CARL JUNG

It was not so much a taste for psychology as a distaste for Freud that drove me to Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychoanalyst and one-time disciple of Freud who, like so many disciples both before and since, was subsequently to turn against his 'master' and pursue his own less dream- and sex-oriented mode of psychoanalysis ... with quite spectacular results! Unlike his Viennese counterpart, Jung was convinced that more factors than sexual repression were at work in the overall development of neurosis - indeed, that sexual repression was only one amongst a number of possible causes and not necessarily the most important, nor even something that had to count at all. In short, neurosis could stem from any number of basic causes and develop along different lies from person to person, depending on one's temperament, background, experiences, ethnicity, and so on.

Compared to Freud, Jung seemed like a breath of fresh air, a release from the charnel house of sexual fixation and oedipal guilt, a sort of J.B. Priestley to D.H. Lawrence. He expanded the horizons of psychoanalysis and psychology to a degree which made him interesting to men of letters, not least of all to Hermann Hesse, and, in a way, he was something of an artist or writer himself, his autobiographical Memories, Dreams, and Reflections being of immense general interest and certainly one of the most fecund autobiographies of the twentieth century - rich in experience, speculation, imagination, recollection, and spiritual wisdom. It wasn't for nothing that the great German-born novelist and poet alluded to above was an admirer and good friend of Carl Jung, and the correspondence between the two men is ample testimony to their mutual respect, taking its place beside the letters of Henry Miller and John Cowper Powys, not to mention Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, as a valuable record of contemporary literary friendship, in this case having more than a little to do with their mutual interest in oriental religion, particularly Hinduism and Buddhism, which influenced the writings of both men; though Jung dismissed transcendental meditation in the West as a false transplant which was out-of-place amid the noisy streets and teeming skyscrapers of cities like New York and Chicago.

Neither was he particularly sympathetic to such artificially-induced visionary experiences as could be engendered by LSD and kindred synthetic drugs, preferring to regard mystical illumination as the fruit of long meditative endeavour which could not and should not be 'gate-crashed' through recourse to artificial means, a viewpoint that Aldous Huxley sharply criticized for its naturalistic conservatism in the face of new pharmacological breakthroughs which, in conjunction with modern technology, would bring 'heaven' within everyone's reach and with a minimum of effort, in accordance with the demands of evolutionary progress. In other words, mystical illumination made easy through mind-expanding drugs. And, of course, Huxley was right and Jung wrong or, at any rate, somewhat reactionary in this matter, as well as sceptical, if not contemptuous, of the value of transcendental meditation in the urbanized West.

Thus a sage without a religious commitment, for he wasn't a practising Christian and was little more than a theoretical student of oriental traditions; though he did flirt with quasi-religious National Socialism for a while, if only as a Swiss outsider who had no personal contact with the Movement and little at stake to deter him from seeing in Nazism the rise of a virile new ideology that would stamp on Western decadence and communist barbarism with all the passion of the elemental forces unleashed from the prison of subconscious repression - a testimony to the shadow side of the psyche which Jung claimed for everyone, himself not excepted, and which had to be respected in the interests of psychic hygiene.

To be sure, there was plenty of darkness in Jung's psyche, which had brought him into contact with his own elemental forces on more than one occasion, not least of all in the presence of Freud. Was not Jung a kind of twentieth-century black magician after all, a man for whom alchemy and magic were no foreign subjects but, for a time, of passionate concern to him? Again, we are reminded of Huxley's criticism of Jung for having taken symbols too seriously in his quest for spiritual insight, for having substituted symbolic appearances for mystical essences and become bogged down in occult distractions to the detriment of inner wisdom, bedazzled if not bedevilled by sacred mandalas and other shrines to natural determinism.

And 'synchronicity', the more than coincidental correspondences of seemingly unconnected events, phenomena, patterns, signs, etc., which exercised such a deep fascination for Jung, and led him to develop his own theory on the subject - what was that if not an aspect of medieval alchemy and pagan animism in contemporary guise, another manifestation of the occult in quasi-scientific dress ... to accord with the rational diabolism of a secular age? Hardly surprising that Jung's theories of 'synchronicity' were subsequently to exercise such a profound fascination on Arthur Koestler, in many ways a kindred spirit who fought shy of genuine transcendentalism under pressure from his political experiences and scientific bent. One wonders whether Cocteau would have seen Jung's numerological 'synchronicity' and the planetary 'synchronicity', defined by astrologers in terms of the cosmic pattern prevailing at the moment of one's birth, as an example of the 'miraculous in the commonplace' or as mere coincidence, had he chanced upon both kinds of synchronicity on the same day? Doubtless, Jung knew of the planetary kind, for he was not immune to astrological speculation - far from it! - and had more than once invoked astrology in the course of his occult investigations.

Yet, for all that, it is chiefly as a clinical psychologist and theorist that Jung's international reputation stands, and he undoubtedly made a valuable contribution to our understanding of the psyche. Reading The Portable Jung at a time when my own psyche was in need of understanding, I became fascinated by his theory of 'psychological types', which was based on an extrovert/introvert dichotomy, with its further fourfold division of the psyche into thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition functions - the first and third superior, or primary; the second and fourth inferior, or secondary; the ratio of one to another varying from individual to individual, and therefore giving rise to corresponding fourfold distinctions between the principal 'psychological types'. [A predominantly thinking type will have an inferior feeling function, a predominantly sensation type ... an inferior intuition function; and, conversely, a predominantly feeling type will have an inferior thinking function, a predominantly intuitive type ... an inferior sensation function.]

Certainly this theory convinced me to begin with, though I subsequently criticized some aspects of it, including Jung's desire that the inferior functions, viz. feeling and intuition, [Though I personally regard feeling and sensation as superior, or primary, and thinking and intuition as inferior, or secondary.] should be brought up to the level of, and thus equalized with, the superior functions, viz. thinking and sensation, or vice versa, depending on one's 'type', so that a psychic equilibrium was the equalitarian result - a desire which struck me as both unrealistic and undesirable in light of one's inherent predilection one way or another, not to mention the fact that it appeared to deny an evolutionary psychic progression in the direction of greater spiritual freedom and a correspondingly lopsided psyche.

Indeed, it seemed to deny the spirit altogether, unless the spirit be equated with psychic feeling and the raising of the inferior functions (assuming they aren't already predominant) is but a first - and atomic - step on the road to their eventual overhaul of the superior functions in furtherance of a free-electron psychic bias comprised of a sort of Social Transcendentalist compromise between intuition and feeling, [Or, as I prefer to see it, sensation and intuition, the former overhauled by the latter.] regarding the one as of the State and the other as of the Centre, in complete contrast to the proton and/or neutron psychic bias of thinking and sensation ... [Or, from my standpoint, feeling and thinking.] corresponding to Kingdom and Church respectively, a particle/wavicle dichotomy on a fundamentally autocratic level of psyche that Jung wished to see superseded by an atomic balance between intuition and feeling on the one hand and thinking and sensation on the other, which is nothing less than a liberal mean embracing an atomic compromise between reason and emotion, thereby indicating a distinctly bourgeois point-of-view.

Clearly, if my hunch is correct then the only logical step beyond Jungian psychic equilibrium lies not in the furtherance of the so-called inferior functions to a point where they greatly preponderate over the so-called superior functions, but in the furtherance of the function which, within the framework of Jung's terminology, I regard as both inferior (secondary/introvert) and germane to the Divine, viz. intuition, at the expense of everything else, though in relation, primarily, to sensation, the function most germane to the world, and consequently in reflection of a supertheocratic psychic integrity commensurate with a free-electron, or classless, stage of evolution which is Social Transcendentalist rather than Autocratic Socialist (communist), the difference being that, in the one case, intuition would preponderate over sensation, whereas, in the other case, feeling tends to predominate over sensation - at least officially.

However that may be, one has to admit that, when most true to themselves, most people tend to have such a psychic bias anyway, rendering the need for Jungian adjustments quite superfluous. Regarded from a class point-of-view, it is precisely those of a proton (feeling) or of a neutron (thinking) persuasion who would be irrelevant to a people's or, rather, classless society.