Cg Jung, Man and His Symbols Carl

CG Jung, Man and His Symbols

Carl Jung's long and influential career in twentieth century psychology would culminate in his last major work, Man and His Symbols, which was written in 1961, the last year of his life, in which the duties of expounding Jung's philosophy devolved upon some of the first Jungians, including the author of the second chapter in Man and His Symbols, Joseph L. Henderson. But an examination of Henderson's contribution to the volume -- "Ancient Myths and Modern Man" -- is still a revealing way to explore Jungian thought.

A little historical context is necessary before approaching Man and His Symbols -- we need to realize that Jung first came to prominence as a follower of the Austrian medical doctor, and founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Freud placed a heavy emphasis on the unconscious motivations that came to play in daily life, but which could be observed in such phenomena as dreams and telling slips of the tongue, which could hardly be called volitional on the part of those exhibiting them. Jung began as a Freudian but later distanced himself from Freud's specific doctrine: instead what he came away with was the notion that human thought and creativity participated in a "collective unconscious," in which certain recurrent symbolic phenomena could be read as a kind of allegorical vocabulary of human psychology. For Jung, an archaic Indian mandala could express very similar structural and psychological content to a contemporary American sighting of a "flying saucer." Henderson defines the "collective unconscious" on page 98 as "the part of the psyche which retains and transmits the common psychological inheritance of mankind." The symbols are both "ancient" but also so "unfamiliar to modern man that he cannot directly understand or assimilate them."

Henderson starts precisely at the point where Jung departed from Freud: for Jung, "the analyst can observe a series of dream images and note that they have a meaningful pattern" but he did not agree with Freud that this pattern was an expression of neurotic behavior. For Freud there was only one ancient myth to be assessed in defining human psychology, and that was the myth of the incestuous Oedipus. For Jung, Oedipus is merely one ancient myth among many, and as Henderson puts it "the analogies between ancient myths and the stories that appear in the dreams of modern patients are neither trivial nor accidental" -- if Oedipus offered a profound myth to Freud himself, the entire body of ancient human mythology can offer parallels to the vast range of modern psychological experience, in transformed and disguised shapes often, but usually interpretable with a little patience and flexibility.