56 pages • 1 hour read
Modern Man in Search of a Soul
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The Unconscious as a Resource
Jung disagrees with Freud’s belief that the unconscious mind is a churning cauldron of dark, greedy, antisocial urges. Instead, the unconscious is the source of all human drives, including beneficial and curative impulses. He also differs from the modern, quasi-scientific view that psychic spirituality is a myth and therefore need not be addressed in therapy.
The field of psychoanalysis pioneered by Sigmund Freud at first took the view that patients’ problems stem from loss of control over their darkest urges. This view proved overly restrictive; it doesn’t consider that inner struggles often are about conflicts over legitimate wants and needs, and it fails to make room for the ongoing human desire to find higher values in life. At the same time, modern scientific thinking, with its emphasis on physical evidence, ignores the idea that spirituality is a legitimate concern, and instead writes off much of that deep yearning as distracting fantasies or glandular disorders.
Jung finds that, contrary to these rather cold and impersonal views of patients’ problems, people want more ideal lives that are meaningful and purposeful. These wants aren’t simply displaced sexual frustrations or distorted urges for power. Rather, they are actual, profound desires that well up spontaneously from the unconscious mind in the form of dreams and symbols. With the victory of the materialist view comes a wholesale rejection of religion and its unprovable ideas about God and spirit. People who feel troubled about the resulting sense of meaninglessness and emptiness no longer believe they can trust the doctrinal counsel of the clergy, and they turn to psychologists for help. Many therapists, though, also disbelieve in spirit and suggest solutions that miss the mark.
Despite attempts to prove that spirit has nothing to do with mental health, “organic medicine fails completely in the treatment of neuroses, while psychic methods cure them” (229). Until science accepts that there’s a real spiritual aspect to the mind that contrasts with its material aspect, progress in psychotherapy will remain limited. Psychotherapists can, at the very least, assist patients in interpreting spiritual fantasies and symbols that arise from their dreams and daydreams, so that they may find in their lives a place for purpose, meaning, and higher aspirations. Full acceptance of the power of the unconscious for good as well as evil, and a better understanding of its fundamentally spiritual nature, will strengthen the effectiveness of the analytic treatment process. In this way, perhaps the ongoing malaise of modern society itself will find a cure.
The Importance of Symbols
To the psychology patient, the unconscious offers up truths, but they’re hidden behind symbols that appear in dreams or fantasies. Jung believes that the most important symbols from the deep mind emerge from a shared unconscious realm, the collective unconscious, that presents its messages in the form of universal symbols called archetypes. By understanding these images, a patient may reach a resolution of inner psychic conflicts and arrive at a more serene and balanced mental life.
Archetypes are symbols that speak to universal human needs. These images recur throughout the world; both industrialized and pre-industrial societies respond deeply to such symbology. When they appear in a dream, these symbols can be interpreted as if they’re slightly garbled messages from a friend who warns of impending trouble, asks for help, or shows the path to take.
Horses and snakes, for example, are signs of power; mothers represent nature and the physical. One of Jung’s patients reported a dream in which her mother had hung herself while a horse gallops out a window to its death on the street below. Jung took this dream as a cry for help from the patient’s body, and medical tests showed a serious organic illness.
The dream analyst shouldn’t draw hurried conclusions about the meaning of symbols. Many have fixed meanings that can vary depending on the individual patient’s situation. Jung writes, “I prefer to regard the symbol as the announcement of something unknown, hard to recognize and not to be fully determined” (22).
Archetypes often represent cries and longings of the mind’s spirit. Freudians dismiss such activity as mere conflicts within a person’s pleasure drive, but Jung believes they symbolize genuine needs held by all peoples and cultures, desires that arise outside of the more mundane urges for physical satisfaction and social power. Many such symbols—lightning, dance, menstrual fluid, goats, pomegranates—represent creative potential. Arising from the unconscious, such images stand, not for destructive or anti-social urges, but for resolution and inspiration.
Artists often deal in symbols; the greatest art speaks symbolically to the highest aspirations of all peoples everywhere. Such art echoes with motifs that anyone can understand; its purpose isn’t to represent mundane needs but instead to symbolize transcendence and the highest values and aspirations of humanity.
Symbols that appear in dreams and fantasies serve as important clues to the identity of needs and drives that patients have long buried or repressed. Correctly understood, these symbols, especially the universal archetypes, become signposts that guide therapist and patient toward hidden problems that can then be resolved.
The Subjectivity of Analysis
Jung takes a scientific yet flexible approach to the contents of the mind. He believes it’s important to be humble when striving to learn about people’s mental health issues. He also believes that it’s impossible to be completely objective in research and as a therapist, and that those who ignore this danger will arrive at wrong conclusions and inflict them on their patients.
Jung prefaces several of his essays with the caution that, in the analysis of the mind, it’s easy to take a wrong turn and get lost in the weeds of therapeutic data, or to reach conclusions prematurely. He reminds us that psychology deals in “answers that are always open to doubt” (97), and that “The present state of development of psychology does not allow us to establish those rigorous causal connections which we expect of a science” (156). Jung understands that not everyone believes that a part of the mind functions outside of consciousness. His personal view is that the unconscious mind is a well-established fact, but he accepts that this conclusion isn’t universal, and that those who disagree will likely consider a waste of time his interest in signals from the unconscious that appear as the symbology of dreams.
Jung is also highly sensitive to the fact that, in analyzing patients, he and other therapists can easily filter the process through their own biases. For example, “It is one-sided, and therefore dangerous, understanding for the doctor to prejudge the dream from the standpoint of a certain doctrine […]” (9). In this respect, he finds that Freud’s theories—especially the idea that nearly all neuroses stem from distortions of sexual drives—are too limited, and that therapy will be more successful if it considers a wider variety of ideas, including Adler’s belief in the urge to power and Jung’s own idea about the desire for spirituality.
Therapists also must be aware that their own unresolved psychological issues can color their understanding of patients’ problems. They may view a patient’s symptoms through the lens of their own neurotic behavior, which, by its nature, hides the real problems that are locked in the unconscious recesses of their own minds. Thus, therapists easily can be completely unaware of their own biases; they should take extra care to notice any unusual reactions on their part during therapy sessions.
Jung knows his theories will stand or fall on the evidence; in the meantime, he suggests that other theorists and therapists remain humbly aware that the same truth applies to them.
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By C. G. Jung
