THE FLIGHT INTO

THE UNCONSCIOUS
AN ANALYSIS OF C.G. JUNG’S
PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT
The Collected English Papers of Wolfgang Giegerich
The Collected English Papers of Wolfgang Giegerich makes the work of one
of archetypal psychology’s most brilliant theorists available in one place. A
practicing Jungian analyst and a long-time contributor to the field, Giegerich
is renowned for his dedication to the substance of Jungian thought and for his
unparalleled ability to think it through with both rigor and speculative strength.
The product of over three decades of critical reflection, Giegerich’s English
papers are collected in six volumes: The Neurosis of Psychology (Vol. I).
Technology and the Soul (Vol. 2), Soul-Violence (Vol. 3), and The Soul Always
Thinks (Vol. 4), The Flight into the Unconscious (Vol. 5), and Dreaming the
Myth Onwards (Vol. 6).

For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com/The-

Collected- English-Papers-of-Wolfgang-Giegerich/book-series/CEPWG

Titles in this series:

The Neurosis of Psychology: Primary Papers Towards a Critical Psychology
(Volume 1)
Technology and the Soul: From the Nuclear Bomb to the World Wide Web
(Volume 2)
Soul-Violence (Volume 3)
The Soul Always Thinks (Volume 4)
The Flight into the Unconscious: An Analysis of C. G. Jung’s Psychology Project
(Volume 5)
“Dreaming the Myth Onwards”: C. G. Jung on Christianity and on Hegel
(Volume 6)
 THE FLIGHT INTO
THE UNCONSCIOUS
AN ANALYSIS OF C.G. JUNG’S
PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT

COLLECTED ENGLISH PAPERS

VOLUME FIVE

WOLFGANG GIEGERICH
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 Contents

Acknowledgments .............................................................................. vii

Sources and Abbreviations .................................................................. ix

Preface ............................................................................................... xi

CHAPTER ONE: eG. Jung's Psychology Project as a Response to

the Condition of the World ............................................................. 1

***
CHAPTER TWO: Psychology as Anti-Philosophy: eG. Jung ......... 21
Method ofapproach and textual basis ......................................... 22
Paradise Lost ............................................................................... 26
Ego resistance against his thought ................................................ 31
The ego resistance as instigated by the thought itself .................... 36
Disowninghis own thought. From "I" to "it" .............................. 39
The construction of the principle of subjective certainty
and immediacy ................................................................... 45
What looks like events is performed rituals ................................... 52
Intellectual isolation and renouncement oftruth .......................... 56
Ersatz ......................................................................................... 60
The thought ofnot-thinking ...................................................... 62

CHAPTER THREE: The Disenchantment Complex. eG. Jung

and the Modern World ................................................................... 67
CHAPTER FOUR: The Rejection of the Hic. Reflections on eG.
Jung's Communion Fiasco ............................................................... 91
"Was it my failure?" ..................................................................... 92
From hic to alibi and the loss ofearth ......................................... 108
Psychological consumerism ........................................................ 117
The historical move from sensual enactment to logos and
thought and Jung's rescue ofthe sensual ........................... 122
Holding one's place within the negation and the
situation ofabsence .......................................................... 129
The communal nature ofsoul ................................................... 132

CHAPTER FIVE: The Smuggling Inherent in the Logic of the

"Psychology of the Unconscious" .................................................. 137
CHAPTER SIX: The Flight Into the Unconscious. C.G. Jung’s
Psychology Project ......................................................................... 173
I. The acquisition of the standpoint of “the unconscious” ........... 177
II. The flight into the unconscious ............................................. 199
III. Form change: Echo escapes Pan ............................................ 217
IV. “Immediate experience”: Pan’s flight from Echo .................... 230
V. Mysterium disiunctionis .......................................................... 236
VI. The logical generation of “the unconscious” ......................... 245
VII. The actual fabrication of “the unconscious” ........................ 259
CHAPTER SEVEN: Liber Novus, that is, The New Bible. A First
Analysis of C.G. Jung’s Red Book .................................................. 273
The book which is not a book ................................................... 273
Pitfalls for the superficial observer .............................................. 283
The project ............................................................................... 293
The construction of psychic objectivity ...................................... 311

***
CHAPTER EIGHT: The Opposition of ‘Individual’ and
‘Collective’—Psychology’s Basic Fault. Reflections on Today’s
Magnum Opus of the Soul ............................................................. 325
Appendix ................................................................................. 350
Postscript 2011 ......................................................................... 357
CHAPTER NINE: Closure and Setting Free or The Bottled Spirit
of Alchemy and Psychology ........................................................... 371
CHAPTER TEN: Mythic Illusory Appearance – Blindness to
Logical Form. C.G. Jung’s Faust Interpretation, for Instance ....... 405
I. The mode of artistic creation .................................................. 409
II. The topic and issues treated in Faust II ................................... 414
III. Logical form ........................................................................ 419
Index ............................................................................................... 433
 Acknowledgments

Versions of the following chapters have previously been published

elsewhere:
Chapter 2, “Psychology as Anti-Philosophy: C. G. Jung” was first
published in Spring 77 (Philosophy and Psychology), June 2007, pp.
11–51 and appears here in a slightly expanded version.
A slightly different version of Chapter 3, “The Disenchantment
Complex. C.G. Jung and the modern world,” was an invited paper
delivered at the Inaugural Regional Conference in London, July 2011,
of The International Association for Jungian Studies on “Enchantment
and Disenchantment: The Psyche in Transformation” and appeared
in print in International Journal of Jungian Studies vol. 4, no. 1, March
2012, pp. 4–20.
A considerably shorter, rudimentary oral version of Chapter 6,
“The Flight Into the Unconscious,” was presented September 2, 2000
at “An International Symposium of Archetypal Psychology” organized
by Pacifica Graduate Institute at the University of California, Santa
Barbara, and was made publicly available through audio tapes as well
as later, in 2009, in the Internet at http://www.rubedo.psc.br/artingle/
flight.htm. The present text of Chapter 6 is based on parts of several
different longer and very long versions both in German and in English
written between 1999 and 2002, presented at lecture series extending
over several semesters at the C.G. Jung Institute, Zurich as well as at
the Neresheim Seminars, and was augmented by the inclusion of a
new paradigm, the mytheme of Pan and Echo.
Chapter 7, “Liber Novus, that is, The New Bible. A First Analysis
of C.G. Jung’s Red Book” first appeared in Spring 2010, Vol. 83
(Minding the Animal Psyche), Spring 2010, pp. 361–411.
The original version of Chapter 8, “The Opposition of ‘Individual’
and ‘Collective’ – Psychology’s Basic Fault. Reflections On Today’s
Magnum Opus of the Soul” was presented orally to The Guild of
Pastoral Psychology, London, in May 1996, and published both in
Harvest. Journal for Jungian Studies vol. 42, No.2, 1996, pp. 7-27 and as
Guild of Pastoral Psychology Lecture Pamphlet No. 259, 1997, as well as
in Italian translation by Anna Accogli in l’imaginale 21, ottobre
1996, pp. 11–51.
Chapter 9, “Closure and Setting Free or The Bottled Spirit of
Alchemy and Psychology” first appeared in Spring 74 (Alchemy). A
Journal of Archetype and Culture, Spring 2006, pp. 31–62.

***

As with all the previous volumes, collaboration with the editor of

this series, Greg Mogenson, was very constructive, helpful, and
enjoyable. I wish to sincerely thank Greg for his accompanying the
genesis of this book with spirited involvement.
 Sources and Abbreviations

For frequently cited sources, the following abbreviations have

been used:

CW: Jung, C. G. Collected Works. 20 vols. Ed. Herbert Read,

Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire.
Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1957-1979. Cited by volume and, unless otherwise noted, by
paragraph number.
GW: Jung, C. G. Gesammelte Werke. Zürich and Stuttgart (Rascher)
now Olten and Freiburg i:Br: Walter-Verlag, 1958 ff. Cited
by volume and, unless otherwise noted, by paragraph number.
Letters: Jung, C. G. Letters. 2 vols. Ed. Gerhard Adler. Bollingen Series
XCV: 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975.
MDR: Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Rev. ed. Ed. Aniela
Jaffé. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage
Books, 1989. Cited by page number.
Erinnerungen: Erinnerungen Träume Gedanken von C.G. Jung.
Ed. Aniela Jaffé. Zurich and Stuttgart: Rascher Verlag, 1967.
 Preface

In everything, truth be your supreme commandment

—Motto of the Academia
Electoralis Theodoro-Palatina (1763)

Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas

—After Aristotle, Nic. Eth. 1096a

To understand Kant means to go beyond Kant

—Wilhelm Windelband, Präludien, 1883

I
n this book, a number of my essays are collected in which Jung’s
psychology project is subjected to a close reading and a radical
psychological critique. I think that C.G. Jung deserves to be taken
seriously. And from early on it has been my position that psychology
must be applied to itself and not only to patients or cultural
phenomena like myths and fairy tales. The analysis of Jung’s psychology
presented here is a psychological analysis because it is guided by my
long-term struggle for a “rigorous notion of psychology” (a psychology
that deserves its name “logos of the soul”) and relies on criteria laid
down by Jung himself. Rather than a critique from outside and in the
name of principles or values external to it, it thus is a critical analysis
of Jung’s psychology from within the heart of Jung’s psychology.
Certain basic tenets of Jung’s are being subjected to the alchemical
aqua fortis and have to show whether they are gold or not. One
essential critical question in this regard is: to what extent is Jung’s
psychology project responsive to the needs of the soul—the concrete
soul in its historical setting at his time—and derives the views it
entertains about the soul simply from how the soul in fact shows itself,
and to what extent does it conversely come to the soul with
preconceived ideas about what the soul in abstracto surely must be
and want, thus—unwittingly—following an agenda of its own. And
although the result of my analyses may in many cases appear to be
devastating, the reader will not be left empty-handed with no more
xii THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

than ruins inasmuch as this critical destruction of a theoretical

conception happens in the name of essential affirmative insights or
principles and ex negativo supports them.
Methodologically it may not be superfluous to remind the reader
that a critical analysis has a different task from works devoted to an
exegesis. My topic cannot be to explain what Jung meant, what he
intended to express with what he said. It has to be what the inner
consistency, the objective implications and consequences of his
teachings are as well as what the underlying or rather inherent driving
force is that made Jung come up with his ideas and made them so
important to him. Jungians very often make the mistake of surfing on
the waves set in motion by Jung rather than listening to the echo of his
teachings (which I believe would be the psychological approach to an
author and the way to show one’s respect). We should not make it so
easy for ourselves.
In most but not all of the following chapters I start out from a
small text by Jung and give it an extensive close and devoted reading,
so that my analyses may, as if by themselves, grow out of this textual
basis rather than being free-floating, sweeping assessments about them.
I try to exhaust the implications of any theorem, following it in all its
ramifications, because only when one fully sees what all is involved
can consciousness truly depart from views recognized to be untenable.
Each time it is not merely the particular issue, but Jung’s psychology
project as a whole that is ultimately at stake. It is, as it were,
circumambulated from the particular angle or perspective opened up
by the specific Jungian theses under discussion in each chapter.
In my critiques, I usually speak of “Jung.” But Jung the person is not
my target. The word Jung functions merely as an abbreviation or stand-
in for the body of work authored by Jung and for the ideas contained
in it. I am interested in the objective psychology of Jungian psychology
as a general way of thinking and not in the man whose name it bears
and his subjective psychology.
There are several quite different aspects to Jung’s psychology. C.G.
Jung saw himself as an empiricist. He wanted to present facts and
merely name and describe them. In his work this stance is best
represented by his Studies in Word Association, but, for example, his
The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, although a work following a
fundamentally different approach, belongs to this category, too. Jung
was also a theorist; we just have to think of his Psychological Types, which
develop a schema for differentiating (and understanding) psychological
PREFACE xiii

phenomena and processes. His Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting

Principle belongs also to Jung the scientist, combining, as it does, a
statistical experiment with fundamental theorizing.
There is yet another Jung, that Jung who, as above all Marco
Heleno Barreto1 has convincingly shown, conceived of psychology as
“something like antique philosophy,” as philosophical practical
wisdom. This Jung abhorred turning analytical psychology into a fixed
theory under which concrete phenomena would then be subsumed
and into a technique to be applied to “cases.” This Jung wanted to
really see the individual in his or her uniqueness and also to be
open to the eachness of each new moment. As therapist he faced
his patients directly, which also means to come forward in the
consulting room as the real human being that he was and to respond
to them with spontaneity and intuition out of his own living center
rather than as a professional persona. (Spontaneity here does, however,
not mean naively and simplistically. It was the spontaneous response
of a psychologically educated and aware mind, a mind that had
acquired a rich knowledge about mythology, religion, ethnology,
psychiatry, and so on.)
It also needs to be mentioned that Jung had, which is quite
unusual, a real notion of soul in contradistinction both to “psyche”
(the behavior of the organism) and to “civil man,” the “empirical
personality,” or “the ego”—soul as a reality in its own right and as
objective soul (whose “greater part is outside the body,”2 that is, outside
the human individual). Because he had really become aware of “soul”
he also had a true access to the soul depth of psychic phenomena
(myths, symbols, dreams, rituals, clinical situations, etc.) and was
capable of viewing these phenomena truly from a soul standpoint. This
is a standpoint for which “behind the impressions of the daily life—
behind the scenes—another picture looms up, covered by a thin veil
of actual facts.”3 Just consider the following passage.
I once asked the Bishop of Fribourg, in Switzerland, to send us
a man who could give a good account of the mystery of the
Mass. It was a sad failure; he could tell us nothing. He could

1
Marco Heleno Barreto, “‘It is something like antique philosophy’: Analytical
Psychology and Philosophical Practical Wisdom,” in: Spring 77 (“Philosophy &
Psychology”), Spring 2007, pp. 79–98.
2
Maior autem animae pars extra corpus est. Sendivogius, “De Sulphure” in Museum
Hermeticum, Frankfurt 1678, quoted by Jung in a letter to Karl Kerényi of 12 Juli 1951,
(Letters 2, p. 19). Cf. CW 12 §§ 396, 399, and 562.
3
C.G. Jung, The Visions Seminars, Zürich (Spring Publ.) 1976, p. 8.
xiv THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

only confess to the wonderful impression, the marvellous

mystical feeling, but he could say nothing at all as to why he
had that feeling. It was only sentiments, and we could do nothing
with it. But if you go into the history of the rite, if you try to
understand the whole structure of that rite, including all the
other rites round it, then you see it is a mystery that reaches down
into the history of the human mind ... (CW 18 § 616).

We see here the psychological instinct at work. The psychological

instinct does not merely and not so much show in the fact that Jung
rejects the ego sentiments about the rite (or evoked by it) as irrelevant
for the soul (in accordance with the “psychological difference”), but
much more and much rather in his being able to actually perceive the
living mystery in what for most other people who, like Jung, would
approach this phenomenon not as believers but with a scientific interest,
would be nothing but antiquarian curiosities, the dry dogmatic data
and scholarly results of historical and comparative religious studies.
In addition, there is yet another essential aspect. Jung also
critically reflected, and gained valuable insights into, the
methodological stance to be taken by a self-reflective “psychology
with soul.” I only mention the insight that for psychology there
can be no “Archimedean point” from which to observe psychic
phenomena, so that in this field the object to be studied is
inevitably the subject itself, a fact which ultimately requires the
construal of psychology as the discipline of interiority.
However, when Jung said,
I myself am in the grip of the same dream [as Goethe with his
Faust] and have a “main project,” which began in my eleventh
year. My life has been permeated and held together by one idea
and one goal: namely, to penetrate into the mystery of the
personality (MDR p. 206, transl. modif.),
we realize that there is also a very different Jung from the empirical
scientist, the theorizing psychologist, and the therapist who aimed
for a way of living life in the sense of a philosophical practical
wisdom—a different Jung, especially when we keep in mind that,
in connection with Goethe, Jung had elucidated a few lines before
the quoted passage that ‘main project’ actually means “opus magnum
or divinum.” An empiricist might perhaps be able to describe his
scientific goal as the wish “to penetrate into the mystery of the
personality.” But he could not describe his work as an opus divinum
PREFACE xv

and himself as being “in the grip of a dream,” the same dream that
Jung believed to see expressed in Faust. Jung’s ‘main project’ as opus
divinum circles around such questions as those of Meaning, the Self
and the nature of God, the ultimate significance of the individual, and
the inner process, telos, and goal of life.
In contrast to the divers aspects just listed by me before this
last one, in contrast, furthermore, to the numerous interests and
topics displayed in his publications, Jung viewed his entire
psychology, his life’s work as a whole, as held together by this one
dream and tried to present it especially as the outgrowth of the
early experiences that he recorded in the Red Book. “It all began
then; the later details are only supplements and clarifications of
the material that burst forth from the unconscious.” “The first
imaginings and dreams were like fiery, molten basalt, from which
the stone crystallized, upon which I could work” (Erinnerungen p.
203, my transl.). We do not have to agree with this thesis. There
are, after all, those other aspects of his work that cannot be viewed
as seamlessly stemming from those early experiences. But, be that
as it may, the “main project” that Jung in the cited sense saw as
the deep inner unity of his work, regardless of whether it began in
his eleventh year or originated in those later experiences during the
time of World War I, this (and only this) is what I mean by his
“psychology project” and what I critically analyze and circumambulate
from different starting points in the following essays.
When I planned this volume it contained seven more essays,
essays on Jung’s religious thinking, especially concerning
Christianity, and on Jung and Hegel. Since the inclusion of these
essays would have exploded the size of this book, they will have to
wait for another time. A few essays published previously in my The
Neurosis of Psychology and The Soul Always Thinks, vols. 1 and 4 of
my Collected English Papers, New Orleans, LA (Spring Journal
Books) 2005 or 2010, respectively, could as far as their content is
concerned have been included in the present volume, above all “The
End of Meaning and the Birth of Man,” but also “Jung’s Thought of
the Self in the Light of Its Underlying Experiences,”
“Irrelevantification,” and “Is the Soul ‘Deep’?”
The present volume begins with a chapter that tries to assess
Jung’s psychology project as a whole. Chapters two to six give an
in-depth psychological reading of autobiographical reports by Jung
xvi THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

in chronological sequence, each about one particular inner

experience that he had as a boy or young man, respectively, and
use these stories each time as a lens through which to gain a deeper
insight into the psychology of Jung’s fundamental, unnegotiable
concerns as a psychological theoretician. Chapter seven, a critical
review of his Red Book, concludes the series of papers devoted to
or starting out from Jung’s inner experiences. The remaining three
chapters delve directly into fundamental theoretical issues raised
by Jung’s psychology.

Berlin, April 2011 Wolfgang Giegerich

 CHAPTER ONE

C.G. Jung’s Psychology Project as a

Response to the Condition
of the World

E
very commemoration event in honor of a great mind1 is an
invitation to reflect anew about what his lifework is all about.
This is all the more true when, as today, we celebrate both
the anniversary of C.G. Jung’s death and the sixtieth year of the Institute
named after him. With the phrase “what his lifework is all about” I
allude to Jung’s comment in a letter of 1960 where he laments that
“Being well-known not to say ‘famous’ means little when one realizes
that those who mouth my name have fundamentally no idea of what
it’s all about.”2 In the following I want to present my attempt at working
out what Jung’s psychology project was all about.
But first I have to savor the wording of “what it’s all about.” It?
The word “it” is used absolutely; it has no referent; in other words,
Jung does not say people have no idea what his work or his psychology
is about. His phrase rather means something much more existential,
like “what is at stake?,” “what is the enormous problem that we today
are confronted with?,” the problem that Jung believes to have struggled
with and to which his psychology was his response. Jung is here not
speaking as a scientist. A scientist, such as, for example, Ignaz

1
This is the text of a lecture presented at the “C.G. Jung-Gedenktag” of the Jung
Institute Zürich at ETH Zürich June 6, 2008.
2
Letters 2, p. 530, 1 Jan 1960, to Prof. Eugen Böhler.
2 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

Semmelweis or Alfred Wegener, might suffer from the fact that his
discoveries are not accepted and he himself is maybe treated as a
crackpot. But in such a case he would never say that his colleagues
or the general public have no idea of “what it’s all about,” because
what is not accepted is merely specific scientific hypotheses. It is
true, Jung, too, felt “misunderstood or completely ignored,”3 but
this lack of recognition concerned the question “why there are no
men in our epoch who could see at least what I was wrestling with.”4
What he was wrestling with was, as he said, a “world problem,”
the problem of “an entire world.”5 “The great problem of our time
is that we don’t understand what is happening to the world.” 6
Earlier Jung had stated in a lecture, “My problem is to wrestle with
the big monster of the historical past, the great burden of the human
mind, the problem of Christianity” (CW 18 § 279). These quotations
show how totally different the dimensionality of his concern was,
compared with both scientific and consulting room ones.
During the last few years the whole world has also become upset
about a problem of the “entire world,” namely the problem of
global warming. But when Jung says, “The great problem of our
time is that we don’t understand what is happening to the world”
he lets us know that he has something very different in mind. First
of all the problem Jung sees is precisely not a popular one that makes
headlines. It remains unseen and not understood, indeed—so Jung
felt—suppressed out of fear. 7 Secondly, the nature of the problem
of our time, as envisioned by Jung, is not such that it could be
approached with clear-cut technical and political measures. And
thirdly, the world to which global warming is happening is
obviously worlds apart from that world that is referred to in the
cited statement about our lack of understanding what is happening
to the world. This takes me to my first topic of this talk: Which
“world” are we talking about when we try to describe C.G. Jung’s
psychology project as a response to the condition of the world?

3
Letters 2, p. 589, 2 Sep 1960, to Sir Herbert Read.
4
Letters 2, p. 586, 2 Sep 1960, to Sir Herbert Read.
5
MDR p. 132.
6
Letters 2, p. 590, 2 Sep 1960, to Sir Herbert Read.
7
Jung surmised “that my books expect a human understanding of which the
intellectual world or the world of intellect is afraid, although I can easily understand
why that is so.” Letters 2, pp. 497f., 12 April 1959, to Werner Bruecher.
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT 3

There are many notions of world, and at least two very different
ones even in Jung’s own thinking.
These two notions of world and the ensuing danger of
equivocation can be seen from the very passage from which the motto
for the present anniversary events is taken, Jung’s dictum, “‘Zuunterst’
ist [...] Psyche überhaupt ‘Welt’” (GW 9/I § 291). The Collected Works
translate: “[...] ‘at bottom’ the psyche is simply ‘world.’” In this
translation some nuances are lost. “At bottom” is usually
understood as something like “in reality,” “in essence,” “in the last
analysis.” But “zuunterst” clearly expresses a spatial fantasy, a literal
lowness. It evokes the idea of several layers and points to the very
lowest of them, something like a sub-basement. A few lines earlier
Jung had himself expressly spoken of “[t]he deeper ‘layers’ of the
psyche” and said of them that they “lose their individual
uniqueness” the deeper one gets. “‘Lower down’ [...] they become
increasingly collective until they are universalized and extinguished
in the body’s materiality, i.e., in chemical substances. The body’s
carbon is simply carbon.” The immediately following sentence is
our motto, and it draws the conclusion from the foregoing
reflection: “Hence ‘at its lowest level’ psyche is simply ‘world.’”
The sense of “world” here is that of the physical universe,
“chemistry,” “carbon.” Jung entertains here a naturalistic fantasy.
Now it is astounding how Jung continues. “In this sense I hold
Kerényi to be absolutely right when he says that in the symbol the
world itself is speaking.” Here Jung does not seem to see that in his
own comments and in the idea by Kerényi he refers to, two
incompatible concepts of “world” clash. When Kerényi says8 that “In
the image of the primordial child the world speaks of its own
childhood,” and, furthermore, when for him the rising sun, the human
newborn, and the mythological child are all equally symbols, he
certainly does not have the world as chemical substances in mind.
Carbon does not speak. The world that speaks, and that, according to
Kerényi’s example speaks in the symbol of the primordial child about
its, the world’s, childhood, is the perceived and experienced world,

8
Karl Kerényi, “Das Urkind,” formerly as “Das Urkind in der Urzeit” in C.G. Jung
and Karl Kerényi, Das göttliche Kind, Albae Vigiliae IV/VII (Amsterdam-Leipzig 1940),
now Karl Kerény, Humanistische Seelenforschung, München and Wien (Albert Langen,
Georg Müller) 1966, pp. 68–115, here p. 93.
4 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

the world of human beings. It presupposes a highly developed awake

mind capable of perceiving symbolically, and certainly also a deep
mind, but deep as poetry or thought may be deep, not deep in the
sense of the lowest layers of the psyche where psyche is “extinguished
in the body’s materiality.”
Jung’s layer fantasy operates with the notion of a continuum from
chemistry or physiology to fully attained consciousness, from archaic
undifferentiatedness to modern abstraction and differentiation, from
the collective and universal and unconscious9 to conscious uniqueness
and individuality. The world-relation that the symbol has for the Jung
of our passage, too, is derived by him from the psyche’s own lower,
archaic levels, ultimately from the fact that, as he says, “the human
body, too, is built of the stuff of the world” (§ 290, my emphasis).
That is to say, the psyche’s world-connection does not come about
through its outward openness to the world. It comes about through
the internal makeup of the psyche, its sharing its material base with
the outer world. 10 Kerényi, by contrast, is thinking in terms of an
encounter or dialogue between the visible world and soul. For him, the
world itself, for example a sunrise, speaks the language of symbols
because it speaks to a mind, whereas for Jung here, symbols are
naturalistically a kind of outgrowth of the psyche all by itself, from
out of its inner rootedness in physis—man so to speak as the mouthpiece
of carbon. We can say that such a psyche may materially be world,
but it has no world, is worldless.
It would be a mistake to pin Jung down to this view. In fact, Jung
harbors two Jung’s within his breast, a naturalistic, scientific one, for
whom the psyche’s world-connection comes about through its
biochemical roots, and a truly psychological one, who explicitly warded
off the naturalistic, biologistic conception of the soul, for example by
saying that “the human soul is precisely neither a psychiatric nor a
physiological problem, nor a biological problem in a general sense,

9
The term unconscious is not in our passage, but is clearly implied.
10
This line of thinking leads directly to Jung’s late speculations about a psychoid
unconscious.
11
Cf. also: Psychology “is something broadly human, [...]. Nor, again, is it merely
instinctual or biological. If it were, it could very well be just a chapter in a text-book of
biology. It has an immensely important social and cultural aspect [...]” (CW 16 § 52).
“Psychology, however, is neither biology nor physiology nor any other science than just
the knowledge of the soul” (CW 9i § 63, transl. modif.).
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT 5

but a psychological one. It is a field of its own with its own peculiar
laws. One cannot derive the nature of the soul from the principles of
other sciences [...]. The phenomenology of the soul is therefore not
limited to facts accessible to natural-scientific methods, but also
encompasses the problem of the human mind, which is the father of
all science” (CW 16 § 22, transl. modif.).11 For this latter Jung, the
world is not speaking all the more in a symbol, the more physiological
or “material” the symbol is. No, for him as for Kerényi, it is the world
that is speaking in a symbol because “[t]he psyche mirrors Being as
such and knows it...” (GW 16 § 203, my transl.). Mirroring, reflection,
knowing. There is an interplay between psyche and world and thus a
duality. This duality comes to a head in what one might call Jung’s
ontological thesis: “The existence of the world has two conditions12:
the one its being, the other its being known” (CW 16 § 201, trans.
modif.), a thesis that Jung explains by saying “that without a reflecting
psyche the world would be virtually nonexistent, and that, in
consequence, consciousness is a second creator of the world.”13 Whereas
before we had the idea of a continuum from the materiality of the body
to the most abstract, rationalistic consciousness, now we have the idea
of two absolutely irreducible sources of the world in an intricate
paradoxical (if not dialectical) relation to each other. For as the second
creator of the world, the psyche is not merely a passive mirror for what
is given, not merely receptive and completely determined by what there
is; it is also active, spontaneous, free. But its freedom is also not an
abstract freedom. Being only the second creator, psyche is in turn
dependent on the other irreducible source. This theory is in a way
reminiscent of Kant’s elaborate philosophical argument of theoretical
freedom, according to which what is given by the senses can only be
given to a consciousness in the first place on the basis of a spontaneous
productive a priori synthesis performed by the imagination.14
This view of the relation of psyche and world also makes impossible
that monistic naturalistic idea of the relation between body and soul
that we found expressed in our motto, “Hence ‘at its lowest level’
psyche is simply ‘world.’” In a letter Jung pointed out
12
“Conditions” in the sense of “prerequisites.”
13
Letters 2, p. 487, 12 Feb 1959, to Pastor Tanner (transl. modif.).
14
This topic has recently received an excellent detailed examination by Reinhard
Loock, Schwebende Einbildungskraft. Konzeption theoretischer Freiheit in der Philosophie
Kants, Fichtes und Schellings, Würzburg (Königshausen & Neumann: 2007).
6 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

the peculiar fact that on the one hand consciousness has so

exceedingly little direct information of the body from within,
and that on the other hand the unconscious (i.e., dreams and
other products from the “unconscious”) refers very rarely to the
body and, if it does, it is always in the most roundabout way,
i.e., through highly “symbolized” images. For a long time I have
considered this fact as negative evidence for the existence of a
subtle body or at least for a curious gap between mind and body.
Of a psyche dwelling in its own body one should expect at least
that it would be immediately and thoroughly informed of any
change of conditions therein. Its not being the case demands
some explanation.15
There is a fundamental gap between body and mind. Body and psyche
are really separate. That Jung finds here this fact “peculiar” and
“curious,” that he thinks “one should expect” that a psyche dwelling
in its own body would be immediately informed about that body’s
conditions, is due to the fact that in this passage it is again the
naturalistic Jung who is speaking. But what he is telling us amounts
to the truth of the psychological Jung; it is his admission that the
naturalistic presupposition is not born out by the facts.
Yes, the psyche dwells in its own body, and yet there is this gap.
This gap is not merely a simple caesura. It is more. It has the nature
of a reversal. In animals, 16 their instinctual impulses go
uninterruptedly and immediately over into their behavior. In man this
immediacy and oneness has been radically burst asunder so that he
was catapulted from out of his body, indeed from out of himself, and
has a priori his place, as a veritable expatriate, in what we call mind or
soul. As psyche and conscious being, man is inevitably in the status
of ek-sistence (Heidegger). It is for this reason that he is primarily
“informed,” and determined in his actions and decisions, from
“outside” and “above.” In ancient times, in order to orient himself in
the world he looked up to gods and down to the dead, to the ancestors;
to gain guidance he turned away from himself to observe the flight of
birds, to analyze the intestines of animals or the cracks produced by a
heated bronze rod in a tortoise shell; he threw yarrow stalks and

15
Letters 2, p. 44 (to Smythies, 29 February 1952).
16
Animals are of course themselves no longer strictly identical with their material
substrate, but divided from it by another, “earlier” “gap.” But this is another topic.
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT 7

consulted the I Ching; in cases of illness he had to ask a shaman, just

as we today need to consult others, doctors, when we feel sick; we turn
to science when we encounter technical or theoretical problems; we
institute committees to come up with solutions, and we move through
the world with the help of GPS. We humans get our knowledge even
about our own bodies not from within ourselves, but conversely by
looking fundamentally from outside in, through dissecting corpses,
through X-rays or, more recently, magnetic resonance imaging. True,
we also speak of gut reactions, but we know that this is a metaphor
and that these reactions do by no means come from our literal guts;
they come from sunken ideas or prejudices.
As this expulsion from body and self, the gap between body and
psyche does not have the nature of a literal “space between.” Rather,
it has the nature of a logical negation of the biological basis of human
existence and thus of a pushing off from it, which is also why the
alchemists, concerning the soul-process, spoke directly of the opus
contra naturam, the work against nature. The indispensability of this
logical negation can even be demonstrated empirically. I mention one
small example from the most primitive stage of the development in
early childhood of the human ability to think symbolically. Up to the
age of 18 months, when shown pictures of things babies manipulate
the paper, trying to grasp the object depicted. After this age, they are
generally able to understand the difference between the picture as an
object in its own right and the object depicted. But, as experiments
have shown, sometimes even up to the age of 4, children fear that if a
picture of a bowl of popcorn is turned upside down, the popcorn would
fall out. It has been suggested that the advancement to the capacity
to think symbolically is mainly due to the development of inhibitory
control supported by changes in the frontal cortex. Children slowly
learn to restrain their natural impulse to interact directly with an image.
Through curbing their impulses, they become capable of simply
looking, and only when they can simply look at the depicted object
has an image become image for them, whereas before it was confused
with its referent.
This observation may throw a tiny light on my view that the gap
between body and psyche is not a “space between,” but that it rather
owes its existence to the (spontaneously happening) execution of a
8 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

logical act, the act of negation, which on the empirical behavioral level
shows itself as inhibition, restraint. At the same time, this observation
may also be a help for understanding that the move from natural
existence to ek-sistence in the mind or soul is not like leaving one room to
enter another already existing one, a transcendent realm of the mind high
above the natural. There is not a literal move from here to there. All
there is, is a move contra naturam, the move, to say it with the
present example, of an inhibitory control of the natural impulse to
directly grasp the object out there, while, however, still dwelling with it
(rather than simply deserting it in favor of some other concern). And ipso
facto there is now a “mere” looking at or contemplating the image-as-the-
sublated-object, a “free” entertaining the image in the mind. The
mind as the sphere of images, ideas, and concepts that are
exclusively its, the mind’s, own property, only comes into being at all
through this negation of the natural while nevertheless dwelling with it.
The union of “inhibition/negation” and “dwelling with the negated”
amounts of course to a contradiction. But because of this
contradiction, the sublated world of images comes into being only
within the natural world and thus its transcending the natural world
also only transcends without literally transcending and leaving it.
After these reflections, I now return to our main topic. When in
what follows I want to describe C.G. Jung’s psychology project as a
response to the condition in which the world found itself at his time, I
mean that world whose existence depends on two sources, its being and
its being known. I mean the world of man that is perceived and
experienced and that speaks—speaks not only through literal symbols,
but also through and in all the diverse human responses given to it.
Only this is world sensu strictiori, whereas to the extent that we are biological
organisms we do not have a world, do not live in a world at all, but in
the environment. Only this world can be meant in Jung’s statement,
“The great problem of our time is that we don’t understand what is
happening to the world.”
What was it that Jung saw as happening to the world? What
was the condition of the world to which Jung’s psychology project
was an answer?
The following well-known statement by Gotthold Ephraim
Lessing comes from the second half of the 18th century. “If God held
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT 9

enclosed within his right hand all truth, and within his left hand
nothing but the ever active striving for truth, although combined with
the provision that I would err forever, and would say to me: choose!,
I would with humility fall into his left hand and say: Father, give! Pure
truth is, after all, only for you alone!”17 One can admire the courage
as well as humility with which Lessing decided for a permanent (but
necessarily failing) seeking. It sounds incredible: he turned down an
explicit offer of the truth, all truth. But on second thought his
statement is not all that radical. For although Lessing exposes himself
to an endless search that on principle cannot reach its goal, he knows
that truth itself is not disputed. Even with his very opting for endless
error, he will nevertheless stay contained in one of God’s hands,
inasmuch as the very act of his choosing was his throwing himself into
it. God, the guarantor of truth as such, remains; and he remains Father.
Goethe’s Faust at one point says that he feels the upsurge of an impulse
to venture forth to the open sea of life, to struggle with its storms,
and, even in case of shipwreck, not to quail. There is of course a
fundamental difference whether such a proclamation of courage
happens while one is firmly standing on dry land or while one is already
holding on to the planks of a vessel being shipwrecked. With all his
unending erring, Lessing is and stays, as it were, on solid ground. His
endless search happens within an ultimate unshaken and
unquestionable certainty.
What Lessing said boils down to no more than an avoidance of
the deadly sin of superbia or hubris, an expression and active
affirmation of his awareness of the difference between the infinite
mind of God and the finite nature of man. Pure truth is only for
God alone, whereas man can never come into the possession of
truth, can on earth never explicitly reach the goal, but this goal,
truth, the absolute, nevertheless already exists even for him, too,
namely in his God, his Father, his own beginning and end.
What we can learn from this is that there are two fundamentally
different levels on which to speak about truth. The one we could call
the semantic level, the other the syntactical level. On the semantic or
content level, Lessing renounces the achievability of truth, but on the
syntactical level the same Lessing is grounded in truth. Now it is very

17
From: Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Eine Duplik (1778), my transl.
10 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

important to understand that psychology, at least psychology in the

tradition and sense of Jung, is only concerned with the syntactical level.
Whether somebody says he believes in God or declares himself to be
an atheist is psychologically neither here nor there, because it is only
the opinion and subjective conviction or feeling of the ego-personality,
a content of consciousness. Psychology begins—in the area of the God-
question—when we are interested in whether, regardless of what we
explicitly think, God has in fact a place in the hidden, but objective
logic of consciousness, in the syntax of actually lived life, in what Hegel
termed the “faith of the world,” or, expressed in mythological parlance,
in the depth of the soul.
On the basis of these clarifications we can recognize that there has
been a fundamental historical change precisely on the level of the syntax
of the world and thus a change that is indeed psychologically relevant.
Up to and through the 18th century, and even into the beginning of
the 19 th century, human existence in the West had always
unquestionably been grounded in and encompassed by a metaphysical
ground, the traditional name for which was God, so that for all these
times Jung could rightly use the old Church phrase quod semper, quod
ubique, quod ab omnibus creditur18 to refer to the universally shared and
continuous underlying “faith of the world” or “logic of the soul.” To
be sure, the particularities of this containing syntax may have changed
over the centuries, but not its basic structure. And to be sure, there
was for example Descartes, who insisted that there had to be systematic
doubt of everything; and there were the thinkers of the Enlightenment
with their radical criticism of all sorts of traditional beliefs and church
dogmas, even of the Church itself, and occasionally even of the very
notion of God. But in all these cases the prevailing structural
relation between surface and ground was the same as the one we
found at work in our Lessing passage: all this doubt, skepticism,
and criticism occurred only on an “upper” semantic, explicit level. But
underneath, on the level of the syntax of consciousness and undisturbed
by whatever heterodox and subversive teachings, the old truth
prevailed. The image of Voltaire, who during his lifetime was a cynical
critic of the Church, but on his deathbed asked for its blessings, may
serve as a visual aid.

18
“What is believed always, everywhere, by all.” Vincent of Lérins, Commonitorium 2.
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT 11

In the 19th century, within very few years after the Napoleonic
wars, with the entrance into modernity, with the revolutionary shift
from the traditional handicraft way of production to the industrial
mode of production, there had been a groundshaking change. More
than that. The ground in which human existence had psychologically
been rooted since time immemorial had not merely become a new,
different ground. Such a thing as “ground” had in the depth of the
soul simply disappeared. The faith of the world had dissolved. Quod
semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditur objectively did not carry
human existence any more, it had become historical, a Theologie der
Vorzeit and Philosophie der Vorzeit (the theology and philosophy of
former ages), as Josef Kleutgen (1811–1883) put it, even if on the
semantic level of ego convictions many people, just as Kleutgen, may
have tried to hold on to it or resurrect it. The logic of the ground that
for Hegel and Schelling was still intact simply no longer existed for
the generation of Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, the late Romantics, Edgar
Allan Poe, Stendhal, Baudelaire, and all the later decades. Where there
had been a ground, there now gaped an Abgrund, abyss. But even Hegel
had already at his time only been able to once more make sure of the
absolute by going the way of Verzweiflung (despair) to its very end,
rather than, like Descartes, merely having to confront himself with
Zweifel (doubt). And Jean Paul, too, another writer prior to this radical
shift, had nevertheless already been driven to fantasize his “Address
by Dead Christ Down from the Vault of Heaven that there is No God.”
In Kierkegaard one can see how the relation to God, once the self-
evident ground backing up existence, had become a utopian project,
the demand for a ‘leap’ on the part of the isolated individual, a leap
across an unbridgeable gap. And by the time of Nietzsche the “true
world” had changed into a “fable.” Truth itself had turned into that
kind of error without which a certain species of living beings could
not live. And Nietzsche was also able, as we all know, to express the
prevailing modern truth about God in the catch-phrase “God is dead,”
notabene that same God that still a century earlier for Lessing had
been the guarantor of pure truth.
This is the condition of the world into which C.G. Jung, himself
an avid reader of Nietzsche, was born. And he not only factually lived
in the truth of his age, as all people inevitably do, but like other great,
12 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

exceptional minds he was also open to it, was reached by it and himself
reached with his soul’s root-fibers into the truth of the collective
situation. That he was special, destined to become a great psychologist,
shows particularly in the fact that as early as age eleven or twelve, in
other words, at a time when his own conscious awareness was first
awakening, he was already troubled by the collective soul truth of his
age, and this, mind you, not via intellectual influences, but
spontaneously, all by himself, out of his own intuition. The event I
have in mind happened on a beautiful summer day. Jung was standing
on the cathedral square of Basel and was overwhelmed by the beauty
of the sight and he thought, “The world is beautiful and the church
is beautiful, and God made all this and sits above it far away in the
blue sky on a golden throne ....” But then, to his utter horror, the
thought continued with the idea that “from under the throne an
enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof [of the cathedral],
shatters it and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder.” Although,
in his subjective interpretation of this his thought experience on the
ego level, Jung managed to evade its message by changing the subject,19
objectively he had been reached by it in the depth of his soul. He now
knew, deep down, that the church and by implication the substance
of traditional Christian faith (and by extension metaphysical meaning
at large) have once and for all been smashed. He knew that the original
beauty of God’s world has been defiled, and that the very idea of God
in his majesty has been laid open to ridicule by His being turned into
a shitting God and his throne into a toilet seat. The destruction had
irrevocably happened for Jung and had been felt. A collective truth had
come home to the boy Jung as his personal knowledge. Psychologically
the experienced irrefutable loss was the basis for everything that Jung
would think and produce even in his mature years.
Jung as the author of his writings and the founder of his psychology
had made the insight into the loss of all mythic, religious, metaphysical
meaning his own and had accepted and integrated it as his baseline.

19
Instead of allowing the message of this spontaneous thought to come home to
him, Jung got worked up about the alleged sinfulness of this thought and speculated
that it must have been God’s will that he, Jung, think a sinful thought against his own
will, thus reinstituting God in his former majesty, that very God the discrediting of whom
was the telos of his thought experience. I discussed this episode at length in my “Psychology
as Anti-Philosophy: C.G. Jung,” in: Spring 77, 2007, pp. 11–51, now Chapter 2 of the
present volume, as well as “The Disenchantment Complex,” Chapter 3.
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT 13

To what extent he had made it his own can be seen from his diagnostic
description of the inner situation of his time: “[...] the stars have fallen
from heaven and our highest symbols have paled [...].” “Heaven has
become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine
empyrean a fair memory of things that once were” (CW 9/I § 50).
“We all know how, in large things as in small, in general as well as in
particular, piece after piece collapsed, and how the alarming poverty
of symbols that is now the condition of our life came about” (§ 23).
The consequence is that modern man “is cast out into a state of
defencelessness that might well make the natural man shudder” (§
24). “[B]efore him there yawns the void [the Nichts of nihilism], and
he turns away from it in horror” (§ 28). “[O]ur spiritual house has
fallen apart” (§ 31, modif.). Today “we stand empty-handed,
bewildered, and perplexed [...]” (MDR p. 332). “There are no longer
any gods whom we could invoke [...]” (CW 18 § 598). “No, evidently
we no longer have any myth” (MDR p. 171). “Our myth [i.e.,
Christianity] has become mute, and gives no answers” (MDR p. 332).
Modern man dwells with himself alone, “where, in the cold light of
consciousness, the blank barrenness of the world reaches to the very
stars” (CW 9i § 29, modif.).
It would be a great mistake to hear these diagnoses as subjective
lamentations in the spirit of cultural criticism and pessimism. Then
the point Jung wants to make would be entirely missed. No doubt,
he views this our situation as highly precarious, as an emergency
situation. But this does not mean that he would see it as a mistake, a
faulty development, and something to be corrected by a return to or
revival of a former state. On the contrary, unambigously rejecting all
such revival attempts and unmasking the popular borrowing of “ready-
made symbols grown on foreign soil” (from India, for example) as
“mummeries,” he states, “A man does not sink down to beggary only
to pose afterwards as an Indian potentate. It seems to me that it would
be far better stoutly to avow our spiritual poverty, our symbol-lessness,
instead of feigning a legacy to which we are not the legitimate heirs at
all” (CW 9i § 27f.). We are naked. Really poor. And this absolute
poverty needs to be relentlessly embraced. No false compromises, and
no consolation. “Just as in Christianity the vow of worldly poverty
turned the mind away from the riches of this earth, so spiritual poverty
seeks to renounce the false riches of the spirit [...]” (§ 29), riches that
14 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

are false because “we have squandered our heritage.” Jung is very clear
about this: “We cannot turn the wheel backwards, [...] you cannot go
back” (CW 18 § 632). Jung rejects any repristination.
Now we have arrived at what Jung was “wrestling with.” This is
the situation to which his psychology project wishes to respond. Now
it remains for us to see “what it’s all about,” “it” here meaning his
answer, his psychology.
If there is no way back, then we can only move forward. Jung wants
us to “sew our garment ourselves” (CW 9i § 27). But the situation of
spiritual poverty is for him more than the call for something like a
spiritual analogue to a post-war reconstruction, where one also has to
begin from point zero, in the sense of “life has to go on.” In Jung’s so
negative-sounding description there is all of a sudden a surprising turn:
“I am convinced that the growing impoverishment of symbols has a
meaning” (CW 9i § 28)! The loss and lack are not merely something
that we have to make our peace with because they happen to be our
inescapable fate. The loss and lack have a meaning, that is, they are
productive, they amount to an advance. This evaluation or the decision
not to condemn the modern situation is Jung’s very own response to
the condition of his time. Jung lets himself truly in for the experience
of loss, “truly” that means logically, not merely emotionally.
The question that arises for us is: what is this postulated meaning
of the impoverishment of symbols? In order to get some basis for this
question, let us listen to some of Jung’s pertinent statements. Reflecting
on what he had discussed so far in a lecture he said,
[...] everything I have observed lies in the soul; everything, so to
speak, on the side of the inner. I must, however, add at once that
this is something peculiar, inasmuch as the soul is not always
and everywhere on the inside. There are peoples and epochs
where it is outside, peoples and epochs that are unpsychological,
as, for example, all ancient cultures, and among them especially
Egypt with its magnificent objectivity and its just as magnificent,
naïve, negative confession of sins. Behind the spirit of the Apis
tombs of Saqqara and the Pyramids we cannot possibly imagine
psychological issues, no more than behind the music of Bach.
Whenever there exists externally a conceptual or ritual form in
which all the yearnings and hopes of the soul are absorbed and
expressed, that is, for example, a living religion, then the soul is
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT 15

outside and there is no soul problem, just as there is then no

unconscious in our sense. It was therefore logical that the
discovery of psychology took exclusively place during the last
decades, although former centuries possessed enough
introspection and intelligence to gain knowledge about
psychological facts. [...] The reason for this is that there existed
no compelling predicament. [...] It needed the spiritual
predicament of our time to force us to discover psychology.
[...] But as soon as he [man] outgrows the periphery of his
Western local religion, that is, when his form of religion can no
longer contain his life in all its fullness, then the soul begins to
become a factor which can no longer be dealt with by the
ordinary means. It is for this reason that we today have a
psychology that relies on empirical facts and not on articles of
faith or philosophical postulates, and at the same time I see in
the fact that we have a psychology a symptom that proves the
profound convulsions of the general soul. [...] Only in this
situation, in this predicament, do we discover the soul [...]
[...] But no culture before ours felt compelled to take this psychic
background as such seriously. [...] This distinguishes our time
from all earlier ones (CW 10 §§ 158–161, translation modified).
“Dogma takes the place of [ersetzt] the collective unconscious by
formulating its contents on a grand scale.” (CW 9i § 21). Dogma is a
substitute for the real thing. It is the latter’s tamed, domesticated
[gebändigt], that is, already civilized version. “The collective
unconscious, the way we know it today, has never been psychological
at all [...]. [...] Always the figures of the unconscious were expressed
in protecting and healing images and in this way were expelled into
cosmic, extra-psychic space” (ibid., transl. modif.)
Another time when Jung had discussed at length our spiritual
poverty, he said that
This precarious situation [Problematik] is new, because all ages
before us still believed in gods in some form or other. It required
an unparalleled impoverishment of symbolism to bring about
the rediscovery of the gods as psychic factors, that is, as archetypes
of the unconscious. [...] This is why we have a psychology today,
and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be quite
superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols (CW 9i
§ 50, transl. modif.).
16 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

And again:
Why is psychology the very youngest of the empirical sciences?
Why was the unconscious not discovered long ago and its
treasure-house of eternal images not raised up? Simply because
we had a religious formula for everything psychic—and one that
is far more beautiful and comprehensive than immediate
experience (CW 9i § 11, transl. modif.).
We could say that these cited passages give us Jung’s philosophy of
history. There is an absolute rupture in history, a fundamental crisis
in the singular. This crisis separates “all ages before us” from us and
our time. The situation we find ourselves in is absolutely unparalleled.
Despite all the enormous changes and differences between all the ages
before this rupture, they all had nevertheless one fundamental thing
in common: the possession of some kind of conceptual or ritual form
or religious symbolism, that is, the same syntax of consciousness or
logic of the world, at least on the macro-level.
The symbolism that they had is ambivalent in Jung’s view. On
the one hand, it is incomparably beautiful and comprehensive, superior
to what we can achieve. On the other hand, it is something already
civilized, cultured, an always already processed form and thus
traditional. As such it shielded the people of all these previous ages
from immediate experience. This is its drawback. The culturally
expressed forms are, as it were, a refined cultural surrogate for the real
thing, raw psychic reality. It thus in a way functions like a lightning
rod. It takes care of all the soul’s deepest needs without threatening
us directly with them.
The historical rupture is ambivalent, too. By robbing us of such
a cultural vessel and thereby pulling the floor out from under us, it is,
no doubt, a terrible danger. Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.20 “[T]hen things
become terrible.... You are alone and you are confronted with all the
demons of hell” (CW 18 § 632). We are helplessly exposed to impulses
that we do not understand and accordingly we have no established
means and categories for dealing with them. It is a pathological
situation. But precisely by removing the blanket of culturally
established symbolic forms, the loss of symbols also amounts to a

20
See Cyprianus, Epistulae 73,21,2.
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT 17

freeing. It provides an opening to Urerfahrung, primordial or immediate

experience, to psychic reality disclosed, without any protective cover
and secondary processing. Where all previous ages only experienced
gods handed down through cultural tradition, we today, this is Jung’s
view, are confronted with archetypes directly and in retrospect can even
comprehend the former gods as archetypes, however as archetypes only
in already shielded and secondarily processed form.
And what we can experience is again ambivalent. It is far less
beautiful and comprehensive than myth, traditional symbolism,
religious dogma. It is usually fragmented, primitive, raw. But all these
disadvantages are offset by the singular and precious gift of immediacy,
the direct access to and confrontation with the unconscious. This,
immediacy, directness, is the singular distinction and chance of our time.
And this is also the meaning of the impoverishment of symbols.
“Psychology” in its highest sense is for Jung nothing else but an
abbreviation and label for immediate psychic experience and
experience of psychic reality per se, that is, of the unconscious.
Psychology is therefore also ambivalent. It is, on the one hand, a
symptom, the sign of an illness, the symptom of a cultural disaster—
and yet, on the other hand, of enormous importance and value in Jung’s
eyes. “I cannot help believing that the real problem will be from now
on until a dim future a psychological one.”21 “We are confronted with
the darkness of our soul, the unconscious. It sends up its dark and
unrecognizable urges. It hollows out and hacks up the shapes of our
culture and its historical dominants. We have no dominants any more,
they are in the future.”22 “[...] I know [...] how helpless people are in
envisaging and dealing with the enormities that the present time and
still more the immediate future will present us with.”23 “Our concern
with the unconscious has become a vital question for us—a question
of spiritual being or non-being” (CW 9i § 51). And why is it that the
real problem from now on will be a psychological one? Because “the
struggle between light and darkness has transferred its battlefield to
the inner” (CW 13 § 293, transl. modif.) and because “the
unconscious” is “the mother of the future.” 24 “The general and

21
Letters 2, p. 498, 12 April 1959, to Werner Bruecher.
22
Letters 2, p. 590, 2 September 1960, to Herbert Read.
23
Letters 2, p. 498, 12 April 1959, to Werner Bruecher.
24
Letters 2, p. 496, 12 April 1959, to Cary F. Baynes.
18 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

fundamental insight that our psychic existence has two poles still
remains a task for the future” (MDR p. 169, transl. modif.)
It now emerges that Jung’s psychology project is not only a
response to the condition of his time in the sense of a reaction, his
personal answer to a factually given situation, in a similar sense to how
we distinguish between a wound and the subsequent dressing of the
wound. Psychology in its highest determination is much more for Jung,
more than a secondary treatment, more than the application of
psychological insights and techniques to our situation. Psychology
in itself, objectively (and precisely not merely the therapeutic
application of psychology!), is the solution, the key to our
predicament—because the very problem has become a psychological
one; the clear distinction between illness and cure has been
canceled. The battlefield on which the decision about the great
questions has to occur has moved from the external to the inner, from
the level of externally existing religious formulas to the immediacy of
the psyche. The concern with the unconscious is absolutely vital;
psychology is our only hope. This is Jung’s thesis.
We thus see that on the apex theoriae, Jung perceives psychology
in terms of a uroboric logic of identity. Psychology is both the symptom
of an unparalleled historical pathological situation and the cure for
this situation; it is itself “the great problem of our time” or “the real
problem,” and the answer. The unconscious hacks up and hollows out
the shapes of our culture and it is the mother of the future. This shows
that what Jung envisioned is a fundamental collapse of the entire reality
level itself from its previous high level, the level of religion and
metaphysics as great externally existing forms, to the fundamentally
lower level of psychology with its immediate confrontation with the
unconscious. This radical change of the level of reality as such is what
makes the historical rupture that we discussed so unparalleled.
Psychology is thus not just a new additional field of science, an
extension of human inquiry into new areas on the same old level of
reality. For Jung the emergence of psychology is the rupture itself. This
is also why he could entertain the view that certain ones of those who
have been smitten by the fate of a neurosis are “eigentlich ‘höhere’
Menschen” (the CW translate: “really persons of a ‘higher’ type” CW
7 § 291), because they have, whether they like it or not, dropped from
JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT 19

the ordinary reality level, so that the awareness of the second pole of
our psychic existence has forced itself upon them.
Much more could be said about Jung’s response to the condition
of his time, but this is not the time for detailed elaborations. Instead
I want by way of conclusion to shift our focus from a description of
Jung’s response to a reflection of his response. What might today, in
2008, be our response to Jung’s response? His response essentially comes
from the first half of the 20 th century. Much has happened in the
meantime to open our eyes to altered vistas. I will merely list seven
questions that immediately come to mind:
1. Can we still entertain the extremely high estimation of
psychology, as having a historical mission and as in itself being the
answer to our historical predicament? Or will we not perhaps lean
toward a more modest assessment?
2. Can we still believe that with the unconscious we are confronted
with the immediate, unprocessed, raw source of psychic life? Or would
we not rather be inclined to see, for example, archetypal dream
motifs as unconscious individual reuse precisely of already historically
processed and sedimented material from earlier ages, and likewise
comprehend the archetypes as modern abstractions from, and ordering
principles for, the rich historical phenomenology of psychic images?
3. No doubt, there is plenty of unconsciousness and there are
many processes that happen unconsciously. But can we still believe
in “the unconscious,” the hypostatized notion of the unconscious as a
kind of subject and agent behind the scenes?
4. Jung insisted that the loss of cultural forms has a meaning, which
indicates that he did not evade the insight into the loss. The specific
meaning that he saw was that this loss amounted to a pulling away of
the cultural blanket that shielded mankind from the unconscious as
the raw source of meaning. But if the fact that the loss of meaning is
seen as the freeing of an access to the immediate source of meaning,
could this perhaps imply that Jung’s acknowledgment of the loss is
not relentless after all? Are we not perhaps structurally back at Lessing’s
position, inasmuch as, to be sure, “the unconscious” on the semantic
level entails the explicit avowal of our not knowing, while it nevertheless
syntactically supplies us with the certain knowledge that there is an
ultimate ground, the mother of the future? Or is it perhaps after all
20 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

that we sank down to beggary only to pose afterwards as the owners

of the true riches in our inner?25
5. If one follows this line of thinking, might we perhaps have to
revise the idea that neurotics are “really persons of a ‘higher’ type”?
Are they maybe not simply neurotic?
6. Is it to be taken for granted that meaning will “become[-] true
once more,” merely in “a new form” (CW 18 § 632)? Could it not
perhaps be that mankind has outgrown altogether such a thing as
meaning, religion, gods or dominants and that we will have to sew
our garments truly ourselves, without having ready-made patterns,
be they cultural or be they archetypal? Because—
7. and finally—in view of the media, the advertizing industry, the
televisionization of life and its experience, in view, furthermore, of the
Internet, web.2, and “second life,” of quantum mechanics and
nanotechnology, of genetic engineering and the titanic goal of
controlling global warming—can we still insist that the place were
the real action is has become the inner, and that individuation is the
highest goal?
This is the type of question that is raised for us with Jung’s response
to the world condition of his time, questions that we have the task to
give our response to, a response in view of, and in responsibility to,
the world condition at our time.

25
Whereby we can of course fancy ourselves as owners only because the riches that
we claim to own in our inner are logically on principle safely locked away in “the
unconscious,” i.e., defined as logically irrevocably dissociated and sequestered from
consciousness, so that these treasures will never have to come out into the open to
prove their genuineness in the light of day before the public mind and will not and
cannot be the gold standard—or truth—behind the currency of actually lived life.
 CHAPTER TWO

Psychology as Anti-Philosophy:
C.G. Jung

P erhaps the most natural way to investigate the relation

between Jung and philosophy as well as between Jungian
psychology and philosophy might be to see where in Jung’s
work we find references to philosophy and to particular
philosophers. Names of some significance for Jung that come
immediately to mind are Kant, Schopenhauer, Plato, Nietzsche,
Hegel, Heidegger. What did Jung have to say about them, how did
he describe his own relation to them? The question of how he
positioned himself in the medieval Universals controversy
(keywords: Abaelard and esse in anima) should also not be
neglected. 1 Wherever one would start to dig a little deeper, one
would probably soon come up against strange ambivalences, such
as the general one that comes to light when we contrast the
following two statements. (1) “I am not a philosopher but a doctor
and empiricist. I practice psychology in the first place as a science,
in the second place as an instrument of psychotherapy” (Letters 2,
p. 56, to van Lier-Schmidt Ernsthausen, 25 April 1952). (2) “I
can hardly draw a veil over the fact that we psychotherapists ought
really to be philosophers or philosophic doctors...” (CW 16 § 181).

1
See C. G. Jung, “Abelard’s Attempt at Conciliation”, in Psychology Types, CW 6 §
68-95.
22 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

Method of approach and textual basis

My intention with this paper, however, and therefore my
approach are different. Rather than staying on the level of the work
that Jung produced, the level of his explicit views and statements as
well as the implications of what he said and how he worked, I want to
go a level deeper to the source or motive power that produced Jung’s
relation to philosophy and makes it possible to understand why it had
to be the way it turned out to be. What was at stake for Jung? What
were the strategic moves that he made—had to make, because this
was what both “who he was” and the historical locus he found himself
in demanded of him? What is the spiritus rector—the principle—
behind or in his psychology, “the soul” of his psychology? What makes
him (the psychology he developed) “tick”? I want to try to get an idea
of the “intellectual physiognomy” of C.G. Jung so as to become able
from this center to reconstruct and develop the explicit positions that
he took, specifically with respect to philosophy.
For this purpose it is best to use a microscopic approach. It would
of course also be possible to attempt to look at Jung’s life-work as a
whole and try to distill from it its inner physiognomy, in order to
deduce from the so-gained physiognomy why his psychology had to
be the way it was. This approach would be circular. But circularity as
such does not really have to be considered a problem, and often there
is no other way. The only disadvantage is that with such a mass of
material the likelihood is far greater that there might be in one’s
“distillation process” a systematic deviation due to the subjectivity of
the interpreter’s particular angle of view. If, however, we succeed in
finding a small text that while certainly itself also being a part of the
finished product produced by Jung nevertheless opens a window to
the pulsating heart within or behind the production process, this
danger is much smaller. In contrast to an assortment of ideas and
statements from all kinds of texts compiled according to some external
concept (applied by the interpreter, so that what we get is an external
reflection), a single small text can be studied thinkingly, i.e., thought
through in its details according to its own inherent principle. Because
these details reflect, support, and corroborate each other, the text forms
a self-contained meshwork that provides enough guidelines of its own
safeguarding against aberrations.
PSYCHOLOGY AS ANTI-PHILOSOPHY 23

There is indeed a report of Jung’s that—en miniature and

inadvertently—lays bare the logical paradigm, the very motivation,
and basic constitutive operation, underlying Jung’s psychology as
such. This report about an experience during his school years comes
from Memories, Dreams, Reflections [hereinafter referred to as MDR]
and reads:
One fine summer day that same year [1887, his twelfth year]
I came out of school at noon and went to the cathedral square.
The sky was gloriously blue, the day one of radiant sunshine.
The roof of the cathedral glittered, the sun sparkling from
the new, brightly glazed tiles. I was overwhelmed by the
beauty of the sight, and thought: “The world is beautiful
and the church is beautiful, and God made all this and sits
above it far away in the blue sky on a golden throne and ....”
Here came a great hole in my thoughts, and a choking
sensation. I felt numbed, and knew only: “Don’t go on
thinking now! Something terrible is coming, something I do
not want to think, something I dare not even approach. Why
not? Because I would be committing the most frightful of
sins. What is the most terrible sin? Murder? No, it can’t be
that. The most terrible sin is the sin against the Holy Ghost,
which cannot be forgiven. Anyone who commits that sin is
damned to hell for all eternity. That would be very sad for
my parents, if their only son, to whom they are so attached,
should be doomed to eternal damnation. I cannot do that to
my parents. All I need do is not go on thinking.”
That was easier said than done. On my long walk home I
tried to think all sorts of other things, but I found my
thoughts returning again and again to the beautiful cathedral
which I loved so much, and to God sitting on the throne—
and then my thoughts would fly off again as if they had
received a powerful electric shock. I kept repeating to myself:
“Don’t think of it, just don’t think of it!” I reached home in
a pretty worked-up state. ...
...
On the third night, however, the torment became so unbearable
that I no longer knew what to do. I awoke from a restless sleep
just in time to catch myself thinking again about the cathedral
and God. I had almost continued the thought! I felt my resistance
24 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

weakening. Sweating with fear, I sat up in bed to shake off sleep.

“Now it is coming, now it’s serious! I must think. It must be
thought out beforehand. Why should I think something I do
not know? I don’t want to, by God, that’s sure. But who wants
me to? Who wants to force me to think something I don’t
know and don’t want to know? Where does this terrible will
come from? And why should I be the one to be subjected to
it? I was thinking praises of the Creator of this beautiful
world, I was grateful to him for this immeasurable gift, so
why should I have to think something inconceivably wicked?
I don’t know what it is, I really don’t, for I cannot and must
not come anywhere near this thought, for that would be to
risk thinking it at once. I haven’t done this or wanted this, it
has come on me like a bad dream. Where do such things come
from? This has happened to me without my doing. Why?
After all, I didn’t create myself, I came into the world the way
God made me ...”
... [F]inally I arrived at Adam and Eve. And with them came
the decisive thought: Adam and Eve were the first people;
they had no parents, but were created directly by God, who
intentionally made them as they were. They had no choice
but to be exactly the way God had created them. ... God in
His omniscience had arranged everything so that the first
parents would have to sin. Therefore it was God’s intention
that they should sin.
This thought liberated me instantly from my worst torment,
since I now knew that God Himself had placed me in this
situation. ... God had landed me in this fix without my willing
it and had left me without any help. I was certain that I must
search out His intention myself, and seek the way out alone. At
this point another argument began.
“What does God want? To act or not to act? I must find out
what God wants with me, and I must find out right away.” I
was aware, of course, that according to conventional morality
there was no question but that sin must be avoided. That
was what I had been doing up to now, but I knew I could
not go on doing it. My broken sleep and my spiritual distress
had worn me out to such a point that fending off the thought
was tying me into unbearable knots. This could not go on. At
PSYCHOLOGY AS ANTI-PHILOSOPHY 25

the same time, I could not yield before I understood what

God’s will was and what He intended. For I was now certain
that He was the author of this desperate problem. ... I knew,
beyond a doubt, that I would ultimately be compelled to
break down, to give way, but I did not want it to happen
without my understanding it, since the salvation of my eternal
soul was at stake.
...
I thought it over again and arrived at the same conclusion.
“Obviously God also desires me to show courage,” I thought.
“If that is so and I go through with it, then He will give me
His grace and illumination.”
I gathered all my courage, as though I were about to leap
forthwith into hell-fire, and let the thought come. I saw before
me the cathedral, the blue sky. God sits on His golden throne,
high above the world—and from under the throne an enormous
turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters it, and breaks
the walls of the cathedral asunder.
So that was it! I felt an enormous, an indescribable relief.
Instead of the expected damnation, grace had come upon
me, and with it an unutterable bliss such as I had never
known. I wept for happiness and gratitude. The wisdom and
goodness of God had been revealed to me now that I had
yielded to His inexorable command. It was as though I had
experienced an illumination. ...
... Why did God befoul His cathedral? That, for me, was a
terrible thought. But then came the dim understanding that
God could be something terrible. I had experienced a dark
and terrible secret. It overshadowed my whole life, and I
became deeply pensive.
...
It would never have occurred to me to speak of my experience
openly, ...
My entire youth can be understood in terms of this secret. It
induced in me an almost unendurable loneliness. My one
great achievement during those years was that I resisted the
temptation to talk about it with anyone. Thus the pattern of
my relationship to the world was already prefigured: today
as then I am a solitary, because I know things and must hint
26 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

at things which other people do not know, and usually do

not even want to know (pp. 36–42).
This text reports about an experience and thought process from Jung’s
early years. But the report was written by Jung in his old age (according
to Aniela Jaffé’s “Introduction” [p. vi] between the end of 1957 and
April 1958, i.e., at age 82). So this is not an historical record from
the time when it happened. It is an old man’s memory and portrayal of
what happened in his childhood. There is no reason why we should
doubt that the narrative refers to an actual fact in the past. But there
can also be no doubt that the precise diction and the description of
the argumentation said to be the child’s argumentation have gone
through the filter of the stage of consciousness reached through the
long process of Jung’s intellectual development and thus have his
developed psychology behind them.
It is also significant that in his description of this event Jung in
no way distances himself from what he describes. He does not, for
example, portray the mental torment and the thought process that
led to a solution as something childish that he as a mature man had
long left behind. To be sure, he describes it as a child’s problem, but
the problem as well as the solution receive old man Jung’s full backing.
There is not a trace of a critical objection. The contents of the child’s
reflections are fully ego-syntonic for 82-years-old Jung and also syntonic
with his late works on related subjects.
So with this little gem of a story we have something that extends
over, and in a way comprises, Jung’s entire intellectual life. It is a story
that provides us not with the literal biographical beginning and causal
origin of Jung’s psychological thinking, but rather with the inner (in
a certain sense, ahistorical) principle of his thought, the principle
which is the unity of its archê and telos.

Paradise Lost
What Jung tells us is a story about the event of a thought and of
how he dealt with this thought. And thus it is a story about Jung as a
thinker. The thought that emerged in Jung falls clearly into two parts.
The first part is, “The world is beautiful and the church is beautiful,
and God made all this and sits above it far away in the blue sky on a
golden throne.” It is a thought coming from out of an overwhelming
PSYCHOLOGY AS ANTI-PHILOSOPHY 27

feeling that arose in him occasioned by the view of a beautiful sight

on a just perfect summer day. This thought is nothing else but the
description in words of a particular state of being, namely that state
of being that Jung in MDR in other contexts described as “the paradise
of childhood from which we imagine we have emerged” (p. 244) or
the being in the “boundlessness of ‘God’s country’” (p. 72, cf. p. 78).
The same emotion is also captured when Jung quotes some Englishman
who had lived in Africa for forty years as saying, “this here country is
not man’s country, it’s God’s country” (p. 256), or when he says, in
his own words, about his experience of Kenya and Uganda, “I enjoyed
the ‘divine peace’ [‘Gottesfrieden’] of a still primeval country” (p. 264)
or refers to the area where he built his Bollingen tower as
“Gotteshausland” (MDR translates this unusual word as “old church
land” [p. 223], omitting its feeling overtones that go in the direction
of “consecrated land”). From here we can understand that the purpose
of the first half of Jung’s thought is to celebrate the paradise of
childhood once more, to explicitly put in a nutshell what existence in
the paradise of childhood means. We could say that the first part is
the existence in childhood paradise “comprehended in thought”
(Hegel), even if here, in young Jung’s case, “thought” does of course
not mean conceptual thought (the actual form of thought), but
pictorial conception.
The second half of this thought, the content of which we learn
only much later after much fussing on the part of Jung (“... from under
the throne an enormous turd falls upon the sparkling new roof, shatters
it, and breaks the walls of the cathedral asunder”), amounts to the
destruction of what the first part contained, both the portrayed reality
and the blissful, lofty, solemn mood it had created. The turd falls like
a bomb into the “paradise of childhood” evoked in the first half of the
thought and quite literally smashes God’s beautiful cathedral, the
concrete symbol which is the center, heart, and epitome of “the
boundlessness of ‘God’s world.’” It does so not in the form of a real
bomb, which would be terrible enough, but in a decidedly vulgar, if
not obscene way. The destruction of the cathedral is thus twofold, an
external smashing of the building and a moral devastation through
the crude expression of contempt. But it is not only “God’s world”
here on this earth that is destroyed. God himself, the transcendent
28 THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS

source, animating spirit, and guarantor of this paradisiacal world is

defamed inasmuch as he is shown in an absolutely undignified form,
as a shitting God.
Because we get the two halves of Jung’s thought only separated
by a long interlude, and because they radically contradict each other,
we might be tempted to conceive of them as really two separate
thoughts. But it is clear, above all from the “and” between them, that
it is just one single thought, one single image: an image with an
internal about-turn or contradiction. We therefore have to look more
closely into the relation between the two halves of this thought.
The first part presents, as we have seen, the celebration of the idea
of “the paradise of childhood” in the reflected form of an explicit
thought. But such a celebration in the reflected form of a thought is
possible only when that which is celebrated has already been left. Only
from psychologically being outside the paradise can you be aware of
its being paradise and explicitly praise paradise and capture this praise
in the form of a thought. Later, Jung would write about “the miracle
of reflecting consciousness” as “the second cosmogony” (p. 339);
watching in Africa the gigantic herds of animals, the insight came to
him, as he explained, that “[t]his was the stillness of the eternal
beginning, the world as it had always been, in the state of non-being;
for until then no one had been present to know that it was this world.
... There I was now, the first human being to recognize that this was
the world and who through his knowing had in this moment first really
created it” (p. 255, transl. corrected). These ideas go far beyond what
we have in our passage. But the distinction made in them helps us to
see that “the paradise of childhood,” when it exists, is in the state of
non-being (in the sense of Jung’s later text) because then “no one is
present to know that it is paradise,” and the moment when it is known
and can be explicitly expressed, it has already been left. Precisely as
the European visitor who is not part of this world, but observes it from
the outside with his modern consciousness, Jung is “the first human
being to recognize ...” In fact, knowing or reflecting is itself the very
way of stepping outside. This is also why according to Jung a symbol
is alive only for “the exoteric standpoint,” while for the esoteric
standpoint (for a consciousness that has been initiated into its meaning
and now knows it) the symbol is dead (CW 6 § 816). And also why,