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In my first post on the blog, I mentioned that I was reading A Man and His Symbols. It was Carl Jung's last work written with 4 other collaborators. The first section is written by him and is a general introduction to his work that contextualizes what the unconscious is to the modern, rational person.
I'm mostly writing this for myself, because it was a lot and I really like and resonate with a lot of the idea that he wrote about.
The essay begins with the distinction between a "Sign" and a "Symbol".
Sign - An image or concept that denotes the objects which they are attached to. (Ex. Abbreviations such as UNICEF, UNESCO, or an ID Badge)
Symbol - A term, a name, or even a picture that may be familiar to us in daily life, but can carry a meaning beyond what it represents at first glance. (Ex. a cross in Christianity)
The reader is slowly introduced into how the conscious mind is limited in its perception because it's totally dependent on the quality of its senses. Our unconscious is constantly observing our surroundings and is able to tell us a lot about who we are, what we need, and information about our life, but in modern times has created a lot of skepticism in the study or acknowledgement of "feeling". Jung believed that technological advancement and the abandonment of cultural spiritual practices has created the modern civilized man that struggles to connect with nature and understand himself and the world around him.
The spiritual practices themselves are not as important as what they represent. Many people, even today, do things for reasons they don't understand. For example, putting up a tree for Christmas. He claimed that if you ask a Christian why they put up a tree for Christmas, they would answer by saying that it's a tradition. Similarly, many natives and tribal people that continue to practice certain rituals in their culture do not remember its true origins. Jung believed that at some point in human history the mind evolved to be conscious of what it was doing. There's no specific event this can be traced back to, but he gave the example of a father strangling his son and killing him which caused him to feel remorse.
The original unconscious mind carries a lot of information about the primitive human and it's where our instincts lie. Even after the mind shifted towards reason, the unconscious was a useful component of the human psyche. While not at the forefront, it is capable of delivering incredibly powerful symbols to the conscious mind through dreams or visions.
He introduces the topic of "archetypes", which he describes as the history of the human psyche with an unknown origin. Jung believed if our DNA had a long history of evolution, so did our psyche. He describes Archetypes as these figures or symbols of human life that can have many forms but ultimately represent the same thing among many cultures. One of the Archetypes he mentions is that of the "Hero'. A famous figure he describes as a hero is Jesus Christ. Heroes typically go through a process where they seemingly "die" and come back to life. However, Jesus Christ was not the first hero by any means. Jung continues by saying that the hero archetype has existed since time immemorial. He assumes that it originated at a period when man did not yet possessed a hero myth, an age when man did not "reflect on what he was saying".
He also recounts an experience he had with a patient's daughter. The young girl has several dreams and drew pictures of them, then combined them into a booklet as a Christmas present for her father.
The father showed Jung the booklet and a lot of the symbolism in the girls dreams was unrelated to her own personal experience, yet it related to humanity as a whole. I'll describe the first dream as an example.
The first dream the girl had was about a horned serpent that ate and killed all the animals. From four corners, God brought the animals back to life. Jung contextualized the little girl first, saying that her family was Protestant but not very religious themselves. She was around 9(?) years old, so there was some degree of religious education, but she was not a theologian. At this point, Jung had studied symbols for a very long time and was familiar with the historical context and the etymology of some of the symbols that the girl drew. The horned serpent is very specific, as it only appears specifically in a few religious texts. It can be interpreted as a dragon in alchemy which is associated with both chaos and order.
The four corners is very interesting to me, I'll include Jung's analysis from the book.
Jung determined that many of the girl's drawings had symbols related to the theme of destruction and resurrection. The little girl died a year later.
While Jung believes that each dream's interpretation should rely on the individual to explore, as a psychiatrist, he would often need to help people arrive at conclusions about what their dreams meant. This usually involved taking into account what the person is familiar with. If they see a symbol in a dream that is external from their personal experience, then it would be more archetypal in nature. Or, it'd come from that unconscious, primitive psyche.
He pointed out that a lot of people have similar dreams like the girl had before her death. Usually, those dreams happen to people who are much older, so he was surprised that she had them. That was before she died, though. In his essay, Jung continues to explain that before modern medicine, people, like the Greeks, relied on the unconscious to provide them a cure through a dream. The unconscious had a role in prognosis. It could be that the human body instinctively knows what ails it, but since it cannot communicate directly with our conscious minds, the symbols we see in dreams are an attempt to warn us about future possibilities.
When applied to psychology, many people fear of facing the unknown. They fear facing themselves and the dark, unconscious aspect that they routinely ignore or shy away from. When this happens, this can be harmful to the psyche and create repressed feelings which can manifest physically. This isn't limited to a single person and can cause an entire nation to feel similarly. Likewise, having a connection to the spiritual, not necessarily through religion, opens the path to introspection.
Jung believed that if rationalism was the true path for humanity, then we wouldn't have any wars over the arbitrary conditions that we suffer from. And with all the technological advancement, instead of solving problems, humanity cannot stop stroking its own ego and is on the path to its own destruction. He claims that many religions in his time cared more about preserving the institution and not encouraging people enough to look within. I agree that people are too concerned with the material, logic, and are afraid to feel vulnerable nowadays. And it's that fear of being vulnerable and the attachment to the physical or rational that really holds back personal development and actualization.
I have many notes, but for now, I think this is a decent summary for myself. Again, I'm reading through this as research for my visual novel. My main character is an android who develops their own self in a world that's incredible divided.