us the pre-existent meaning behind the chaos of life, which is the meaning of the wise old man. That figure of the wise man as teacher Jung says is one of the types definite aspects, appearing in mythology as Hermes, Trismagistus, Thoth, Orpheus. Quote, if the name Lucifer were not prejudicial, it would be a very suitable one for this archetype. And I have been content to call it the archetype of the wise old man or of meaning, like all archetypes, it has a positive and a negative aspect. End quote. Every one of these archetypes we've discussed so far has so many variations in which it can appear, and there's just so much more that can be said about each of these archetypes than could be said in a single episode. And Jung wishes to stress that what he is imparting to us in his work is more than anything a language, a lexicon, a kind of rough guide, a guide to the perplexed for those who wish to embark on that project of individuation, moving from a state of inner turmoil to a state of health. Jung's understanding of the psyche is not by any means to be taken as a dogmatic set of inflexible truths that we should refer to in lieu of experience. Furthermore, he stresses that when it comes to dealing with these archetypes, these sub-complexes of the mind, there is nothing that he can give us that will serve as an easy set of do-it-yourself instructions that will work in all cases. The concrete situation of the person is what matters. Everyone has their own unique battle to fight. Jung writes quote, "It is not sufficient just to know about these concepts and to reflect on them. Nor can we ever experience their content by feeling our way into them or by appropriating other people's feelings. It is no use at all to learn a list of archetypes by heart. Arctypes are complexes of experience that come upon us like fate and their effects are felt in our most personal life. The anima no longer crosses our path as a goddess, but it may be as an intimately personal misadventure, or perhaps as our best venture. When for instance a highly esteemed professor in his 70s, abandons his family and runs off with a young red-headed actress, we know that the gods have claimed another victim. This is how demonic power reveals itself to us. Until not so long ago, it would have been an easy matter to do away with the young woman as a witch." And so Jung thinks that we are not in any way wiser than the type of people Jung here calls primitives. People who have continued to live according to the life patterns of say pre-industrial society, or even pre-agricultural society, who continue to see the world in terms of these myths and rituals. writes, "The primitive mentality does not invent myths. It experiences them." Their way of thinking about their own mind is more honest than ours. They still speak in a language of gods and spirits, but their understanding of the self is not corrupted by these modern notions of the voluntarily governing ego, who lives autonomously and acts autonomously, thinks autonomously. Such a way of thinking just ignores the reality of the unconscious drives. And so Jung writes, "And this is in psychology of the child archetype," this is paragraph 260 of the collected works volume 9. "In the individual, the archetypes appear as involuntary manifestations of unconscious processes whose existence and meaning can only be inferred, whereas the myth deals with traditional forms of incalculable age. They hark back to a prehistoric world, whose spiritual preconceptions and general conditions we can still observe today in existing primitives." Myths on this level are as a rule tribal history handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth. Primitive mentality differs from the civilized, chiefly in that the conscious mind is far less developed in scope and intensity. Functions such as thinking, willing, etc. are not yet differentiated. They are pre-conscious. And in the case of thinking, for instance, this shows itself in the circumstance that the primitive does not think consciously, but that thoughts appear. The primitive cannot assert that he thinks it is rather something that thinks in him. The spontaneity of the act of thinking does not lie causally in his conscious mind, but in his unconscious. End quote. This is, in effect, the Nietzschean picture of thought as well as he discusses and be on good evil. That the true vital germ of thought, even philosophical thought, is a drive, some sort of unconscious motivation, which may be moral or immoral. That the constitutive element of thought is not truth or the will to seek the truth. But that it's the will to truth of a drive. Jung's further elaboration on this notion of Nietzschean is simply that he dares to identify the different types of certain definite complexes of thought. We might call them complexes of feelings or of sentiments or of impulses, but all such complexes have their own form of reasoning as well. To return to that first essay we discussed, archetypes of the collective unconscious, Jung makes it clear that this way of thinking, understood by the primitive mythologically, is how Jung would describe our thought, albeit with the modern language of psychoanalysis. Quote. There is no single important idea or view that does not possess historical antecedents. Ultimately they are founded on primordial archetypal forms whose concreteness dates from a time when consciousness did not think but only perceived. Thoughts were objects of interperception, not thought at all but sensed as external phenomena, seen or heard so to speak. Thought was essentially revelation, not invented but forced upon us, or bringing conviction through its immediacy and actuality. Thinking of this kind precedes the primitive ego-consciousness, and the latter is more its object than its subject. But we ourselves have not yet climbed the last peak of consciousness, so we have a pre-existent thinking of which we are not aware, so long as we are supported by traditional symbols, or to put it in the language of dreams, so long as the father or the king is not dead. End quote. What Jung offers us is in a description that may seem somewhat reductivist or anticlimatic, a table of categories. And I should note, I don't mean it in a reductive way, I think his table of categories is incredibly useful, and that it is at least hard to argue that there aren't certain definite repeated types that appear in the mythic landscape of human thought. Many today still bulk at these ideas, however, but I would simply ask, what is their alternative? There is no recognizable pattern, no recognizable meaning within the human psyche whatsoever, but there is nothing that unites humanity cross culturally, that the individual pathologies of human beings are so peculiar or unique or random that we can't make any descriptive sense of them at all as categories. I think that is funnily enough a fairly unscientific way of viewing the human mind, which is funny because people often accuse Jung of being unscientific. I think whether you agree with Jung or not, it provides us with a useful toolset, a useful lexicon for approaching the human mind, and a fascinating commentary on the relation of psychology to the world's religions and cultures. But of course, Jung also relates to Nietzsche in a far deeper way than merely carrying on his influence. In many ways, Jung was a critic of Nietzsche. He strongly disagreed with many of Nietzsche's moral conclusions, and furthermore, he was one of the first critics to analyze Nietzsche's philosophy and consideration of his mental illness. This critical relationship between Jung and Nietzsche, however, I think is a very rich one, much like the criticism of Socrates by Nietzsche. Jung is oftentimes in a kind of struggle with Nietzsche in his writing, and even though his philosophy thoroughly rebukes the Nietzschean moral and cultural project, there's a sense in which Jung recognizes Nietzsche's viewpoint as valuable and as indispensable for the development of his own thought. It's in response to Nietzsche that some of Jung's most profound ideas are created. We're going to talk about that next time when we invite Nietzsche to come in, take a seat, lie down, whatever makes you more comfortable care Nietzsche, because you're about to be psychoanalyzed. Join me then for Nietzsche on Jung's couch, Jung's psychoanalytic critique of Nietzsche and his ideas. Signing off. If you enjoyed the Nietzsche podcast or found it helpful, you can visit us and support the show at patreon.com/untimelyreflections. The link is in the description. Or just share the show with any of your friends that you think might enjoy it or on social media. Thank you for your support.