[This continues an earlier line of thought. Start here.]
Whenever Jung introduces his principal ideas and their interconnections, at some point or other a fault line appears. It’s often half-hidden (or glossed over in the presentation), but it’s always there and it always subtly complicates the subsequent stages of Jung’s lines of thought. This is problematic, of course, because the very point of introducing his principal ideas and their interconnections is typically that Jung wants to build some of the more advanced and detailed ideas on top of them. The principal ideas and their interconnections are the fundamental structure, the Gedankengebäude of his philosophy of psychology. But once the fault line appears, it introduces an incongruity, or unresolved question marks, or sometimes unfounded claims, and these affect everything that follows.
But the effect is very subtle, and easily overlooked. And it can be observed, I think, only by careful comparison of the various texts in Jung’s body of work which do precisely that: introduce his principal ideas and their interconnections, in order to then build some more advanced and detailed ideas on them. Luckily, there is a particular set of passages which practically recommend themselves for that purpose.
In his analytical practice, Jung observed and patiently recorded a certain typical path of personal development which he called “individuation process”, and in his various works he traced and explained its first stages in a compelling manner. His notions of Ego, Persona, Shadow, and Anima/Animus describe a plausible psychodynamic that can be (and has been) successfully applied in therapy and for personal growth. (It has inspired some weird fiction and extravagant new age mythology, too.)
Yet despite several attempts (fascinating in their own right, if much less influential over the subsequent decades) Jung was never able to get a grip on the stages of the process which come after the Anima stage. One such direction is outlined in the chapter on the “Mana Personality” (the final one in the Two Essays) and in the spirit essay (it is also briefly alluded to in the introduction to Aion and in some of the early passages of Psychology & Alchemy); a different one appears and frequently reappears as the “coniunctio” argument (the mystical union of opposites), and the various variants based on the quaternio and mandala structures; finally, there is the metaphysical speculation around what today is sometimes called “dual aspect” theory (and vaguely, if implausibly, assimilated to Spinozan philosophy), particularly the notion of a “psychoid” realm of archetypes and the “principle of synchronicity”, vaguely modeled on Eastern notions and loosely connected with certain parapsychological notions (such as telepathy and precognition). These seem to present another attempt, although here it isn’t entirely clear whether Jung wanted to transcend his earlier discussion or rather provide it with a more abstract basis. (Something which, incidentally, might be said about the attempts around oppositions and quaternios, too.) But whether he failed at the Anima stage and went off to a different kind of account, or whether he failed and re-tried with these metaphysical speculations — the problem seems in both cases that Jung got stuck with an initially promising, but then at some stage intractable, theoretical account.
Still, each of these later complications can be traced back to the beginnings of the lines of thought that led to them; and there (at the beginnings) we typically observe two things: one, Jung introduces his principal ideas and their interconnections, and two, the fault line appears and adds an element of subtle incongruence. So perhaps — and this is my working hypothesis — the later effects of that fault line have something to do with those later complications. And if that’s the case, and Jung understood (or at least suspected) it to be so, then it would make sense for him to return, over and over again, to these beginnings and make another fresh attempt.
We can read Jung’s incessant circling around these questions in this light.
[will be continued]
