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.
I have just spent half a year re-reading much of Jung’s work, in order to gain a more integrated perspective on his principal ideas. There is a reason why this is a sensible thing to do. Of course, I take it that Jung’s work has enough substance and relevance to be still of value today. (Anyone who doesn’t agree with that would simply ignore Jung entirely, or relegate him to a footnote in history...
When I left my big-picture sketch of Jungian thought, I noted that the methodological fundamental (with subjectivity rather than objectivity as point of departure) was itself a theoretical choice; a choice that contrasts with the dominant preference for intersubjectively verifiable observation taken, paradigmatically, in a scientific approach. There is a certain temptation to assign this...
When I summarized the view that emerges from the individuation essay, I listed a number of respects in which the notion of “personality” on which it is based is different from our everyday notion of a person. One of these was that a psychological individual (according to Jung, in the individuation essay) partly consists of unconscious, collective structures which are diffused throughout the...
There is an interesting corollary to the argument of the individuation essay, as I have reconstructed it in my recent postings. That argument was, roughly, that a psychological individual had to be (by presupposition) a “whole”, expressed and held together by some structural principle; that this whole could not coincide with the conscious subject, and this structural principle could not be the...
A psychological individual is a whole, and what makes it a whole (and keeps it together) is that it has personality character. That personality is like a sleeping (and dreaming) person, rather than a waking person. A waking person would be structured by consciousness, whereas a psychological individual, as a whole, is not characterized by that. This Jungian view is both weirder and more radical...
If not a subjective field, then what could be a plausible candidate for a structural principle on which the notion of a psychological individual can be based? (A principle, that is, which “expresses the whole” and “holds it together”?) It’s in answer to this question (remember, we are still reconstructing the argument of the individuation essay, GW IX/I, §§ 489-524) that Jung now (§§ 507-509)...
10. So far, we have seen that Jung explicitly assumes, as a basic premise shared in his tradition, that psychology must cover both consciousness and the unconscious; he also presupposes that a psychological individual (defined as a “whole”) must have a structural principle which “holds it together” and “expresses the whole”; he again assumes, this time with the broader tradition of modern...
Now that we have sorted out these distinctions to some degree, let’s compare how Jung employs them in those passages which introduce the “progression” on the path of individuation. I’m starting with a short, concise essay which Jung published precisely as an introduction to these themes: “Bewußtsein, Unbewußtes und Individuation”. The text sets the context with a brief statement of the basic...
The definitions of consciousness and the “I” contain another distinction on which Jung insists: that between the “field” of consciousness and its center (the “I”). Only on the basis of this distinction can he then go on and ask whether there is a similar center to the larger personality. The field of consciousness is an obvious and unproblematic, though metaphorical notion (carrying its...
Leif Frenzel is a writer and independent researcher. He has a background in philosophy, literature, music, and information technology. His recent interest is Jungian psychology, especially synchronicities and the relationship between consciousness and the unconscious.