46. Letters, paper, and ink
Brief thoughts on Jung, dreams, and the unconscious.
Dealing with mental content and calling that content ‘psychological’ is like saying that when we deal with a book, we are dealing with letters, paper, and ink.
In some contexts there will be nothing wrong with the description. But if our purpose is to know something more than material about a book, identifying it with those ‘mere’ surface-level things would be misleading and incomplete.
The letters, paper, and ink in our hands have a genesis beyond and prior to the printing press and the English language. Assuming our book isn’t an unlikely accident of nature - like a stalactite that happens to look like the Statue of Liberty - the ideas within are caused by the mind of the author.
Even this does not go far enough. The author’s mind is entangled with something beyond its own brain waves and concepts. If he writes a scientific description of a hurricane, for example, and if his writing is not mere delusion, the reality of weather patterns has made its mark, shaped his concepts, and caused his book.
And so we can lay out an extended chain: an external meteorological reality, causing a form in a mind, causing a form of letters, paper, and ink.
This metaphor helped me to my current understanding of how Carl Jung thought about dreams.
On Jung
The images in dreams - the horse, the flood, the naked sprint through one’s highschool - these are letters, paper, and ink.
The signals of the unconscious latent in dream imagery - the “ineluctable truths, to philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides”1, formed in response to the patient’s experiences, the conduct of their conscious mind, and their life situation - these are the ideas of the author.
And the unconscious itself - which (as far as I can tell) for Jung is an object which lives in individuals but has both individual and collective aspects, and may not contain any clear boundary between the hidden nature of the individual and the experience of the species at large - those are the hurricane.
This latter idea about the unconscious itself may be unclear - Jung sometimes even calls it The Unknowable - and so I’ll include a few lines from Jung’s Answer to Job2, as a means of elaboration:
The psyche is an autonomous factor, and religious statements are psychic confessions which in the last resort are based on unconscious, i.e., on transcendental, processes.
I find his use of the term ‘transcendental’ notable. To Jung, the statements of the psyche are “subject to manifold influences from within and without.” He also believes that when assessed collectively (across times and cultures and individuals), these images converge:
There is no doubt that there is something behind these images that transcends consciousness and operates in such a way that the statements do not vary limitlessly and chaotically, but clearly all relate to a few basic principles or archetypes.
While the signals of the psyche consist of “anthropomorphic images that could never stand up to rational criticism”,
we should never forget that they are based on numinous archetypes, i.e., on an emotional foundation which is unassailable by reason. We are dealing with psychic facts which logic can overlook but not eliminate.
Jung elaborates on this relationship between psychic facts and some underlying reality with a quote by Tertullian (160-240 AD) in De testimonio animae, which offers a poetical pointer to the realm from which psychological facts emerge. The language is religious in character, but the materialist or the scientifically-minded reader will get at the meat of Jung’s meaning by looking most closely at the relationship being described, rather than its literal metaphysical commitments:
These testimonies of the soul are as simple as they are true, as obvious as they are simple, as common as they are obvious, as natural as they are common, as divine as they are natural. I think that they cannot appear to any one to be trifling and ridiculous if he considers the majesty of Nature, whence the authority of the soul is derived. What you allow to the mistress you will assign to the disciple. Nature is the mistress, the soul is the disciple; what the one has taught, or the other has learned, has been delivered to them by God, who is, in truth, the Master even of the mistress herself. What notion the soul is able to conceive of her first teacher is in your power to judge, from that soul which is in you. Feel that which causes you to feel; think upon that which is in forebodings your prophet; in omens, your augur; in the events which befall you, your foreseer. Strange if, being given by God, she knows how to act the diviner for men! Equally strange if she knows Him by whom she has been given!
Project update
I continue to work on Hallsong Media. I am excited to be deep in a writing process, connecting ideas like those described here to a sci-fi thriller concept that should be fantastic when put on the screen.
Feel free to follow along at the Hallsong Twitter, or support my ongoing philosophical and artistic work at my Patreon.
Hoping all are well!
Carl Jung, “Modern Man in Search of a Soul” (1933). Dream Analysis in its Practical Application.
Carl Jung, “Answer to Job” (1952). Lectori Benevolo