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There was no
immediate response to what had been said. Thankfully, no one had drifted off to sleep- at
the same time, no one seemed to have been transported into a state of ecstatic reverie by
my words either.
Finally,
Vince said: "Less you have any concerns in this regard, David, I think one can safely
say that your precis on Jung's approach to myth was, by quite a few orders of magnitude,
better than dead air- space."
"Speak
for yourself Vince," said the woman with no name tag but wearing a mischievous smile.
Although her gray hair and wrinkles testified to her apparent age, her manner and
comportment gave expression to a youthful energy and an enchanting, yet, hard-to-pin-down
spiritual quality that was very appealing.
"On
occasion," she intimated, "I like dead air-space. Consequently, I feel duty
bound in these times of endless searches for constant sources of sensory stimulation to
come to the defense of a beleaguered companion of those who may be inclined to meditation
and contemplative reflection. However, if you wished to express the same sentiments in
some way that did not denigrate that which remains silent in its own defence, then I
believe I would support the general tenor of your position."
She seemed
to reflect for a few seconds on what she had said and, then, added: "For someone who
professes to appreciate silence, I don't seem to have much trouble in destroying it do
I?"
The two
comments were followed by a further brief silence. After a few moments had passed in this
fashion, one of the people whose name I remembered, Ben Blake, remarked: "For some
reason, I've always had a problem with treating the unconscious as an actual thing. Or,
maybe, the right way for me to try to convey what I mean is to stipulate that for some
kinds of processes and issues I'm quite prepared to accept the existence of a realm
referred to as the 'unconscious' that is, in some way, attached to, or a part of, one's
being, but there are many other aspects of life that often are relegated to the
unconscious, or forces of the unconscious, but about which I have my doubts as to whether
or not this is a correct characterization of the situation."
"I'm
not sure I understand what you are getting at," said a woman whose name tag read
'Melanie Teasdale'.
My initial
impression of her - perhaps aided and abetted by her Bride-of-Frankenstein-like hair, as
well as the reading glasses that hung about her neck, seemingly ready to examine whatever
curiosity she might happen upon - was that Melanie was an individual who had spent many of
the hours of her life pre-occupied with exploring quite a few of the unchartered nooks and
crannies of life.
"Could
you give some examples, Ben, of what you have in mind?" she requested.
I found
myself mentally referring to him as 'Uncle Ben', due, no doubt, to his friendly, familiar,
and , generally, avuncular style of relating to the people in the circle. The unlit pipe
with which he gestured and, from time to time, that he placed in his mouth, seemed to
enhance this effect.
"Well,"
Ben began, "although I find myself conceptually going back and forth on these issues,
I guess the obvious examples involving instances where the existence of an unconscious
dimension to human affairs seems apparent would concern various aspects of personal memory
and motivation. For instance, there is the name or fact or piece of information which one
knows but, for some reason, one can't produce or retrieve it on a given occasion.
"Presumably,
this data that remains out of the reach of our consciousness could be said to be residing
in the unconscious. Of course, there might be some individuals who would wish to say such
material is not really in something called the unconscious as much as it merely remains
inaccessible to conscious recall.
"In
other words, being out of consciousness is not necessarily the same thing as being in a
realm of the unconscious. For example, what is going on in some country on the other side
of the Earth may be out of our current state of consciousness, but this doesn't, as a
result, automatically qualify this unknown data to be a part of someone's unconscious
regions, nor does it necessarily create, in and of itself, an unconscious realm in which
such data can be said to exist.
"Moreover,
there are many facets of a computer's data base or memory banks that may not be in use at
any given time. However, I'm not sure one would want to claim, therefore, that a computer
can be said to possess an unconscious realm.
"Alternatively,
someone might wish to reverse the argument. If one does not wish to attribute an
unconscious realm to computers when their current programming state or operating mode does
not permit them to have access to certain aspects of stored data, then, perhaps, the same
is true of human beings as well.
"Another,
possibly better, example that might indicate the existence of an entity called the
'unconscious' involves various non-conscious emotional or motivational patterns which are
operating within us on an ongoing basis. More specifically, these motivational and
emotional patterns or processes may be the real forces shaping our behaviors, yet we are
not aware of them because they are hidden beneath, say, psychological defenses that permit
us to attribute more acceptable or flattering reasons to the behaviors that are rooted in
these hidden network of emotion and motivation.
"Although
the idea of the unconscious existed before Freud came along, he was able to place it, to
some extent, in a more scientifically acceptable light. For, in addition to dreams,
hysteria and so on, Freud also took phenomena that he referred to as the psychopathology
of everyday life, like slips of the tongue, as common place sorts of example which served
as empirical evidence for the existence of the unconscious.
"Hidden
emotions and motivations, along with instinctual drives, played a very important part in
disclosing the presence of the unconscious realm as far as Freud and a variety of other
psychological investigators were concerned. This data does not prove the existence of a
region, state, realm, place or entity known as the unconscious, but, at least, such data
lend a certain plausibility to the idea.
"Nevertheless,
there are other cases, and Jung's notion of the collective unconscious is, at least for
me, one candidate for what I have in mind, in which we may use the term 'unconscious' as a
way of talking about forces, processes and phenomena that we don't really understand and
which, in point of fact, may have nothing necessarily to do with a psychological or
biological realm of the unconscious. Instead, these processes and phenomena may be
impinging on us from some other realm, through a dynamic we are not aware of, and we
merely attribute our experiences to the unconscious because, for a variety of cultural and
historical reasons, we are more prepared to accept this kind of ontological or
metaphysical interpretation for such events than if someone were to try to argue for an
other-worldly or spiritual account of these sorts of phenomenon or process."
An
individual whose name I recalled to be 'Andrea Myers' - a recollection that was confirmed
when I checked the name written on the tag pinned to her blouse - spoke up at this point.
She looked and talked like a business executive who had stopped into the 'club' for a
lunch time chat about what the non-business world was up to.
"If I
correctly understand the last part of what you are saying, Ben," Andrea said, by way
of preface, "your idea might have something to do with the changing character of the
philosophical and cultural conceptions of the nature of the individual and one's relation
with reality.
"At
certain points in history," she continued, "people were prepared to accept, as
true, ideas such as visitations by a creative muse, or demonic possession, or satanic
influences, or dreams as messages from some other world. Now, however, as a result of
various kinds of scientific, psychological, and philosophical influence, many people
accept as true, ideas such as, for example, that dreams are due to certain kinds of brain
activity during REM sleep, or these people contend that creativity is the result of a free
play of concepts which is generated through various modalities of brain chemistry,
together with K-complex electrical rhythms, or such people argue that demonic possession
is really a residual, delusional effect of some kind of breakdown in the metabolic
pathways of, say, serotonin and/or dopamine.
"Yet,
in point of fact, we are not necessarily any closer to understanding what is going on now,
then when people were attributing these phenomena and processes to other-worldly agents.
Neurotransmitters, brain chemistry and electrical activity are used to give descriptive
expression to the realm of the unconscious, but all we really have are certain patterns of
correlation rather than a solid case of causation - although we 'moderns' like to feel
somewhat smugly superior, relative to the so-called primitive myths of yesteryear, simply
because we are able to couch our ignorance in very impressive-sounding technical
language."
Colby Shaw,
another of the individuals whose name I remembered from Vince's round of introductions,
joined in the discussion at this juncture. He reminded me of what I envisioned a
twenty-something Tom Sawyer might have looked like, although I do not know exactly on what
this sense of the young man actually was based.
Somehow,
Colby's tanned and freckled face, his general demeanor, together with his laconic way of
expressing himself, seemed like they might have been the product of having experienced
adventures, of one sort or another, near the banks of a river in the South. Yet, this
down-home boy impression was in counterpoint to the kinds of thought being voiced by him.
"Seemingly,"
suggested Colby, "Carl Jung represents an interesting sort of transitional figure in
all of this. In certain respects he is an important part of the conceptual revolution that
has been taking place during the last ninety years, or so, in which psychological accounts
have gained ascendency, at least in some quarters, over spiritual or religious accounts,
as the repository of 'true', down-to-earth explanations for the events of our lives. Yet,
at the same time, his notion of the collective unconscious seems to be part of a
metaphysical framework that transcends, and, therefore, cannot be reduced to, the brain
functioning of any given individual."
The
gray-haired woman with no name tag said: "I've often found Jung very confusing in
this respect. Frequently, one finds him speaking about the soul, spirituality, the
importance of religious symbols, and so on, but he appears to make spirituality a function
of purely psychological processes.
"For
him, spirituality or religion appears to be little more than one of the forms generated by
processes of a mythological nature. As is true with psychology, these mythologies are
significant in as much as they contain the symbols which are able to help the individual
make contact with the archetypes of the collective unconscious and, consequently, provide
the person with the psychological material through which one can work toward resolution of
the problems and challenges of identity, the self and personality that Jung believes are
necessary for the successful completion of the developmental processes that characterize
the second half of life.
"I find
Jung interesting in as much as he is willing to allow for dimensions of reality, meaning,
the self, identity and personality that extend beyond the overly simplistic world of the
libidinous energies and instinctual drives of Freud and biology. Nevertheless, even if one
agreed with Jung concerning the need to reclaim, balance, and integrate aspects of
personality and self by revisiting the unconscious, I don't feel a purely psychological
approach is capable of doing justice to that which spirituality is, in essence, attempting
to direct our attention.
"In a
sense, just as Jung's theories add very important dimensions to, as well as complement,
the work of people like Freud, something needs to be added to Jung's framework in order to
reflect the richness and depth of being that transcends the realm of the psychological. In
many respects, I find Jung to be just as reductionistic, in his own manner, as he seemed
to find Freud to be, even though Jung certainly is offering a far more complex picture of
the nature of the human being than did Freud."
"But,
Tammy," said Art Carmichael, the recent bearer of liquid gifts, "on more than
one occasion I believe Jung spoke in quite approving terms of such things as religious
discipline. At least he wasn't saying, like Marx, that religion was the opiate of the
masses or, like Freud, that religion was merely an illusory projection of an overly
moralistic superego trying to cope with the many problems presented by a very resourceful
and devious set of instinctual urgings."
For some
reason which I could not identify, and that was more of a feeling than it was a reasoned
analysis of any kind, Art seemed somewhat lost in the group. While there was nothing odd
in what he said, his psychological and emotional rhythms seemed to be out of phase with
what appeared to be the ambience of the group. Perhaps, like me, he had been drafted into
a situation with which he was attempting to deal as best he could.
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