In the late 1940s, Carl Gustav Jung, who was a great admirer of England, wrote an open letter to English theologians inviting them to have a “conversation” with him about the symbols and dogma of the Christian faith, and what he had discovered empirically about the contents of the human psyche. It is a sound argument that theory is not much good if it conflicts with experience: an argument that goes back in Western Europe to Roger Bacon in the 13th century. None of them replied; I understand that even Archbishop Temple did not deign to reply. Since then the process begun with the publication of Charles Darwin’s The Origin of the Species has proceeded apace; and the Church of England is now a tiny minority in an otherwise pagan scientific world, with certain established privileges which are increasingly challenged. In this essay, I venture to suggest some of the questions that might have featured in that “conversation”, without necessarily offering an opinion as to who is right.
Until about 1900 the unconscious was an undiscovered country to the average, educated, Western man. Many people had written about it; Origen in a classical way; the alchemists in a profound psychological but absurd chemical way; the Church with demented intolerance of the sanctity of its symbolism. But nobody had made this continent of the inner mind, this seemingly inaccessible Atlantis, accessible to the common-sense man of affairs. That is, until Freud made it accessible. People may not know much about it, but they accept nowadays that it is there. Even the ghastly music, which is so horribly ubiquitous, is an out-pouring of the singer’s soul.
Freud revealed this world of the unconscious, through dreams particularly; and created a unified structure, comprehensive if flawed, on the basis of sexual motivation. I say it was flawed because, whilst I accept that “sex” is a universal in Nature, I refuse to accept that it is the only universal. I also refuse to accept that “sex” is fundamental. You can have sexual confidence, and sexual lack of confidence; and I reckon that “confidence” is more fundamental than sex. By “confidence”, I mean basically an enthusiasm for life. Nevertheless Freud must receive the credit for opening the doors of this new inner world, into which previous explorers had only made brief and limited incursions.
Then came Jung, an intellectual giant, and a universal genius in the world of medical psychology; perhaps the first, and maybe the last. He explored and made sense of this new world, particularly with his postulates of the “Archetypes” and the “Collective Unconscious”. As a mere student, I reckon these were his greatest ideas; in particular that archetypes behave like autonomous psychic beings, as soon as an individual responds to their presence;