Review - The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. Second Edition by C.G. Jung

One cannot underestimate Jung in his sweeping vision, technical proficiency and knowledge base concerning myth and fairytale and consequently psychology. What impresses me most about Jung is the fact he spent ten years working at a mental institution and thus gained experience to bolster his prudence with people from all walks of life who were experiencing all sorts of psychological problems. Unlike Freud, his teacher at first, Jung's practice was not private and limited to a relatively thin slice of humanity. He saw an entire array of the european population and his science, to me, is therefore more robust than his contemporaries. As Jung treated his patients, he began to see certain patterns emerge that pointed to some entity that was universal, that transcended normal boundaries of space and time. Certain psychic elements, the mother, the child, the wise old man, the hero, all cropped up regardless of a person's background, ethnic or otherwise. Jung then came to postulate the collective unconscious, later to be called the objective psyche. Jung found these complexes and pesonalities that originated from the collective unconscious, were best described as archetypes, in that they were objective and pre-conscious. Primitive man, who lived largely unconsciously also held out the mother, the child, the wise old man and so forth as powerful symbols that helped to explain much of what happened on a day to day basis, and even stretching into years and ages. These primitive motifs are in turn inherited by us all, carried forward in our ancient sympathetic nervous system, bubbling up from the primordial depths into our daily lives in many and various ways. This is the deepest layer of our psyche, this dark, uncharted, decentralized area of the Self, that if ignored for too long, will make itself known in perhaps unseemly ways, as evidenced in mass hysteria, schizophrenia and psychosis, with neurosis added to boot. The Self is understood to be ancient, the sum totality of the conscious and unconscious, while the Ego is conscious bound and new, constantly running ahead while the unconscious lags behind. Progress is made when the unconscious and conscious, each mutually exclusive, strike up a compensatory relationship with one another, where opposites (the products of consciuos thinking) are resolved. Progress is made only when light and dark, good and evil, spirit and flesh, are in balance with one another. At times in this edition, Jung can get to be a bit much with his flagrantly filtering his patients' neurosis through his alchemical bias. Modern problems are viewed through a strange, arcane occultic kaleidesope where Jung's ramblings can take on an air of a hierophant or psychopomp, as opposed to a scientist concerned with objective reality. But to be fair, Jung does point out that the subjectivity of the therapist, it's application and nonapplication, can play just as important role in recovery as the patient's own phenomenology. After reading this book, one can begin to look at literature, fairy tales, religious myths, popular genre novels and even hollywood screenplays in a Jungian light. His psychology has been quite friendly to those creative folks who wish to affect the largest slice of humanity with the deepest machinations available. The movies Star Wars, 2001 A Space Odyssey, the Hobbit, and so many others can be appreciated for their archetypal imagery and themes. I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in psychology, religion, esoterica and Jungian thought. This is a great introduction to Jung's thought, and the effect said thought has had on modern man.