Early Jung, Late Jung

Jung: four mental functions

It is my understanding that the human personality, in its current state of evolution (and for the foreseeable future), rests upon a basis of four mental functions and four unconscious states.

The attributes of the adult personality emerge as the child develops and what we regard as mentality is defined by; an interaction of the mental functions in the material environment, combined with the influence of the unconscious as derived from its non-temporal, non-material basis. Neither is strictly independent of each other as they are brought into coincidence by The Marriage Quaternity -  the human cultural archetype, without which, no human conscious or emotional evolution takes place.
  
The mental functions were analysed by Jung in the following way : Sensation (sense perception), Intuition (unconscious synthesis), Feeling (evaluation) and Thinking (abstract/synthesis).
These functions are limited, rather in the manner of genetic regression to the mean. In other words, no one function is allowed to grow disproportionately beyond the other functions - as determined by the environment in which they are expressed. However, mankind's function as a developing animal in a hostile environment has optimised a combination of these mental functions to ensure survival. This has meant that the optimal mental functions are Sensation and Intuition for men and Intuition and Feeling for women - (Jung's use of the word 'feeling' is a mistranslation from his native tongue and should not be confused with the more general term to describe an outpouring of emotion or affect, e.g, feeling emotional). Jung asserted that these functions operated in tandem and through the medium of what he called extraversion and introversion. One can see from this explanation that for most of human development the most appropriate functions would be turned outwards - towards the environment. In that sense the functions operate upon the subject's mind while it is in a passive state (of active emotional participation). Modern examples of passive mental function is demonstrated by such activities as, watching films and television, listening to music, participating in sport. Under these circumstances, introversion occurs as a recessive tendency (to the prevalence of extraversion).  Introversion is characterised by self reflection, a state extraverts only resort to in desperation, but the differentiation is more subtle in effect and points to a closer link between introversion and the teleological function of unconscious - as experience is always felt as personally implicating subjectivity. Extroverts therefore regard experience as contingent, Introverts regard it as inherent. Neither state is completely fixed for the individual, but the orientation becomes reinforced and habitual over time as a way of interpreting and dealing with experience.

 Mankind's Natural Specification


Like all other natural creatures, man expresses a range of optimised skills as a form of natural specification - through which originally the creature could survive. In animals, it is a purely unconscious process of being linked to a strict, or more general environment. So, for mankind, Specification (as a new definition) was originally limited to different, but scarcely diversified roles, within the tribe. As teleology exerted its influence and tribal life developed into a richer form of cultural expression, Specification diversified into more complex skills. We can see for instance that with the introduction of tools, firstly fashioned by each individual as a group skill, during later periods of group life and to serve the growing social complexity brought about by teleology, expert artizans arose. The inheritance of this tendency from the period of the industrial revolution and before, is seen in the current specialisations and segregations of the technological revolution.

The four pillars of the human unconscious - The Marriage Quaternity

The strength of The Marriage Quaternity: it ring fences human development to one cultural epoch.
   
The Unconscious is defined by a series of self demonstrative and autonomous conditions that are accessible through psychological analysis:

The Persona, which has a borderline unconscious/conscious orientation — the habitual mask.

The Shadow, which is an all encompassing unconscious state — subject to growing repression as the child develops from the human personalities collective basis. The Shadow holds, not only the personal, repressed emotional trauma's, but also the capacity for the personality to transcend its material basis and become objectified. The archetypes that can ultimately bring this into being are also expressed into consciousness through the Shadow...

The Anima/Animus

Essentially, the soul of a human


The Wise Old Man

The adjunct to the central archetype and therefore God. 

Gaia

The jumping off point is an acknowledgement that there are two diametrical psychical entities inhabiting material creation and that mankind is at the interface. Nature is defined by the unconsciousness of creation and is antithetical to ultimate consciousness.

What does this mean and how is this idea derived…

In the later work of Carl Jung, there appears an idea that is a game changer for humanity. There is a very famous interview in which Jung is asked does he believe in God. Jung simply replies that he does not need to believe, he knows. What does Jung know that allows him to eschew belief in such a definite way? If we look at Answer To Job, a book that Jung wrote in old age, we see that Jung has relativized God into a function of the natural reality we all share  – he calls God psychical phenomenology and as such, like the rest of natural creation, it is unconscious of itself.

Furthermore, Jung also describes how this entity is seeking conscious expression through man – he says, God wants to become conscious, but as a master of the unconscious, dealing with the psyche on a daily basis over a long and illustrious career; Jung also adds, but not quite… He knows how hard it is to raise an unconscious complex into human consciousness, let alone working the same miracle with divine unconsciousness.

This brings us back to the idea of the two diametrical forces at play within the human framework. Man’s existence within nature has become increasingly tenuous, the more he has been inflated by the unconscious will of god to become conscious. There is a certain inevitability in this process – on the one hand these psychical entities (archetypes) have been projected through material inflation and science, but also man has become more aware of himself- in some cases, to the point of an extreme level of self reflection - the first prerequisite of the unconscious psychical entity within creation.

This is the philosophy. It explains why Man is out of step with natural creation and is desecrating the planet, but has become ill with such psychological disorders as extreme neurosis.

As a physician, Jung knew he could not cure all his patients, but the big step forward was the idea that human’s could begin to become aware of their own motives through an examination of The Shadow. In contrast to Freud, Jung knew that this path led, not only to the personal levels of repression, but also to the engine that continually reinforced the psychical lesions of his patients. He realised that these lesions were working as agent provocateurs for a further evolution of God’s need for consciousness  - but in precise levels of synchronicity – neurotic symptomology.

In this context, psychological illness takes on the significance as defining the patient as an expression and element of divine unconscious will - ‘there are as many gods as there are stars and they all want to become conscious’ as Jung put it…

What are the implications for the patient if he becomes aware of this process, but furthermore what are the implications for the unconsciousness of god?

Firstly, I shall deal with the individual and then go on to the biggest surprise of all – the implications for the planetary system.

Faced with an intractable neurosis, we must ask what is the person expressing of the overall process and how can their human nature be brought into coincidence with their divine purpose. Each neurosis will be defined by symptoms, which are often discounted as displacements of the underlying lesion. In the process I have described, the symptoms, not only reveal the aetiology of the neurosis - the personal element, but also its teleology – its divine purpose. It is as if each human individual is a microcosm of the process as a whole and those are most prone to expressing the process are those that become psychologically ill.

As a natural history specialist, I know that in the Millenia of natural evolution, the human creature - as well as his animal antecedents, will have encountered all of the environmental conditions that are likely to be expressed in a single life and as such, there will be a genetic strand programmed in to deal with all the hardship and cruelty, as well as all the nurture and love. It was put to me in the following way: if a seed is planted in rocky ground it will still seek the light. Distorted it might be, compared with those planted as fertile brethren, but still it will attempt to fulfil its potential.

There was a particular young woman who was referred to me at a social occasion by a close female associate – he’s good, she said, talk to him. This was some time ago and although I was good at acquiring transference, I had no idea how I would deal with the person’s extreme dysmorphia. I cannot say I thought it through logically – but why was this retiring girl, who apparently hated her own appearance and would generally not go out, so keen to dance? It did not seem to make sense.

Later after many extended telephone calls, where the girl did not need to face me personally and so expose herself in public, I ascertained that her father had expected and wanted a son – thus expressing his repressed homosexual component, which due to his Latin origins, were deeply entrenched. He had since left the family home and a year after that the neurosis in the girl had begun. On examining her dreams, I realised that she could not develop any further down her own masculine path - her extreme self reflection and loathing of herself as a woman - which now substituted her father’s implicit disappointment in her as a girl child. So, a maternal route had to be found. This I promoted as an acknowledgement of the girls sensuality in the form of ritual dance, realising that it brought together the natural origins of the woman as an expression of her inherited nature, but also involved a sublimation of her need for a form of reflective self expression – she had to work consciously at its meaning for her personality as a whole. In effect, I had to help her to be unnaturally, natural.

Now to Gaia and how the process in the individual affects the macrocosm. I became aware of the principle of Gaia by being introduced to the work of its main detractor – Richard Dawkins. I had absorbed Dawkins work on the selfish gene theory as a young student of natural history and could see its relevance in what I was observing of the butterfly colonies around me, but as his work developed towards an extreme material denial of any kind of divinity, I lost interest in him. I had already become aware of a divinity within nature by many subtle and also quite blatant promptings from my unconscious. I will not go into these, but they can either be taken at face value or symbolically, but sufficient to say, that I realised I was being absorbed, not only by my study and photography of nature, but also, by what I can only describe as a psychical process, that seemed to stem from Nature itself. I realised I was in sympathy with my surroundings and was ‘going native’, but in a thoroughly modern way – I was working on the North Downs around London UK, not Africa.

Many years later, a spiritual friend, who is now deceased, told me of his run-ins with Dawkins at lectures in London and I subsequently learned how Dawkins had dismissed James Lovelock to the extent that it had a severe effect on Lovelock’s well being. It seemed clear to me that Dawkins represented a polar opposite to Lovelock, and that Dawkins ever more complex theories to explain evolution were a defence to Lovelock’s ideas of an embracing reality in the natural world around us – to the extent in it being planet wide - Gaia. What was missing from Dawkins was the acceptance of teleology, the very function Jung was proposing in his idea of an unconscious God that was programming natural reality through a spiritual process. I realised, it could only be so, given the timescales involved - that this engine of creation was an unconsciously derived, but nevertheless purposive entity. Dawkins quite naturally reviled the creationists on the mere basis of the fossil record, not realising god’s psychical origins as phenomenology and therefore forcing him to explain God, (as it was expressed through human material ritual over the last several millennial) - as a grand delusion.

It is in contrast to Dawkins that ANY unfolding of this unconscious process into consciousness will involve Nature changing and in effect becoming a more conscious entity, with all that it will imply for natural justice in the world.