Modern Man in Search of a Soul - Carl Jung
Review & Rating: 8/10
It’s a book about modern psychology by one of its foundational figures. Jung appears to be an empirically driven psychotherapist, unlike his teacher —Freud.
Jung rejected Freud’s scientific approach of generalizing his findings to the greater human population. Instead, Jung equated psychology to be closer to philosophy where the work wasn’t to figure out “why” but “what”. Our bias is to try and find reasons for causes instead of observing and accepting everything to be an independent situation.
The book is as much for the psychologist as the person seeking to understand the self. While Adler and Freud focused on those with severe neuroses, Jung worked with “normal” people. This means dealing with the age-old question of “what is the meaning of my life?” I think his teachings will be applicable for most individuals working towards self-awareness in the 21st century.
Book Notes:
Dreams are a lens into the unconscious. Suppressing conscious thoughts will move them to the unconscious. Dreams are the filtered streams of our unconscious.
Dream analysis is “what for” not “why”. Think about the context that gives birth to such dreams. Some are direct. Some are symbols that are only applicable to the dreamer. Don’t try to understand the dream. Establish context. “Why” looks for cause. “What” looks for context.
Utilize Occam’s Razor when looking at a dream. Simple explanations are often right.
Freud thought all neurosis originated in childhood. He had a causalistic approach to dream analysis. Every dream resulting from a traumatic past what required constant “why”. Jung interjected neurosis can develop later in life. He believed associating trauma to a childhood origin might result in false attribution, possibly blaming, an inaccurate memory to explain the dream. Instead, the focus should be placed on the dream for what it is, not as a cause of something.
When working with people, admit you don’t understand what they’re going through. It’s unbearable for people to hear that you understand them when you have never lived their life.
Dreams are a source of information and self-regulation. Repressing and pushing away conscious thought will continuously come back in dreams. Examine it. Consider it as feedback from your subconscious. Repressing thirst only makes you thirstier. It’s the same for your thoughts.
Dreams are related to daily life. It compensates for a conscious attitude.
Four steps when working w/ a client: 1) Confession, 2) Explanation, 3) Education, 4) Transformation.
Confession: Secrets & unsaid emotions will move to the unconscious. The more we repress it, the more it will build up as stress and come out in our conscious life. The mind’s stress will come to stress the body. Secrets build inside. They take on personalities of sin and guilt. Toxicity builds to corrupt the mind and body. That’s why secrets need an outlet. Consider whether you are keeping a secret when you feel anxiety, nauseous, and sick. Confession actually connects us as individuals through the unique situations that we felt separated us from the world. But most select the easy way of uniting under socially fabricated illusions.
Explanation: Use dreams and facts to build context to find what the client’s subconscious might be projecting. Focus on the body that casts the shadow. Consider how culture (familial and societal) mould us and make us its unwilling mouthpiece. These ideas - that we mistakenly think is from our own volition - go beyond logical justification and moral sanction. Common roots of neurosis come from a 1) desire to fulfill childhood fantasy or 2) regressing to an old family situation
Education: Replace bad habits with good ones. Neurosis created the bad habits and understanding the cause won’t do anything to end it. The habits formed as a result of the neurosis need to be replaced. Think about it as how we have a set amount of habits and each “spot” needs to be filled up. We default to bad habits because they are quick and easy. It takes work to pull out the weed and plant a strong plant into the same spot so the weed doesn’t grow back there.
Transformation: You need to have done your own introspection. You need to have gone through the first three steps yourself to have the self-awareness to understand the transformation process. That’s because transformation of the client will also transform you. “You can exert no influence if you are not susceptible to influence.”
On average, those adapted to society adhere to the pleasure principle. Those unadapted - including forcibly rejecting - society have a craving for power and importance. All entrepreneurs and leaders of organizations are those who didn’t adapt to society and used their power to make everyone else adapt to their view of the world.
“The older brother who follows in the footsteps of his father and attains a commanding position, may be tortured by his desires; but the younger brother who feels repressed and overshadowed by the other two, may be goaded by ambition or the craving for respect.”
This reminds me of the corporate world of suits I lived in where luxury and posturing with money and titles ran my life. Compare this to my younger brother in healthcare whose wish was for an office job with a 9 to 5 he could only desire from the outside. I threw out the illusion of stability among the corporate elite while he struggled to move towards it.
Neurosis isn’t only for the abnormal who wish to be normal. It exists in those trapped in normalcy when their deepest need is to live an abnormal life.
“What sets one free is for another a prison - as for instance normality and adaptation.”
The error in modern psychology is generalization. Every case needs to be taken individually without the use of categorizations for ease. I think it’s the inevitable faith of people needing to justify their careers. Researchers need to “discover” something and make categories and generalized answers to something that isn’t a science.
It all starts with you:
“…be the man through whom you wish to influence others.”
The sign of an elevated society is when the people forgo compulsion and turn to self-development. This is the evolution of psychology where it moves from treating the sick to being of service to the healthy.
Freudian psychotherapy focused on understanding successful people through the pleasure principle.
Adlerian psychotherapy focused on unsuccessful people with self-assertion issues.
Jung interpreted for the sole reason that it works. Empirical over scientific reasoning. Jung noted figuring out why dreams work was a scientific hobby that wasn’t as important to doing his work. You don’t need to know why. The error is in thinking there is always some reason, our bias to default to cause and effect for everything. Figure out what works and do it. Let science catch up.
Human interpretation gives meaning to fact. Consider the subjectivity of what we consider “rationality” and “facts”. Most things have no meaning in itself, it’s us who give things meaning. I can’t help but think it’s true for everything with investing, business strategy, careers and everything that exists in the wicked environment we live in.
Strive to remember what it was like to play.
“As Schiller says, man is completely human only when he is playing.”
The purpose of interpreting dreams is to understand what activates the dreamer. This will allow the dreamer to explore his nature further.
Jung instructed his patients to pain their dreams and fantasies. He saw painting as a way to see what exists within ourselves. This could also be drawing or writing. The purpose is to create an effect. One that results from a total state of play where the patient plays an active role. It seems akin to the “confession” stage Jung instructed on.
The act of giving form to active fantasies and dreams gives the dreamer creative independence. A small sense of control that is essential to our inherent desire for independence.
The you that “rationalizes” things away…the things that you think are silly are not silly because they truly are, it’s because the world you live in has programmed you to think it is because others around you don’t do ir or have expressed similar thoughts:
“Most of my patients knew the deeper truth, but did not live it. And why did they not live it? Because of that bias which makes us all put the ego in the centre of our lives - and this bias comes from the over-valuation of consciousness."
People gravitate towards self-development after they’ve had enough appealing for acceptance from society. It no longer becomes his primary aim in life. Those in this stage become aware of the unimportance of their own creativity and learn to do it for intrinsic reasons.
Jung viewed psychology types as the rational functions (thinking versus feeling) and non-rational functions (sensation versus intuition). Jung considered these four functions as a matter of fact in classifying people’s attitudes.
“Sensation establishes what is actually given, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and finally intuition points to the possibilities of the whence and whither that lie within the immediate facts.”
They are Jung’s four points to the human compass.
Our feelings are reasonable. It’s also discriminating, logical and consistent as thinking. Consider it a manifestation of the super computer in your head. To deny our feelings as being rational and logical is as stupid as forgetting to think and preach a singular view by the so-called “data-driven syhstemists”.
Conscious problems exist starting from youth to the middles ages - 30s to 50s. The faster we learn to accept death, the faster we can focus on living well. That means creating meaning with the remainder of our life. To live with aim and purpose. The prerequisite to create meaning is an environment where you feel safe.
Those who struggled to find their place in the world are spared from the inner problems those who had an easy time adapting to society grapple with later in life. The absence of struggle creates a sense of inferiority in the self.
Society gives prizes for achievement, not for self-awareness. Achievement doesn’t help with the latter. Achievement turns idealistic youngsters into dry and narrow moulds with no ambition. As they age, they double down on the ideals and principles that got them there. They take it as matter of fact and dangerously teach it to their offsprings. They fail to change their views.
“We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.”
Art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all the arts.
A directed life is better, richer, healthier than an aimless one.
Differences with Freud and Jung
Freud placed sexuality as the crux of all issues. Sex was the sole driver of negativity.
Freud focused on those with neurosis whereas Jung saw normal folks. This impacts their philosophy of psychotherapy.
Freud rejected theology whereas Jung believe man will eventually learn toward a form of spirituality. This reminds me of David Foster Wallace’s speech on worship. We all learn to worship something: power, money, god, parents, etc…
Freud rejected the parental figure in the infantile sexuality paradox being a theological god.
Freud used his passion for science to generalize human psychology. Jung pointed out scientific thought is only one function in working with the human psyche and that psychology was not science. The danger of Freud and those who use science is to generalize and label human psychology. It’s lazy.
Freud’s psychology was not psychology of the healthy mind. He generalized his findings from neurotic patients onto the human race.
Ideas create us, not us them.
Primitive man was once viewed as illogical. It’s utter stupidity to judge the past with standards and knowledge of the present. It’s akin to saying a middle-aged man is an imbecile for shitting his pants when he was two years old. You cannot hope to ever judge people of the past with standards of the present. It ignores all context and facts of that time. It’s also arrogant and those who do so lack all humility and fail to realize how imperfect and flawed they are. People of the past are no more logical or illogical than us in the present. The future will look everything we think is rational, logical, and progressive today and laugh at how wrong and stupid we were. If we thought this of the past, the future will treat us the same.
Our generation is not special. People today set up Christmas trees and they have no idea why they do it. It’s no different from primitive man praying to the sky or dancing when it rains. We are a bunch of monkeys that do things that don’t make objective sense, only subjective sense. Subjective sense we mistake as objective logic and rationality.
Human history is a record of the rarest right tail events. Nothing was planned and there was no order. Everything happened via chance. There was no master plan to human progression. It’s a human flaw to desire causation and explanations for them, there are none.
Chapter 8 is essential for any aspiring or professional creative.
Jung viewed artists as being called to do their work on behalf of society. My guess is he is referring to the “muse”. Jung said this calling will create internal conflict because it will require the artist to move away from the simple pleasures. Pleasure an ordinary person seeks like security, happiness and satisfaction.
The artist will have to move away from that path to the vocational path of putting the creative process to work for the advancement of humankind. A path of ruthless passion for creation, Contrary to popular opinion, the arts have led the advancement of humanity with engineering applying the visions and science coming to explain the empirical.
Jung on artists:
“Every creative person is a duality or a synthesis of contradictory aptitudes."
“The artist is not a person endowed with free will who seeks his own ends, but one who allows art to realize its purposes through him.”
“…as an artists he is ‘man’ in a higher sense… one who carries and shapes the unconscious, psychic life of mankind…To perform this difficult office it is sometimes necessary for him to sacrifice happiness and everything that makes life worth living for the ordinary human being.”
A great of work art is like a dream. It won’t tell you “this is it” but rather it’s an image that the artist must bring into existence. It is what it is.
Creative work comes from the unconscious and this work defines the artist, not him it.
If you are stricken with nightmares, consider it as an indication of giving into too much fear or you are too exempt from it. Either way, you are running away so time to face your demons and the decisions you are running from.
Human actions are derived from our psychic reality. Jung referred to this as a sensation. Something we feel in our mind and body. The sensation is what drives action with intention and reason. Reason alone is not how we decide - we want to think it is. Our psychic reality is closer to a “feeling” that is derived from our morality and spirituality. This brings psychology closer to philosophy and further away from science.
“A high regard for the unconscious psyche as a source of knowledge is by no means such a delusion as our Western rationalism likes to suppose.”
“..it is most often feeling that is decisive in matters of good and evil, and if feeling does not come to the aid of reason, the latter is usually powerless.”
If good intentions and reason was all we needed to drive human decision-making, we would never have had the atrocities of war, genocide, and human suffering.
Mathematics, psychics, botany, biology are sciences. There is one form. Psychology and philosophy has many variants. There is no singular truth in these arts.
Humans make decisions based on our psychic reality, to think it’s a result of pure objective rationality is wrong.
Jung believed the idea of psychic reality to be the most important development in modern psychology.
Jung pointed to the origins of Western psychology and theology coming from Asia. I imagine his references are rooted to Genghis Khan’s reign. He noted Asiatic origins for Christianity, the study of sexuality postulated in Vienna coming from Hindu teachings, Oriental texts introducing relativism ten centuries earlier than Western “discoveries”, Western psychoanalysis being traced to yoga per Oskar Schmitz, etc…. The oddity is how Western societies take this influence as their own discovery and go on to “introduce” it to the rest of the world, only to cause problems to existing cultures. Jung pointed to the laughable situation where Christian missionaries forced the end of polygamy in Africa - resulting in an exponential increase in prostitution. It's such arrogance of “our way is right, and we are better” that has resulted in man trying to fuck with nature to create more problems.
The problem of the psyche is not something to judge and point fingers at. Evil is capable within every individual and the only way to eradicate evil in the psyche of society is to focus on improving the self. For a bunch of Christians that preach "only him without sin to cast the first stone”, they sure cast a lot of stones for sinners.
Jung believed the “first principle” of neurosis resulted from a feeling of meaninglessness with the person’s life - whether they are conscious of it or not. Freud’s rejection of spirituality is seen as his obsession of sexuality as the origin of neurosis instead of lack of purpose.
The church used to give people meaning in life. As society evolved and turned to rationality, people have had to learn to find meaning in themselves. To give themselves meaning instead of blindly listening to a religious institution. This struggle has led to an imbalance causing signs of neurosis.
Every human would do well to “know thyself”. A focus on this alone would solve most problems. Life itself becomes an adventure to explore, understand and create the self.
The path to learning about the self will require destruction of the self. This requires accepting the shadow-side of human nature and Jung considered this impossible for most. Most will be too afraid to stand alone and looking straight at the darkness of evil and ego that exists in their psyche. Only those who confront this self will be able to live with every side of themselves. That’s the truest way to know the self and give meaning to life.
“…only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures.”