Modern Man in Search of a Soul Jung

Carl Jung: Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Jung supports the ideas of the Work especially with his concept of the collective unconscious. Like Gurdjieff, Jung spent his whole life trying to answer one question. He states, “My life has been permeated and held together by one idea and one goal: namely to penetrate into the secret of the personality.” One way we can see into the personality is through our examination of dreams. Jung maintains that man must go through the individuation process in order to develop his unique human potential. Though out his work he shows that the unconscious visions are just as real as the material world that we see in our conscious vision of life.

Carl Jung talks about dreams from the personal unconscious, which help a person to fulfill his individual destiny. Dreams from this level are made up of images that are collected during an individual’s lifetime. During our waking day everything that we experience is recorded and stored in our personal unconscious. Nothing is ever lost. There are images that we do not respond to or recognize in the rush of every day life. However, these images are not lost. They are recorded and stored and come forth in our dreams, but in disguised forms. Images from our earliest childhood came come forth from the personal unconscious. There is no time-space in the unconscious. Therefore in a dream a picture of a frying pan from your mother’s kitchen of forty years ago can sit on the new electric stove that you bought yesterday. Consciousness separates, but the dream puts all of the contents together.

According to Jung, a dream from the personal unconscious is often compensation for an attitude in waking life. If we dream of hiking up a mountain trail and enjoying the beauty of the surrounding forest, this may be compensating for our attitude that we have to work harder to advance in our profession. A dream in which we admire a colleague for his outstanding efforts may be compensating for our negative attitude toward him in waking life.

Other dreams come from what Jung calls the collective unconscious. The collective contains everything that ever happened in human history, and everything that will ever happen in the future. Jung states that if we work on our dreams we can reach the collective unconscious.

The archetype is often present in dreams from the collective. An archetype is a motif that appears over and over in fairy tales and literature. The most noted archetypes are the shadow, the anima and animus, and the self.

The shadow is all that is dark and hidden from the conscious mind. It is that aspect of our self that we cannot accept in every day life and often project into others. When you find someone that you really dislike you should pay close attention to his or her characteristics because you are probably projecting your shadow into that person. Projection of the shadow is seeing the mote in your brother’s eye, but not seeing the beam in your own eye. On the collective level nations project the collective shadow into the enemy. The enemy is all evil. In making this projection a nation can excuse itself of all blame.

The anima is the female counter part of man’s nature. The animus is the male counter part of woman’s nature. The anima is the inner man, the animus the inner woman. A man is a man because of one chromosome. He has twenty-three chromosomes from his mother. There is a feminine aspect to man and a male aspect to woman. The anima and animus can serve as a bridge leading the dreamer from the personal to the collective unconscious.

The self is the unconscious reflection of the totality of the individual both conscious and unconscious. The ego is the center of consciousness, but it is inferior to the self. The self includes the ego, consciousness and unconsciousness. In dreams it is often represented by the circle or the Mandala.

Jung maintains that the goal of man should be to become a total whole individual. He can achieve this through the individuation process. Individualization is self-realization. Jung believed that man is so taken by the materialist aspect of life that he ignores the greater part of himself. Jung believes like Gurdjieff that each man has a specific destiny, that we were placed on the earth to fulfill a preordained purpose. In order to realize our cosmic task we have to gain self-knowledge. Man must make a profound effort to understand his conscious self and his unconscious being.

The conscious self operates from several functions, sensation, feeling, thinking, and intuition. The functions exist as opposed pairs. Thinking is the opposite of feeling. If a man sees the world through the thinking function his feeling function will be undeveloped. If he sees the world through his sensation function his intuition function will be underdeveloped. Most men operate from one function while the other functions lie undeveloped. The whole man will recognize which function is dominate and will work on developing the under developed functions.

The functions are analogous to Gurdjieff’s centers. The thinking center controls thought. The moving-instinctive center controls movement and sensation. The feeling center controls emotions. Here again most men have a dominant center. The balanced man will work on developing all centers.

Jung maintains that modern man has given up his individuality to state mass mindedness. He looks to the state for all his needs and no longer stands as a separate individual. He is manipulated by propaganda and mass advertising. He has become a slave to the machines and technology that drive his life. In order to regain his proper place in the universe man must assert his individuality. He must develop his inner self and realize that the spiritual aspect of self is just as important as the material.

Jung believes that the content of the unconscious is just as real as the content of the conscious-mind. We must integrate the two in order to find our souls.