I have quoted Hillman, from his “Peaks and Vales” essay on the difference between spirit and soul, as listing three distinctive features of soul-work, in contrast to spirit-work. The first of those three is that “pathologizing” is not “dismissed for growth”. But what does that even mean?
In Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung points to a fundamental difference between Christian religion and alchemy. Both are concerned, according to him, with the monumental task of unifying opposites; but Christian religion finds these opposites projected in spirit (Geist) and alchemy projects them into physis (Stoff), whereas “none locates the problem where it originated, namely, in the human soul”...
In my previous post, I have discussed Hillman’s criterion for distinguishing between spirit-work and soul-work from "The Myth of Analysis". Hillman has also written an entire essay on this topic: “Peaks and Vales", and there he lists three more criteria.
One way to approach the distinction between spirit and soul is to look at the different ways in which we engage with them. If there is an essential difference between spirit and soul, then there should be a corresponding contrast between spirit-work and soul-work.
Jung presents the process of engaging with the unconscious, aka the “individuation process”, often as a series of stages; where at each stage the focus is on a specific archetype. But if that route is somehow the typical one (or maybe even the only one), are there any particular reasons for this?
Is there a difference between spirit and soul? In his survey of what the term "spirit" means, Jung notes in passing that it is “common opinion that spirit and soul are essentially the same and therefore only arbitrarily separable”. And it is true that, in Jung’s work, the use of notions such as “psyche”, “spirit”, and “soul” seems at times arbitrary or at least vague...
There is a chapter (naturally) on smartphones and Instagram in Tim Wu’s "The Attention Merchants", his very readable and eye-opening history of the attention industry; its title: “The fourth screen and the mirror of Narcissus”. This choice is very apt indeed.
The archetypal idea of a “hidden meaning behind chaotic events in life” appears when subjects find themselves in certain types of situation: when it seems that “there is no way out”. Jung says this both in the synchronicities essay and in the spirit essay. Yet there is a third line of thought in his work which arrives at the same point, but via an entirely different route.
Jung’s two essays on synchronicities and on spirit in the fairy tale have a striking claim in common: that there is a “hidden meaning [Sinn] behind the chaotic events in life”. It will be interesting to compare how the two essays introduce the core finding: there is an interesting commonality, and one important difference.
There is in human experience a perennial contrast between the external world and the inner world, the interior. With both worlds, we interact; and to some small extent we can influence and control them. But mostly, they’re wide-open ranges of the unknown: abundant, overpowering, and utterly “other” than ourselves.
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology.