The Symbolic Life, Collected Works Vol. 18
Reference
Jung, C. G. (1976) 2nd Ed. The Symbolic Life, The collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 18. Bollingen Series XX, Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J.
I The Tavistock Lectures (1935)
Lecture I
§4 “Now as to our procedure, I should like to give you first a short idea of my programme. We have two main topics to deal with, namely, on the one side
[1] the concepts concerning the structure of the unconscious mind and its contents;
[2] on the other, the methods used in the investigation of contents originating in the unconscious psychic processes. The second topic falls into three parts,
i. first, the word-association method;
ii. second, the method of dream-analysis;
iii. and third, the method of active imagination.”
§6 “It even looks to me sometimes as if psychology had not yet understood either the gigantic size of its task, or the perplexingly and distressingly complicated nature of its subject-matter: the psyche itself.”
§8 “Psychology is a science of consciousness, in the very first place. In the second place, it is the science of the products of what we call the unconscious psyche. We cannot directly explore the unconscious psyche because the unconscious is just unconscious, and we have therefore no relation to it. We can only deal with the conscious products which we suppose have originated in the field called the unconscious, …”
§9 “… consciousness without any consciousness of the ego. I know a number of cases of children eleven, twelve, and fourteen years of age, or even older, suddenly realizing “I am.””
§11 “When we say “the unconscious” we often mean to convey something by the term, but as a matter of fact we simply convey that we do not know what the unconscious is.”
§12 “It is always as if, and you should never forget that restriction.” It is in keeping with other works, for example, On the Nature of the Psyche, CW8; the title speaks for itself. Within that essay Jung talks of psychoid as an adjective not a noun when he uses the term:
§14 “Consciousness is very much the product of perception and orientation in the external world. It is probably localized in the cerebrum, which is of ectodermic origin and was probably a sense organ of the skin at the time of our remote ancestors. … Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu.2
2 [“There is nothing in the mind that was not in the senses.” Cf. Leibniz, Nou- veaux Essais sur VEntendement hurnain, Bk. II, ch. 1, sec. 2, in response to Locke. The formula was scholastic in origin; cf. Duns Scotus, Super universalibus Por- phyrii, qu. 3.]”
Underlining mine. What about imagination?
§15 “I would put it the reverse way: I would say the thing that comes first is obviously the unconscious and that consciousness really arises from an unconscious condition. In early childhood we are unconscious; the most important functions of an instinctive nature are unconscious, and consciousness is rather the product of the unconscious. … ” Underlining mine.
Jung shows/says that consciousness is a product of the senses and of the unconscious. The latter should be taken in context of his comments about Freud in paragraph 4…where he says that Freud derives the unconscious from the conscious, so he wants to differentiate that.
§16 The motif of the 'intensity of feeling'.
§18 “The important fact about consciousness is that nothing can be conscious without an ego to which it refers. … The ego is a complex datum which is constituted first of all by a general awareness of your body, …”
§20 “You can distinguish a number of functions in consciousness. They enable consciousness to become oriented in the field of ectopsychic facts and endopsychic facts. What I understand by the ectopsyche is a system of relationship between the contents of consciousness and facts and data coming in from the environment. It is a system of orientation which concerns my dealing with the external facts given to me by the function of my senses. The endopsyche, on the other hand, is a system of relationship between the contents of consciousness and postulated processes in the unconscious.
§21 ”… First of all we have sensation,6 … “
6Psychological Types (C.W., vol. 6), Definition 47.]
§22 “The next function that is distinguishable is thinking.7 … It gives a name to the thing. It adds a concept because thinking is perception and judgment. (German psychology calls it apperception.)8“
7Ibid., Def. 53.]
8Ibid., Def. 5.]
§23 “The third function you can distinguish and for which ordinary language has a term is feeling.9 … Feeling informs you through its feeling-tones of the values of things. Feeling tells you for instance whether a thing is acceptable or agreeable or not. It tells you what a thing is worth to you. On account of that phenomenon, you cannot perceive (sensation) and you cannot apperceive (Think) without having a certain feeling reaction. … Now the “dreadful” thing about feeling is that it is, like thinking, a rational10“
9Ibid., Def. 21.]
10Ibid., Def. 44.]
(Emphasis mine)
§24 “Now the fourth function.
Sensation tells us that a thing is.
Thinking tells us what that thing is,
feeling tells us what it is worth to us. …
But there is another category, and that is time. … but you get the hunch that they will rise. That is what is called intuition,11 … But you can mix up feeling and intuition easily. Therefore it is an almost artificial distinction I make here, though for practical reasons it is most important that we make such a differentiation in scientific language.”
11Ibid., Def. 35.]
(Underline and Emphasis mine)
§26 “I have tried to describe that function as well as I can, but perhaps it is not very good. I say that intuition is a sort of perception which does not go exactly by the senses, but it goes via the unconscious, and at that I leave it and say “I don't know how it works. … Actually, intuition is a very natural function, a perfectly normal thing, and it is necessary, too, because it makes up for what you cannot perceive or think or feel because it lacks reality. You see, the past is not real any more and the future is not as real as we think.”
§35 “As a rule, the inferior function does not possess the qualities of a conscious differentiated function. The conscious differentiated function can as a rule be handled by intention and by the will. If you are a real thinker, you can direct your thinking by your will, you can control your thoughts. You are not the slave of your thoughts, you can think of something else. You can say, “I can think something quite different, I can think the contrary.” But the feeling type can never do that because he cannot get rid of his thought. The thought possesses him, or rather he is possessed by thought.” Italics mine
§36 “The same law applies to each function. The inferior function is always associated with an archaic personality in ourselves; in the inferior function we are all primitives. (Participation mystique)”
§39 “Therefore the first function on that endopsychic side is memory. …”
§40 “The second endopsychic function is a more difficult problem. We are now getting into deep waters because here we are coming into darkness. I will give you the name first: the subjective components of conscious functions. … We do not like to look at the shadow- side of ourselves; therefore there are many people in our civilized society who have lost their shadow altogether, they have got rid of it. They are only two-dimensional; they have lost the third dimension, and with it they have usually lost the body. The body is a most doubtful friend because it produces things we do not like; there are too many things about the body which cannot be mentioned.”
§42 “Now we come to the third endopsychic component - I cannot say function. … And now things begin to get worse, for this is where the emotions and affects come in.
§43 “The fourth important endopsychic factor is what I call invasion. Here the shadow-side, the unconscious side, has full control so that it can break into the conscious condition. Then the conscious control is at its lowest.
Discussion
§46 “If you study emotions you will invariably find that you apply the word “emotional” when it concerns a condition that is characterized by physiological innervations. … So the difference would be this: feeling has no physical or tangible physiological manifestations, while emotion is characterized by an altered physiological condition. … and because you realize that you are getting excited, you are twice as angry as you ought to be. Then you are in a real emotion. But when you have feeling you have control.”
§54 “You can put it like that. Since intuition sometimes seems to function as if there were no space, and sometimes as if there were no time, you might say that I add a sort of fourth dimension. But one should not go too far.”
§69 “The relation between body and mind is a very difficult question. You know that the James-Lange theory says that affect is the result of physiological alteration. … It is due to our most lamentable mind that we cannot think of body and mind as one and the same thing; probably they are one thing, but we are unable to think it.” Underline mine
Footnote 17, namazu
§70 “Body and mind are the two aspects of the living being, and that is all we know.”
Lecture II
§77 ”… the unconscious. We approach it through the peculiarities of the endopsychic functions, those functions which are not under the control of the will. They are the vehicle by which unconscious contents reach the surface of consciousness.”
§78 ”… I call that class of contents the sub- conscious mind or the personal unconscious, …” (Emphasis mine)
§79 ”… They belong to mankind in general, and therefore they are of a collective nature.”
§80 ”… An archetype means a typos [imprint], a definite grouping of archaic character containing, in form as well as in meaning, mythological motifs. … From these layers derive the contents of an impersonal, mythological character, in other words, the archetypes, and I call them therefore the impersonal or collective unconscious.” (Emphasis mine)
§81 “… they “a priori categories of imagination,” as two Frenchmen, Hubert and Mauss,3 quite independently of my own work, have called them.
§84 ” Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it.“
§87 “The deepest we can reach in our exploration of the unconscious mind is the layer where man is no longer a distinct individual, but where his mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind - not the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the same. As the body has its anatomical conformity in its two eyes and two ears and one heart and so on, with only slight individual differences, so has the mind its basic conformity…. ”
§91 “When you analyse dreams or symptoms or fantasies of neurotic or normal people, you begin to penetrate the unconscious mind, and you can abolish its artificial threshold. The personal unconscious is really something very relative, and its circle can be restricted and become so much narrower that it touches zero. …”
§92 ”… If you do not recognize certain material as historical, and if you do not possess the parallels, you cannot integrate these contents into consciousness and they remain projected. The contents of the collective unconscious are not subject to any arbitrary intention and are not controllable by the will.
§93 “You are human, and wherever you are in the world you can defend yourself only by restricting your consciousness and making yourself as empty, as soulless, as possible. ”
§97 “Our particular problem from now on will be: How can we approach the dark sphere of man? As I have told you, this is done by three methods of analysis:
[1] the word-association test,
[2] dream-analysis,
[3] and the method of active imagination.”
Best q&a ever:
§113 “How can you establish whether the thing is conscious or unconscious? You simply ask people. We have no other criterion to establish whether something is conscious or unconscious.” Later on in the chapter he mentions the idea of 'relatively' unconscious…so there is a scale of sorts.
§122 “I must repeat that we cannot penetrate the unconscious empirically and then discover, for instance, the Freudian theory of the castration complex. The castration complex is a mythological idea, but it is not found as such. …”
Lecture III
Lecture IV
** §1554 “…The cooperation of the conscious reasoning with the data of the unconscious …progressively unit[ing] the opposites.”