Carl Gustav Jung

What is the Absolute? Does God exist?

Psychology reaches only the God-image in the soul, not God Himself

Reserve before the transcendentStated explicitly

Jung insists on distinguishing between the image of God in the psyche and God in Himself. As a psychologist, he says, he can speak only of the former: of numinous experience, of symbols of wholeness and of the archetype of the self, which empirically cannot be distinguished from the God-image. About the existence of a metaphysical God he declares that science can neither affirm nor deny anything. That is why Psychology and Religion presents itself as a study of psychic facts and not as an apology, and Answer to Job deals with the divine image as Western man experiences it, not with God. This methodological reserve coexists with a personal conviction: asked by the BBC in 1959 whether he believed in God, he answered that he did not need to believe, he knew.

Who am I? Is there a true self?

The self, greater than the ego, is realised over a lifetime

An evolving soulInferred from their doctrine

Jung distinguishes between the ego (Ich), the centre of consciousness and one complex among others in the psyche, and the self (Selbst), which is both the centre and the totality of the conscious and unconscious psyche. The persona, the social mask, is not the true self; the shadow and the anima or animus are parts of oneself that go unrecognised. The process of individuation consists in integrating them so as to become the individual one is, and it lasts a lifetime. Jung said this of himself at the start of his autobiography: his life was the story of a self-realisation of the unconscious. The true self is not given in advance nor reached by denying the ego: it becomes conscious in stages.

Why do we suffer?

What is not made conscious is lived outside, as fate

Ignorance of what we areStated explicitly

Jung locates the root of much psychic suffering in unconsciousness: what a person does not recognise in himself, his shadow, his complexes, his one-sidedness, acts behind his back. According to the psychological rule he formulates, when an inner situation is not made conscious, it happens outside, as fate. Neurosis, he wrote in Psychology and Religion, is always a substitute for legitimate suffering: it appears when one evades the pain that belongs to life. And in his essays on modern man he defined it as the suffering of a soul that has not found its meaning. Jung does not promise the absence of pain: he considers conscious suffering part of individuation, and what is pathological is the suffering endured without understanding it.

What happens after death?

On life after death he can only tell myths, not prove

Silence or reserveStated explicitly

Jung devoted a chapter of Memories, Dreams, Reflections to life after death, and opens it by warning that he can prove nothing: he can only tell stories, mythologise. He offers dreams, experiences of his own and the vision he had in 1944, on the brink of death after a heart attack. His psychological argument is that the psyche is not wholly subject to space and time, as synchronistic phenomena suggest, so it is not absurd to think that something of it continues. He adds that it is healthy for psychic life to have a myth about death, and that reason alone cannot provide one. In The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche he holds that death, seen from the soul, is a goal rather than an end.

How is liberation or salvation attained?

One is not enlightened by imagining light but by making the darkness conscious

Through conscious inner workStated explicitly

Jung speaks not of salvation but of individuation: the process by which a person becomes the indivisible individual he is. It is not travelled with imported techniques or luminous ideals; one does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light but by making the darkness conscious. The work consists in recognising the shadow, differentiating oneself from the social persona, entering into dialogue with the anima or animus through dreams and active imagination, and letting the self, the centre of psychic totality, manifest in symbols. It is conscious, long and often painful work, which Jung compared to the opus of the alchemists. It promises not a final state of perfection but a greater wholeness, with its opposites integrated.

Is a teacher necessary?

His own guide was Philemon, an inner figure

The teacher is withinStated explicitly

Jung asked for no disciples to follow him and advised Westerners against imitating the methods of Eastern gurus. His own decisive master was inner. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections he tells that during his confrontation with the unconscious there appeared in his fantasies Philemon, an old man with kingfisher's wings with whom he conversed and who taught him the objectivity of the psyche: that there are things in it the ego does not produce. Years later a cultivated Indian, a friend of Gandhi, told him that his guru was Shankaracharya, dead for centuries; Jung then understood that Philemon had been a guru of that kind for him. The analyst accompanies, but the true guide of individuation is the self that speaks in dreams and symbols.

Is the world real?

We know the world only as psychic image; its essence remains open

Did not address it

Jung gives no metaphysical answer to the question, and does so on purpose. As a psychologist he holds that the only thing we experience immediately is psychic reality: the world always reaches us as an image in the psyche. In Psychological Types he proposes the formula esse in anima to escape both idealism, which reduces everything to idea, and naive materialism. He does not thereby deny the outer world. In his last works, starting from synchronicity and his dialogue with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, he takes from the alchemists the notion of unus mundus: the hypothesis of a single reality of which psyche and matter would be two aspects. He presents it as conjecture, not knowledge; about what the world is in itself he keeps his reserve.

What is love?

Before the mystery of love, Jung turns to Paul: it bears all things

Love of God and neighbourStated explicitly

Jung admitted he could not say what love is. In the closing reflections of his autobiography he writes that he felt unable to find a language for its paradoxes: love, Eros, is for him a cosmogonic power, prior and superior to consciousness, of which man is not master but victim and instrument. Before that mystery, he says, nothing expresses it better than Paul's words in the first letter to the Corinthians: love bears all things, hopes all things. In his clinical writings he sets it against the will to power: where love reigns there is no will to power, and where power predominates love is lacking. Human love, with its projections, is also a field of individuation.

Are we free, or is everything determined?

The unconscious is lived as fate; making it conscious is taking it on

Destiny and responsibilityStated explicitly

Jung defends neither unlimited free will nor complete determinism. Ego-consciousness is small before the autonomous forces of the psyche: complexes and archetypes act on their own, and what is not made conscious, according to his psychological rule, happens outside as fate. Freedom, for him, grows with consciousness: integrating the shadow and unconscious contents widens the margin of choice and, at the same time, responsibility, because one can no longer blame others for what one now recognises in oneself. In his autobiography he describes his life as the self-realisation of the unconscious: something given to him which he had to take on and work through. Destiny becomes a task.

Why meditate or pray?

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes

Returning to the source of the IStated explicitly

Jung proposes no prayers and no Eastern techniques; indeed he warned Westerners against imitating yoga and Asian meditation, which in his view uproot the European from his own psychic history. His practice was different: active imagination, that is, letting the images of the unconscious emerge and conversing with them in full consciousness, attention to dreams, and the drawing of mandalas, which he himself did for years. All of this points inward: in a letter he wrote that who looks outside dreams and who looks inside awakes. His commentaries on The Secret of the Golden Flower and on Buddhist texts read those practices as paths towards the self.

Can reason know the ultimate?

We cannot leave the psyche: of the transcendent, reason can affirm nothing

Thought is limitedStated explicitly

Jung declared himself an empiricist and, in theory of knowledge, relied on Kant: everything we know reaches us through the psyche, and we cannot step outside it to check whether its images correspond to a transcendent reality. That is why reason can neither affirm nor deny anything about God, the immortal soul or ultimate meaning; metaphysical statements are, for the psychologist, psychic facts whose truth in itself remains open. At the same time Jung distrusted the hypertrophy of intellect in Western man, which cuts him off from symbols and feeling. Numinous experience has its own evidence, and he himself claimed to know, not to believe; but that knowing is not a rational demonstration.

Withdraw from the world or transform it?

The only real danger is man: change begins in the individual

The revolution is innerStated explicitly

Jung lived in the world as a physician, teacher and father, and did not preach withdrawal; but he distrusted collective solutions. In The Undiscovered Self, written in the midst of the Cold War, he argues that mass society, the totalitarian State and ideologies absorb the individual and make him irresponsible, and that the only counterweight is the self-aware individual, who recognises his own shadow instead of projecting it onto the enemy. Already in his writings on the age, such as the 1936 essay «Wotan», he had read mass movements as psychic epidemics. In 1959 he told the BBC that the only real danger that exists is man himself. The transformation of the world passes through that of each person.