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The Soul of Carl Jung

Modern Man in Search of a Soul

How the Artist Brings the Unconscious Mind to Life

By Carl Jung

In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung examines how artists freely channel unconscious forces into their art and how understanding art can help reveal the truth about the human psyche:

It is not alone the creator of this kind of art who is in touch with the night-side of life, but the seers, prophets, leaders and enlighteners also. However dark this nocturnal world may be, it is not wholly unfamiliar. Man has known of it from time immemorial—here, there, and everywhere; for primitive man today it is an unquestionable part of his picture of the cosmos. It is only we who have repudiated it because of our fear of superstition and metaphysics, and because we strive to construct a conscious world that is safe and manageable in that natural law holds in it the place of statute law in a commonwealth.

Yet, even in our midst, the poet now and then catches sight of the figures that people the night-world—the spirits, demons and gods. He knows that a purposiveness out-reaching human ends is the life-giving secret for man; he has a presentiment of incomprehensible happenings in the pleroma. In short, he sees something of that psychic world that strikes terror into the savage and the barbarian.

It is therefore to be expected of the poet that he will resort to mythology in order to give his experience its most fitting expression. It would be a serious mistake to suppose that he works with materials received at second-hand. The primordial experience is the source of his creativeness; it cannot be fathomed, and therefore requires mythological imagery to give it form. In itself it offers no words or images, for it is a vision seen “as in a glass, darkly.”

It is merely a deep presentiment that strives to find expression. It is like a whirlwind that seizes everything within reach and, by carrying it aloft, assumes a visible shape. Since the particular expression can never exhaust the possibilities of the vision, but falls far short of it in richness of content, the poet must have at his disposal a huge store of materials if he is to communicate even a few of his intimations. What is more, he must resort to an imagery that is difficult to handle and full of contradictions in order to express the weird paradoxicality of his vision.

Excerpt from the C.G. Jung ebook, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Filed Under: Carl Jung

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JUNGIAN TERMINOLOGY

Active imagination: A method of assimilating unconscious contents through some form of self-expression.

Anima: The inner feminine side of a man.

Animus: The inner masculine side of a woman.

Archetype: Primordial, structural elements of the human psyche.

Assimilation: The process of integrating outer objects and unconscious contents into consciousness.

Collective Unconscious: A structural layer of the human psyche containing inherited elements, distinct from the personal unconscious.

Consciousness: The function or activity which maintains the relation of psychic contents to the ego.

Ego: The central complex in the field of consciousness.

Enantiodromia: The emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.

Individuation: A process of psychological differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality.

Inflation: A state of mind characterized by an exaggerated sense of self-importance, often compensated by feelings of inferiority.

Jungian Analysis: A form of therapy aimed at bringing unconscious contents to consciousness.

Myth: An involuntary collective statement based on an unconscious psychic experience.

Neurosis: A psychological crisis due to a state of disunity with oneself.

Projection: An automatic process whereby contents of one’s own unconscious are perceived to be in others.

Psyche: The totality of all psychological processes, both conscious and unconscious.

Psychosis. An extreme dissociation of the personality due to the activity of unconscious complexes that are completely disconnected from consciousness.

Self: The archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche.

Shadow: Hidden or unconscious aspects of oneself which the ego has either repressed or never recognized.

Spirit: An archetype and a functional complex, often personified and experienced as enlivening.

Symbol: The best possible expression for something unknown.

Synchronicity: A phenomenon where an event in the outside world coincides meaningfully with a psychological state of mind.

Transcendent function: A psychic function that arises from the tension between consciousness and the unconscious and supports their union.

Unconscious: The totality of all psychic phenomena that lack the quality of consciousness.

Wholeness. A state in which consciousness and the unconscious work together in harmony.

From Daryl Sharp’s Jung Lexicon

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