Relative State

Jung’s Plural Experiences

December 26th, 2005

Carl Jung was Freud’s student and apparent successor until they parted ways intellectually. In Jung’s autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections (MDR), he recounts the period following his break with Freud, when he was thrown into a state of disorientation that lasted several years:

I lived as if under constant inner pressure. At times this became so strong that I suspected there was some psychic disturbance in myself. (MDR, p. 173)

Jung decided that since he knew nothing about where this might lead, he would do whatever occurred to him: he “consciously submitted to the impulses of the unconscious” (MDR, p. 173). He built model towns by the lake; experienced strong fantasies and wrote them down.

In order to seize hold of the fantasies, I frequently imagined a steep descent… I had the feeling that I was in the land of the dead. The atmosphere was that of the other world. Near the steep slope of a rock I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard and a beautiful young girl… The old man explained that he was Elijah, and that gave me a shock. (MDR, p. 181)

Jung also had a long-lasting inner figure called Philemon, who was a pagan with “an Egypto-Hellenic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration” (MDR, p. 182). Here he writes about the insights given him by his experiences:

Philemon and other figures of my fantasies brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, but which produce themselves and have their own life. Philemon represented a force which was not myself. In my fantasies I held conversations with him, and he said things which I had not consciously thought. For I observed clearly that it was he who spoke, not I. He said I treated thoughts as if I generated them myself, but in his view thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air, and added, “If you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people, or that you were responsible for them.” It was he who taught me psychic objectivity… I understood that there is something in me which can say things that I do not know and do not intend, things which may even be directed against me. (MDR, p. 183)

Jung’s experiences had a very large influence on the school of psychology he went on to found. I will have to write more about Jungian psychology at a later date.

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