Review: Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Modern Man in Search of a Soul by C.G. Jung

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



The eleven chapters in this work are, save one, lectures delivered by Jung prior to its 1933 publication. Carl Jung snipes at times at the wide target of Freud’s narrowly focused psychology, such as observing that free association merely leads to projecting one’s own complexes. But, at times it seems the crowded dreamscape of Jung’s own archetypes may be a projection of his own issues. Still, I enjoy reading vintage Jung since his relentless probing of the human psyche seems to have given him a sagacity causing such wise observation as from "Stages of Life,"

"The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behavior. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many -- far too many -- aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes."

And from “Psychology and Literature”: “It is always dangerous to speak of one’s own times, because what is at stake in the present is too vast for comprehension.”

I also love his take on the criticism process: “The truth is that poets are human beings, and that what a poet has to say about his is often far from being the most illuminating word on the subject. What is required of us, then, is nothing less than to defend the importance of the visionary experience against the poet himself… the personal life of the poet cannot be held essential to his art — but at most a help or a hindrance to his creative task. He may go the way of a Philistine, a good citizen, a neurotic, a fool or a criminal. His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet."

Jung also dives into the materialism vs. dualism argument: “The objection has already been raised that this approach reduces psychic happenings to a kind of activity of the glands; thoughts are regarded as secretions of the brain, and so we achieve a psychology without the psyche. From this standpoint, it must be confessed, the psyche does not exist in its own right; it is nothing in itself, but is the mere expression of physical processes. That these processes have the qualities of consciousness is just an irreducible fact — were it otherwise, so the argument runs, we could not speak of the psyche at all; there would be no consciousness, and so we should have nothing to say about anything. Consciousness, therefore, is taken as the sine qua non of psychic life — that is to say, as the psyche itself. And so it comes about that all modern "psychologies without the psyche” are studies of consciousness which ignore the existence of unconscious psychic life.” Thus, Jung is revealed as a subtle spiritualist.

Finally, from “The Basic Postulates of Analytical Psychology”, Chapter IX of Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Jung nearly wins me over to his archetypes idea. Perhaps it is true … indulging and reading his arguments reminds me of the feeling I get watching a really good cable TV U.F.O. documentary, I want to believe:

“It would be positively grotesque for us to call this immense system of experience of the unconscious psyche an illusion, for our visible and tangible body itself is just such a system. It still carries within it the discernible traces of primeval evolution, and it is certainly a whole that functions purposively — for otherwise we could not live. It would never occur to anyone to look upon comparative anatomy or physiology as nonsense. And so we cannot dismiss the collective unconscious as illusion, or refuse to recognize and study it as a valuable source of knowledge…

It would certainly show perversity if we tried to explain the lives of our ancestors in terms of their late descendants; and it is just as wrong, in my opinion, to regard the unconscious as a derivative of consciousness. We are nearer the truth if we put it the other way round.”




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