Born feet first, a prince of the scientific age in Kesswil, Switzerland
in 1875, Carl Gustav Jung became an intellectual giant of his
generation, and is considered by many to be the originator of
analytical psychoanalysis. Completing his medical education in
Basel, Jung then passed through a series of apprenticeships under
some of the brighter names in psychiatry, methodically setting
up shop in cities in bustling turn of the century Europe. He then
met and became quick friends and collaborator with Freud. In 1911
he was elected the first president of the International Psychoanalytic
Society.
Although a strong believer in the scientific challenge and an
equally just practitioner of applied methods along the crowded
path to truth, Jung held that the increase in scientific understanding
has led to a dehumanization of the natural and social worlds.
"A former unconscious acceptance of natural phenomena, which
involved endowing them with symbolic power has disappeared",
he wrote. Yet, at the root of the problem lies the standard ambiguous
set of ontological claims. Jung insisted that the contents of
the psyche are as real as that which exists in the external world.
He clearly meant by this more than the obvious, which nobody would
be disposed to deny. For example, that there are recurrent patterns
of symbolism that even the most dull man in the street can detect.
In a lecture given at the 1951 Eranos conference in Ascona, Switzerland,
Jung described several examples of what he considered classical
synchronicity as evidence that psychic events both in dreams and
the waking state do not only influence but are influenced by the
collective unconscious on the simultaneous planes of symbolic
and physical being and do often supersede notions of time, space,
and statistical probability. Careful notekeeping allowed the eminent
psychologist to amaze himself at the confluence of events beginning
April 1, 1949.
The Eranos conference of cigar chomping VIPs heard Jung recall
that early that morning he drew an inscription on a notepad containing
a figure that was half man, half fish. There was fish for lunch.
One supposes he didn't arrange the menu. Somebody later mentioned
the custom of making an "April fish" of someone. In
the afternoon, a former patient, whom he had not seen in months,
showed him some impressive pictures of fish. In the evening, he
was shown a piece of embroidery with sea monsters and fishes in
it. The next morning he saw a former patient who was visiting
him for the first time in ten years. She had dreamed of a large
fish the night before. A few months later, when he was using this
series for a larger work and had just finished writing it down,
he walked over to the spot by the lake near the front of his house
where he had already been several times that morning. This time
a foot long fish lay on the sea wall. Since no one else was present,
he wondered how it could have got there.
Praising J.B. Rhine's reliable basis for work in the field of ESP
and his trademark pack of cards depicting five geometric symbols,
Jung delighted in the statistical evidences he gathered from his
own office practice and random samplings set up to discover "meaningful
coincidences" predicted by his system.
One rumor has it that whenever Freud and Jung would gather together
in a parlor, odd things would occur, a picture falling off the
wall, a chest of drawers crashing, or books dropping off shelves.
This tale may well be apochraphal and intended merely to relay
the message that there was some powerful psychic brainstorming
going on when the two Goliaths met head to head.
His "golden scarab" story of a young woman patient
is famous. Well-educated and poised to disagree on everything
from apples and oranges, she proved to be psychologically inaccessible
because she always had a response to everything in hard intellectual
terms. Jung was faced with the psychic wrestling of the patient's
"geometrical" or Cartesian reality when it proved "illogical"
while encountering the intellectual resistance a patient's problems
had erected. The powers of synchroncity Jung claimed, by quickly
and opportunistically pointing out a real-time real-space association
to a dream she had the night before, punctured the desired hole
in her rationalism and opened her to treatment with satisfactory
results.
Jung claimed that his cases of synchronity, extra sensory perceptions,
astrological, and other causal relationships differ from manticism,
or the oracle method of the I Ching. Not everyone is convinced.
However, Carl Jung's influence on later generations of writers
is not disputed.
Recent contributors to the "meaningful coincidence"
method as a critical pursuit of the signals life has to offer
are noted writer and old Bull of the Beat Generation, William
S. Burroughs, and prolific homme des lettres, Colin Wilson, who
has spun webs across nearly every print genre from philosophy
to encyclopedias, the occult and science fiction.
Burroughs has rattled the cages of establishment thinking ever
since the 1959 publication of his book, Naked Lunch, with his
significant emphasis on the human instinct as an integration of
mechanical and psychic coincidences as they appear upon the matrix
of randomized order in human affairs. His peculiar belief is that
the artist actually creates the future using principles of the
collective unconscious which lead directly to life imitating art.
That human events are created by this process and are not merely
culturally peddled synthetic forms or conscious copycat behavior,
but instead, exist psychically in the realm of hard reality as
art urges man to relocate himself within this swirl, is well established
in his essays and novels and meets the demands Jung originated
in his own work.
Wilson in the late 1980s notes that an American professor of
psychology named Abraham Maslow, after bringing healthy people
together to study their common energy, postulated a belief in
the healing and paranormal inferences of what he called "peak
experiences", a phenomenon that healthy people engage with
fair degree of frequency. Stunning athletes speak of a place they
call "the Zone", typified by unconscious will linked
to the power of implicit influence and outstanding achievement.
After much study Maslow became convinced that these peak experiences
could not be induced.
That is where Wilson worked to prove Maslaw wrong. Enter biologist
Rupert Sheldrake who developed a theory of evolution that outraged
most of his older colleagues. According to Sheldrake, there is
a simpler and much quicker method than changes in genes, a method
he dubbed "morphic resonance".
He cites the story of a band of monkeys on an island off the
coast of Japan. Scientists fed the monkeys unwashed sweet potatoes,
and one exceptionally bright female named Imo was quick to dunk
her tots in the sea, making them not only less gritty but more
tasty. Soon all the monkeys on Koshima learned the trick. But
so had monkeys on the mainland - monkeys who had no contact with
those on Koshima.
Telepathy? Not according to Sheldrake. For it works not only
for animals but for crystals as well. Some substances are extremely
difficult to crystallize in the laboratory. But as soon as one
laboratory had succeeded in doing it, the substance begins to
crystallize much easier all over the world. Careful considerations
eliminated the possibility that visiting scientists had carried
fragments of the new crystals on their clothes or beards. Hypothesis:
the crystals were "learning" from one another.
Anyone remember the first four minute mile? Sheldrake was encouraged
to test his theory with a number of experiments. One of these
involved sending out thousands of trick pictures in which a face
is concealed in a mass of lines. He reasoned that once a certain
number of people had learned to "see" the face, increasing
numbers of people would be able to see it immediately. And that
is precisely what happened. If Sheldrake is right, and the physical
scientists are fighting him tooth and nail at every turn, the consequences
would obviously be earth-shattering. Colin Wilson suggests that
we would have to recognize that our writers
and our artists are largely to blame for the chaotic state of
society. He laments that the 20th century fascination with defeat
is being stuffed down the throats of our children, school and
university. Adding, "If there is anything to the theory of
morphic resonance, this is the equivalent of pouring plague germs
into the city's water supply". Not exactly the cold meaningless
random world of post-Newtonian physics.
In regards to Wilson's indictment of modern writers, in 1932
Jung wrote a letter to James Joyce voicing his near indifference
to the extravagant psychological peregrinations of the latter's
recent masterpiece, Ulysses, admitting "a string of
veritable psychological peaches". Finnegan's Wake
seems to have left Jung even more dry in the mouth.
Many argue that Jung is open to criticism for treating the collective
unconscious not as a theoretical entity to which reference is
made in an as yet untested hypothesis, but as something whose
existence is an established fact. Finally it is worth noting that
we possess little worthwhile statistical evidence about the efficacy
of Jungian psychotherapy. Lacking this evidence, many are forced
to conclude that although Dr. Jung established a psychological
system of some complexity, there are yet no grounds for believing
any of its propositions which go beyond recording empirical data,
either as to the nature of personality, the world at large, or
as to the process of cure when so desired. |
