Manuela Pallotto Strickland, Under a Starry Vault
of God, also rid itself of the active link to the unconscious, leaving it unguided and unhindered and at the mercy of its own frantic outbreak. To Jung, WWI was the proof.
Jung thought that the secularization of the Western world did not disempower only
the religious symbolic, but the very mythical, unconscious imagination from which the
former sprung forth. Nonetheless, although severed from and unrelated to the
conscious, rational side of the psyche, the unconscious was still alive, and so was the
psychological need to reintegrate it like a shadow, an uncanny anima within a
representation of the self wider than the rational and conscious ego[1]. Jung thought that
the vitality of such a need was proved by the fascination for all sorts of psychic
phenomena developed by modern man, who, no longer in the position to believe in
God, began to look for a new experience of the «numinous», in which Jung recognized a
pure Gnostic, pagan quality. The mere interest in the «numinous», though, remained
only a symptom of the spiritual crisis in act. From a psychological point of view, it only
showed the need for man to reach out to his unconscious, yet without being able to
repair the divide. In the same way, the resurgence of paganism, along with the mythical
universe it fed on, played a similar symptomatic role, yet did not, in itself, heal the split.
The main task for modern man, was to bridge the gap between ego and unconscious.
Jung's vision was optimistic. Neither the failure of religion nor the modern defiance of
myth, in fact, were bound to have the last word. Besides the most archaic «unconscious
way of transformation of the incest wish into religious practices», Jung suggested that
there was a different way for man to reintegrate libido, precisely by means of a
«conscious recognition and understanding» of the unconscious sides of the psyche[2].
Such a recognition was meant to be an experience rather than an abstract knowledge.
Jungian analysis aimed precisely at building the frame for this experience to happen
within.
It has been said, rather correctly indeed, that such an experience had to be intended
as one of «self-deification»[3], the model of which was provided by the onereic
pag. 47
© Firenze University Press • Aisthesis • 2/2015 • www.fupress.com/aisthesis • ISSN 2035-8466
- ↑ C. G. Jung, Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 9, Part 2: Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self, ed. by Gerhard Adler & R. F. C. Hull, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969.
- ↑ Id., Psychology of the Unconscious, cit., p. 262.
- ↑ R. Nolle, Jung the Leontocephalus, in Jung in Contexts. A Reader, eds. A. Storr, P. Bishop, Routledge, New York, London, 1997, pp. 51-90; Id., The Jung Cult: Origins of a Charismatic Movement, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994; Id., The Aryan Christ: the Secret Life of C. G. Jung, London: Macmillan, 1997. A substantial critique of Noll’s stance is S. Shamdasani, Cult Fictions: C. G. Jung and the Founding of Analytical Psychology, London: Routledge,1998; and Id., Jung Stripped Bare by His Biographers, Even, London: Karnac, 2005.
