It is notoriously difficult to kick a toe-hold into the works of Carl Jung who, quite frankly, had a brain the size of a planet! He wrote extensively on not only analytical psychology, but on religion, politics, history, mythology, symbolism, folktales, UFOs, personality types, dreams, consciousness, etc.
Most commentators tend to start with Jung’s four functions of the conscious mind: Thinking, Feeling, Sensing and Intuiting. Anyone who has completed a Myers-Briggs Personality Questionnaire will be familiar with these. Others start with the Ego, Self and Shadow, and begin (incorrectly) comparing these to Freud’s Ego, Superego and id. Or they might start talking about the Collective Unconscious and Instincts. However, amongst Jung’s seemingly impossible-to-understand technical essays, papers and books, there are quite a few aimed at the general reader, and from these we can indirectly collect some knowledge about his more intellectual hypotheses.
For this discussion I have used one of Jung’s short books (it’s only 79-pages) – The Undiscovered Self (Routledge, 1958), and taken some excerpts (11-pages including questions) to create the Discussion reading material. These excerpts are available via the Link below. The subjects covered by Jung are quite wide-ranging, but I think they offer lots of scope for discussion, as well as softly introducing some of Jung’s ideas on the psyche, without too much pain.
Subjects covered can be (nicely) outlined as several interrelated Trinities (very Jungian!):
· The place of the Individual in relation to the State and the Church;
· Psychology in relation to Politics and Religion;
· Culture in relation to Law and Faith;
· Self in relation to Ego and Shadow.
In this book, he basically proposes that we modern people project our own existential angst onto the outside world, thus creating the geo-politics, societies, cultures, and religions which we then attribute as the cause of our existential angst. What’s more, we expect, and trust, these external “abstract” entities to “solve” our problems for us, thus twisting the very arrow that we shot into our own guts! It’s truly very clever. Another book of Jung’s (much larger) covers similar themes – Modern Man in Search of a Soul; and this might have been a more appropriate title for The Undiscovered Self. In both, what Jung is saying is that the solutions to our woes lie inside and we find them through self-examination – or through £££-Analysis [before he became a modern guru, he had to earn a living!].
I have described this as a “gentle introduction” to Jung’s work, and as such, I have avoided material which requires any depth of knowledge about Jung’s psychological models. However, I have included some basic introductions where these help with understanding this particular book; nothing heavy.
Read the document, with the aim of answering the numbered questions (1-to-9) that are embedded in the document; I have also provided them in a separate document available via the second Link below. I have made some alterations to grammar etc. to aid reading. Also, I have made some comments and included some rhetorical questions – in blue italics - these are to slow you down, and to get you thinking more deeply about the subject. Please make your own notes, do further research if you wish, and bring your own questions, examples and ideas to the discussion.
Reading Material: inc. Questions
Questions Only