Memories, Dreams, Reflections by C.G. Jung (translated by Richard Winston and Clara Winston)
A partly-autobiographical account of Jung’s life and thought.
Finished: 14 February 2022
Rating: ★★★★☆
This helped to clarify so much of what I’ve been thinking about, like a mirror held up to the mess of my mind — formless, dark — such that I could begin to see the shape of it. Which means, having read nothing else by Jung, I may well have read him inaccurately. I may have read in him the kind of thought and insight I needed most at this moment. Spurred, no doubt, by the fact that Jung was engaged with exactly that — dreams and myths can tell us what we most need to know about ourselves at a particular moment.
While certain parts of Jung’s thought delve far beyond the realm of proof, I also read in him a very pragmatic understanding. Prior to this, I’d only been briefly acquainted with the broad strokes of his thought — archetypes, the collective unconscious, the shadow, dream interpretation, synchronicity. It’s easy to be sceptical, but I think Jung understood their instrumental value. He doesn’t ask us to accept his concepts as metaphysically true, writing of his dreams that “we cannot attribute to these allusions the value of knowledge, let alone proof”. However, the value that they do have is to “give the probing intellect the raw material which is indispensable for its vitality. Cut off the intermediary world of mythic imagination, and the mind falls prey to doctrinaire rigidities. On the other hand, too much traffic with these germs of myth is dangerous for weak and suggestible minds, for they are led to mistake vague intimations for substantial knowledge, and to hypostatise mere phantasms”.
In other words, Jung is getting at the mental benefit and effect of engaging in this kind of thought. The lesson I take is that he has journeyed and seen what most other people have been unable to see (both in terms of ‘visions’ and in actually helping many of his psychological patients), and he has taken metaphors and tools back that, for the most part, really do help us. For example, myths about death after life can’t be known to be literally true, but when an individual has a myth for what comes next, it eases her dying. It doesn’t matter that it might not be the whole truth — what matters is its function. Some might argue that we’re worse off for believing something that isn’t the truth, but the reality is that we can’t know the truth in that kind of situation, and it it is true that we fear that unknown. So what can be done about that? Through myths and archetypes, Jung makes us feel both the mystery and horror of the world beyond our understanding while also giving us a way in which to situate ourselves such that we feel we are at home in our world, in ourselves. In a similar vein, Alexander Chee’s essay, “The Querent”, describes Tarot reading as “something that could show me the possibilities of the present, not the certainties of the future” — we are not shown facts about the world we couldn’t have known, but rather we are confronted with mirrors of ourselves.
At the same time, I don’t want to tame Jung overmuch. One thing I think he exemplifies, though not in explicitly the same terms, is to enact sacredness. I get my understanding of sacredness from John Vervaeke, who explores two aspects of sacredness: (i) its ability to make us feel at home in the world by transforming our relationship with our surroundings, and (ii) the way it can challenge our sense of reality and bring us deep into the heart of horror. Jung is deeply aware — reverent, even — of the mysteries of the world. “The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable.” The mind is dark and unexplored. We are complex creatures, unsure why we’re conscious, unsure what consciousness is. The subconscious or unconscious can rapidly lead to us losing control but myths and archetypes allow to make sense of things without denying the mystery. Enlightenment is not the eradication of that mystery by reduction; it is the acceptance of its fullness. Certain rituals or stories or even buildings we call sacred are experienced thus because they help us to walk that paradoxical line.
Jung does make some more clearly metaphysical claims because his instrumentalism serves a greater context of meaning that allows us to understand ourselves in relation to the world. (To caveat, he’s not entirely sure whether there is meaning: “Life is—or has—meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.”) For Jung, humans are the “second creator” of the world, after God, due to the fact that we witness it and thereby give it objective existence and meaning — this, he thinks, is the “cosmic meaning of consciousness”. If we ascribe creation only to a supernatural being, life becomes a machine and the human psyche “runs on senselessly, obeying foreknown and predetermined rules”. While we are alive, our task is to maximise our awareness of the knowledge that is present in nature. At the same time, however, the unconscious mind possesses more sources of knowledge than the conscious mind. Raising the level of consciousness can, therefore, only be done with “mythologising” because myth bridges unconscious and conscious cognition. The mythical archetypes help us to make sense of hints we receive via dreams and spontaneous revelations from the unconscious.
Is that true? I don’t know. My point is that his view of meaning situates us within the entire universe in a way that promotes a sense of belonging and purpose, regardless of whether the substance is entirely true. That, too, can be further abstracted such that I think a more overarching aspect of Jung’s purpose can be phrased in a way that links to cultures cultivated in various religions and spiritual practices. Jung was trying to regain contact with reality and thereby gain knowledge, wisdom, and agency. He was led to understand the purpose of his life as follows: “The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. Or, conversely, I myself am a question which is addressed to the world, and I must communicate my answer, for otherwise I am dependent upon the world’s answer.” To depend on someone else’s answer is to lose agency; to lose agency is to suffer. What I enjoy most is how Jung sought a holistic view. The metaphysics grounds and serves the actions cultivated, the character formed — whereas, nowadays, people are too scared to be caught admitting anything as truth. And so, we see a wholesale rejection of anything resisting scientific proof, but there is little left that can ground the ought of our actions. There is not much purpose beyond immediate fulfilment, if that. Whether or not I agree with the whole of Jung’s thought, there is at least a whole to contend with.
There are multiple levels at which to splice Jung and agree or disagree with him, but to see his purpose laid out alongside his tools was incredibly insightful for crafting my own understanding. What I’ve read into Jung is something that I’ve been thinking about, and I worry I’ve stripped him of something essential or have fallen to confirmation bias, but I don’t think I’m too far off the mark to say that this was a hopeful experience. I don’t know what the question was that Jung thought of as himself addressing to the world, but one that is important to me is something like: How should we live? Jung offers a glimmer of possibility in beginning to answer that.