On the psychology of the unconscious - C. G. Jung

I’m currently reading “Two Essays on Analytical Phychology” which contains two introductory articles by Jung on, well, analytical psychology. I finished the first one and there are already enough notes, so here goes.

I started looking for something more from Jung after reading Man and his symbols (link). What I was especially curious about was the characterization of shadow, animus and anima, which didn’t really show up in this essay; it still was an interesting read.

The Kernidee is that the animal part in man cannot and should not be subjugated, underestimated, deemed inferior to the rational part. The concept comes about in more than one chapter:

[…] although the pathogenic conflict is a personal matter it is also a broadly human conflict manifesting itself in the individual, for disunity with oneself is the hall-mark of civilized man. The neurotic is only a special instance of the disunited man who ought to harmonize nature and culture within himself.
The growth of culture consists, as we know, in a progressive subjugation of the animal in man. It is a process of domestication which cannot be accomplished without rebellion on the part of the animal nature that thirsts for freedom.

More:

Too much of the animal distorts the civilized man, too much civilization makes sick animals.

More:

We should never identify ourselves with reason, for man is not and never will be a creature of reason alone, a fact to be noted by all pedantic culture-mongers. The irrational cannot and must not be extirpated. The gods cannot and must not die.

Lastly:

In all ordinary cases the unconscious is unfavourable or dangerous only because we are not at one with it and therefore in opposition to it.

So (I hope I’m not trivializing everything too much) the point is that sometimes you can’t really talk reason to yourself more than you could talk reason to your dog. I appreciated the empiric point of view:

There is nothing for it but to recognize the irrational as a necessary, because ever-present, psychological function, and to take its contents not as concrete realities - that would be a regression! - but as psychic realities, real because they work.

The true spirit of science, so refreshing. Similar modus operandi in talking about love:

One often hears the question: why should the erotic conflict be the cause of the neurosis rather than any other conflict? To this we can only answer: no one asserts that it must be so, but in of fact it frequently is so. In spite of all the indignant protestations to the contrary, the fact remains that love, its problem and its conflicts, is of fundamental importance in human life and, as careful inquiry consistently shows, is of far greater significance than the individual suspects.

Or about dreams:

The dream itself wants nothing: it is a self-evident content, a plain natural fact like the sugar in the blood of a diabetic or the fever in a patient with typhus. It is only we who, if we are clever and can unriddle the signs of nature, turn it into a warning.

Quindi bisogna scendere a compromessi, the other alternatives being eher undesirable. For example:

I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously; for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropriate and stupid such as only an “enlightened” intellect could hatch forth.

I once had a neighbour who was for some reason convinced that her cat should follow a particular strict diet to stay healthy and fit, so she started feeding him only the prescribed food in prescribed quantities; consequences of this was that the cat secretly crossed the street during the afternoon to come in our garden and eat some of our cats’ food, until one day it was run over by a car, which I think is Jung’s point.

These lines reminded me of Mr. Gwyn, whose story still fascinates me:

The dreamer is the whole dream; she is the river, the ford and the crab, or rather these details express conditions and tendencies in the unconscious of the subject.

I have read somewhere that the best screenwriter still can’t do anything more - or less! - than putting himself on stage, it’s a bit the same idea.
In my notes to Man and his symbols I had juggled a bit with an evolutionary interpretation of the collective unconscious, maybe I’m biased but I think I had guessed correctly:

[…] the contents of the collective unconscious are not only the residues of archaic, specifically humans modes of functioning, but also the residues of functions from man’s animal ancestry, whose duration in time was infinitely greater than the relatively brief epoch of specifically human existence.