137 - Arthur I. Miller [12]
Freud saw the unconscious as a storehouse of repressed emotions, thoughts, and memories, an arena where a day-to-day struggle took place among the id, ego, and superego with a strong sexual undercurrent. Jung, conversely, was interested in aspects of the psyche that could not be attributed to an individual’s personal development but belonged to the deeper nonpersonal realms common to humankind. The collective unconscious is made up of archetypes, which Jung initially referred to as “complexes”—the “feeling-toned complexes” that affected the speed of a patient’s response to his word-association tests. In this primordial state they belong to what he called the psychoid realm, that is, they are not part of the psychic realm, which is made up of the personal unconscious and the conscious. Archetypes are not inherited ideas but potentialities—latent possibilities. Their origin remains forever obscure because they exist in a mysterious shadow realm of which we will never have direct knowledge, namely, the collective unconscious.
Jung described archetypes as an invisible crystal lattice shaping thoughts in the same way that a real crystal lattice refracts light. An arche type can be charged with energy, or “constellated,” by perceptions or thoughts from the personal unconscious and can thus be visualized through archetypal images or symbols. Thus the archetype can move from the psychoid realm to the conscious.
Archetypes are built into the mind. They are organizing principles enabling us to construct knowledge through an analysis of incoming perceptions. They influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions and determine whether a mind is sick or well.
Some years later Jung noted his “amazement that European and American men and women coming to me for psychological advice were producing in their dreams and fantasies symbols similar to, and often identical with, the symbols found in mystery religions of antiquity, in mythology, fairytales, and the apparently meaningless formulations of such esoteric cults as alchemy. Experience showed, moreover, that these symbols brought with them new energy and new life to the people to whom they came.”
In 1912 Jung published Symbols of Transformation, in which he began to develop in detail the concept of the collective unconscious. It was the final break with Freud. Almost until then, Jung professed a great devotion to Freud, his teacher. But the debate over the role of sexuality never faded away with Jung seeking a psychoanalytic theory of a more general—a more transpersonal—sort. As for Freud and his circle, they turned on Jung, damning him as an occultist. They reviewed his book harshly and he lost many friends and colleagues. Jung was disappointed but at least he was now absolutely free to indulge in the “images of my own unconscious.”
Remembering the totem of his boyhood, he now perceived it as “a little cloaked god of the ancient world, a Telesphoros such as stands on the monuments of Asklepios and reads to him from a scroll.” The only place he could have seen such a cloaked god in reality would have been in his father’s library, but there was certainly no such thing there. This was surely evidence that there were archaic components in the individual psyche.
A new psychology
What could these images mean? Where did they come from? Jung wanted to develop a psychological view that encompassed the metaphysical and the irrational. As to how to proceed, he was inspired by a passage from Goethe’s Faust referring to “continuity of culture and cultural history.” By looking into history he could find the elements that make up the mind.
He was also inspired by the writings of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. A generation of young turn-of-the-century German-educated intellectuals were attracted to Schopenhauer’s underlying philosophical message that optimism was naive. Only an outlook pervaded by pessimism could capture the