As an analyst, Jung wrote of neuroses in the accepted jargon of his day. Today, the tag has morphed into so many subdivisions of cognitive dysfunction that thick manuals are needed to account for them. Syndromes of every stripe convince us that nature doesn’t really know what she’s doing – but doctors do.
Fifth-dimensional disorders describe a physiology gone haywire. The bodies bearing us through eons now turn against us with each new study. Few analysts today analyze people. Fastened onto impersonal data and generic symptoms, the individual is scarcely considered. The processing of information doesn’t register the psyche as a possible cause — even less does it consider its purposes. The focus on material science blocks out its more comprehensive language.
The method sees the mind so microscopically that the more study is devoted to it, the more it’s obscured. Though projection is a basic concept, it applies only to patients. As literally as the paradox allows, the part is perceived as the whole. Depending on subjective conditions of who sees what and how and when, studies confirm that one thing is sure: the more objectively the contradictions are examined (if they are), the more speculative the answers — and they change with each discovery.
However mystical it appears to a science fascinated by its method, Jung’s model confronted the psyche directly — to see what it had to say about our condition. Owing to the dual nature of energy, he saw the need of artificially separating mind and body to observe the evidence and determine which side yielded what.
His comparative approach conceived a psychology far different than the material science of today. The facts he established can change the way we see our problems dramatically. Once acquainted with them, there’s nothing mystical about his work:
Knowledge confirms that the transformation of energy is accomplished by the interaction of two opposing poles. The body is one pole of a self-regulating animal, the psyche, the other. Functions are discernible by their opposites. Mind/body, conscious/unconscious, causality/purpose, rational/irrational, sensual/spiritual – all are designations for contrary energies designed to adapt to ever-changing circumstances.
The obscurity of their interactions creates paradoxes in the way we see them. Jung’s work was based on the psychic relations between the poles and how we perceive them — not the cause-and-effect actions of concrete things colliding in space.
Of the functions Jung saw as defining us, each has a specific energy. His studies showed that we identify with one main function to the exclusion of others. Thinking excludes feeling to record information; feeling represses thinking to weigh values. Accidental circumstances would find us paralyzed with indecision were it not for instinctual processes which automatically correspond to them, perceptible through images.
The identity of image and object is designed for quick response. Because of the evolutionary need for immediate action, only parts of the total image can be perceived at a given time. The focus needed to respond to fluid conditions requires complementary functions to supplement them. Unconscious perceptions and emotional reactions belonging to the subject blend with the objects and circumstances they represent and are reflected back after the fact.
Memories and fantasy associations appear as projections of the subject’s response, still in the guise of the concrete experience they embody. The reflective capacity processes the images, and because all life can be reduced to singular form, it’s individually conditioned.
But, a social animal learns according to the development of the species. The similarities between the two are more apparent than the differences — one of the reasons objective science so little considers them. Nature, however, has placed a premium on reflection unrivaled in the rest of the animal world. To stress that value, the unconscious compels attention to its directives through complexes of ideas for purposes of further development.
Jung discovered that the attraction is created by fluctuations of energy between functions which correspond to changing needs. They’re fitted to the objective conditions of the individual/collective inheritance prescribing how we experience the world. Paired with the individual abilities, those faculties mirror the dual perception of a reflective consciousness.
Our concrete orientation can’t readily discern things from ideas; the unconscious pushes its energy across the threshold of awareness via symbols. With reflection, associations form around the symbols, a measure of the energy compelling attention. The deeper we explore the ideas embedded in them, the more apparent their religious and philosophical character — the way nature informs us of her tendencies. Despite what material science tells us, it’s an instinctive function.
Early images of kings and prophets reflected general social conditions but also individual development. Prototypes of future functions, projections onto those figures gradually dissolved into the individual. Later ideas of a soul further impressed nature’s intent for that evolution, and its divine qualities were eventually perceived as belonging to all. History records the unfolding of consciousness according to this pattern. As it oscillates between social extremes, it reveals the tendency to self-awareness. Jung saw it as an innate force as surely as acorns become oak trees.
Individual differentiation calls for a function governing relations between an objective outer world and an equally objective inner one. Since consciousness perceives both, religious instincts serve the dual purposes of reflection to reconcile the conflicting needs of self and other.
Along the spectrum of human survival, Jung’s studies revealed the religious function to be as basic a need as the biological instinct. All human endeavor points to their lifting of the mind to increased levels of moral reflection. The two poles of the instinct to survival are so inextricably intertwined that the further back into history we look, the less distinguishable they are. “Food for the soul” is a shadowy slip of their deep alliance.
It reflects not only biological functions as seeds of psychological ideas but the opposition which carries them forward. It has long expressed itself in the idea of a trinity: it proceeds undifferentiated from a single being fused in unconsciousness. It then splits into two opposing directions as a developing mind reflects on itself and is finally compelled to create ways of reconciling that split in its personality. It’s a gradual spiral of increasing self-consciousness.
That pair of opposites dictates the moral relations between self and others. The discernment/reconciliation of the conflict is what makes us unique. The idea of a personal soul as mediator, a function capable of reconciling the psyche’s opposition, defines it as a striving for unity — to be whole. It’s the deepest urge of the human animal. The ancient idea of the one god corresponds to it.
The image of the trinity is an archetypal one; fused with the idea of a single god to express a process aimed toward unity. Fantasy-images move it forward: an analogue of past, present, and future, the way we perceive the space/time continuum represented by father, son, and the holy ghost of unconscious fantasy — from generation to generation.
The psychic qualities that would reconcile a dual orientation depend on distinctions between opposites to discover the realities we confront. Obsession/devotion, compulsion/desire, healing/disease, are more emotional than intellectual descriptions. Only the relations between them reveal whether our assumptions are subjective products or real functions and not symbolic diversions.
Their causes and purposes can only be inferred, and they change according to development. The unconscious psyche is designed to inform us of those changing factors. Objective/subjective, individual/collective, symptom/purpose, artificial/natural — where are we today between the psychic poles of awareness?