Memories, Dreams, Reflections - C. G. Jung

Some kind of autobiography of Jung. I wanted to know more about the man before I spend more time reading his books - when you read an essay things are already presented fertiggepackt and in a favourable light for ease of digestion, but if you know little about the topic you have little idea of what you’re being made swallow. So you can either read many essays from many other authors and already have in mind some counterarguments, or you can try to understand what are the original ideas behind the essay and try to evaluate those.

Lacking time and voglia to go around and read essays from Adler, Freud and what not, I thought I would just try and see what kind of beliefs Jung had, whatever their source. His essays I would then read as Bearbeitung/rationalization of said beliefs.

The first part, about Kindheit, is generally uninteresting, if not for getting a general picture of the young Jung (eh eh) and of how he, old, thought about himself at a young age. I still found it overall not interesting. It then gets better and one recognizes over and again as Merkmalen of Jung’s character the thirst for knowledge and understanding and the struggle to conjugate a scientific and analytic point of view to humanistic fields like history and literature. The approach is not butchering the subjects until they somehow spit numbers out - as in: take books, count words by frequency for books, then do statistics with it -, the idea is rather to try and apply a custom scientific method to the best of one’s ability.

This of course fails horribly. It is not clear how one can systematically gather observation from a piece of literature, say in opposition to gathering observations from a swinging pendulum. And how would one then go about analysing said data - all evidence seems anecdotical and is imho unbenutzbar.

I think at this point it’s good to remember the somewhat comical attempt of Galileo at measuring the speed of light: he would position himself on the top of a hill, and a friend on the top of another hill, far away but still seeable. His friend would unveil a lantern from the top of his hill, Galileo would shout as soon he saw the light and the friend would compute the time difference between the moment when he unveiled the lantern and the moment when he heard the shout. My point is that this is complete nonsense, completely absurd, in complete good faith, with all good reasons and completely necessary in order to be able, at some point, to get to a real result. And it doesn’t really matter if this approach never led to anything, it is important to have somebody who tries. One cannot really do too much about succeeding, one can do more or less everything about trying.

I liked this quote:

A belief proves to me only the phenomenon of belief, not the content of the belief.

This is what is important to me. If I read something else from him, I just cannot dwell on each of his sentences to check if maybe the conclusions he draws come from false reasoning (I have a job), I have to trust that the methodology is sound. It seems to be. So I think I will keep reading!

On the last pages what I think (based on what I read from him until now) is one of the fundamental insights is repeated again:

Consciousness is phylogenetically and ontogenetically a secondary phenomenon. It is time this obvious fact were grasped at last. Just as the body has an anatomycal prehistory of millions of years, so also does the psychic system. And just as the human body today represents in each of its parts the result of this evolution, and everywhere still shows traces of its earlier stages - so the same may be said of the psyche. Consciousness began its evolution from an animal-like state which seems to us unconscious, and the same process of differentiation is repeated in every child. The psyche of the child in its preconscious state is anything but a tabula rasa; it is already preformed in a recognizably individual way, and is moreover equipped with all specially human instincts, as well as with the a priori foundation of the higher funcionts.

Programming is tricking a stone into computing, consciousness is tricking a monkey into thinking. I am not too sure what the first sentence from the quote means.