Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 8: Religion and the Search for Meaning." GUARDIAN July 18, 2011.

Jung is often criticised by religious thinkers for his poor theology and perennial philosophy. They are often correct, but they can also miss the main point. Jung was clear that his analytical psychology was not a new religion, neither was he a guru. "Psychology is concerned with the act of seeing and not with the construction of new religious truths," he wrote.
So its role is to provide a language for grappling with what's at stake. "Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have a psychology today, and why we speak of the unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed symbols."

Symbols do die. "Why have the antique gods lost their prestige and their effect upon human souls? It was because the Olympic gods had served their time and a new mystery began: God became man." Which raises the question of whether the Christian dispensation has now served its time too and we await a new mystery. Perhaps we do live on the verge of a new age, of another transformation of humanity. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jul/18/how-to-believe-jung-religion

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 7: The Power of Acceptance." GUARDIAN July 11, 2011

Jung believed that we are psychosomatic creatures who must attend to matters of the spirit as well as the body. Further, our psyche is not just our own. It is connected to others, both those with whom we visibly interact, and those who have come before us, via the dynamic he called the collective unconscious. Life goes well when these links are open. Flow brings a sense of purpose. Conversely, blockages can lead to ill-health with possibly physical and psychological manifestations. "A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning," Jung wrote, in an essay wittily entitled "Psychotherapists or the Clergy".

Other observers of the human condition make similar remarks. Bertrand Russell, who could hardly be different from Jung in terms of his spiritual outlook, nonetheless averred that the happy individual feels himself "part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision". Such a person knows themselves as a "citizen of the universe".

Jung preferred overtly religious language – instead of the universe talking of the "soul of the world" or anima mundi – and this was more than a question of taste. He believed spiritual connectedness was fundamental to being human and that, wary of religiosity, modern consciousness was struggling to take it seriously. The default image of secular individuality was, indeed, the billiard ball. Notions such as the stream of life, let alone the soul or the collective unconscious, tend to be treated as poetic fictions, at best, with damaging implications for human wellbeing. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jul/11/carl-jung-power-acceptance

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 6: Synchronicity." GUARDIAN July 4, 2011.

Jung and Pauli conjectured that they were dealing with a link between the apparently disparate realities of matter and mind. Jung objected to the dualism implied by suggesting these two aspects are distinct kinds of stuff, and so sought a unitary dimension beneath the dualism. In this, he is far from unusual: philosophers and mystics alike have discerned what Jung called the unus mundus or unitary world.Archetypes, as implicit structuring principles, provide a way of conceptualising the common ground shared by mind and matter.

Pauli called it a "missing link", though he was also very aware of the accusation of providing mystification rather than explanation. "In my own view it is only a narrow passage of truth (no matter whether scientific or other truth) that passes between the Scylla of a blue fog of mysticism and the Charybdis of a sterile rationalism," he observed. "This will always be full of pitfalls and one can fall down on both sides."

Individuals from Plato to Spinoza have similarly tried to chart that fine course. However, apart from the breakthroughs such intuitions produced, Pauli had reason to trust that the world was odder than he might otherwise think. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/04/carl-jung-synchronicity

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 5: Psychological Types." GUARDIAN June 27, 2011.

It is striking how differently individuals can react to precisely the same thing. Some love Marmite and others loathe it. And more seriously, many arguments self-perpetuate aside from whether there is evidence or sound reason to decide the issue, because opposing sides embody different temperaments. Depending upon your outlook, Wimbledon is two weeks of poetry in motion, or two weeks of channel-hogging TV tedium. The internet will save civilisation according to the geek, and scramble your brains according to the Luddite. The heavens tell of the glory of God in the eyes of the saint, and of the troubling meaninglessness of empty space for at least some scientists.

Such oppositions struck Jung after his split with Freud. How was it, he asked, that they could interpret psychological problems so differently? The conclusion he reached was that he and Freud exhibited different personality types. The thought led him to a systematic reflection on temperament that is still widely deployed.

Two types seem especially clear: the introvert and the extravert [sic]. An introvert, as Jung was, is more persuaded by the voice of their inner self. An extravert, as he took Freud to be, finds their interest inexorably drawn to external things. "Since we all swerve rather more towards one side or the other, we naturally tend to understand everything in terms of our own type," he explained in Psychological Types, published in 1921. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/27/carl-jung-psychological-types

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 4: Do Archetypes Exist?" GUARDIAN June 20, 2011.

Jung took the inner life seriously. He believed that dreams are not just a random jumble of associations or repressed wish fulfilments. They can contain truths for the individual concerned. They need interpreting, but when understood aright, they offer a kind of commentary on life that often acts as a form of compensation to what the individual consciously takes to be the case. A dream Jung had in 1909 provides a case in point.

He was in a beautifully furnished house. It struck him that this fine abode was his own and he remarked, "Not bad!" Oddly, though, he had not explored the lower floor and so he descended the staircase to see. As he went down, the house got older and darker, becoming medieval on the ground floor. Checking the stone slabs beneath his feet, he found a metal ring, and pulled. More stairs led to a cave cut into the bedrock. Pots and bones lay scattered in the dirt. And then he saw two ancient human skulls, and awoke.

Jung interpreted the dream as affirming his emerging model of the psyche. The upper floor represents the conscious personality, the ground floor is the personal unconscious, and the deeper level is the collective unconscious – the primitive, shared aspect of psychic life. It contains what he came to call archetypes, the feature we shall turn to now. They are fundamental to Jung's psychology.

Archetypes can be thought of simply as structuring principles. For example, falling in love is archetypal for human beings. Everyone does it, at least once, and although the pattern is common, each time it feels new and inimitable. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/20/jung-archetypes-structuring-principles

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 3: Encountering the Unconscious." GUARDIAN June 13, 2011.

Jung's split with Freud in 1913 was costly. He was on his own again, an experience that reminded him of his lonely childhood. He suffered a breakdown that lasted through the years of the first world war. It was a traumatic experience. But it was not simply a collapse. It turned out to be a highly inventive period, one of discovery. He would later say that all his future work originated with this "creative illness".

He experienced a succession of episodes during which he vividly encountered the rich and disturbing fantasies of his unconscious. He made a record of what he saw when he descended into this underworld, a record published in 2009 as The Red Book. It is like an illuminated manuscript, a cross between Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

Its publication sparked massive interest in Jungian circles, rather like what happens in Christian circles when a new first-century codex is discovered. It is of undoubted interest to scholars, in the same way that the notebooks of Leonardo are to art historians. And it is an astonishing work to browse, for its intricacy and imagination. But it is also highly personal, which is presumably why Jung decided against its publication in his own lifetime. So, to turn it into a sacred text, as some appear inclined to do, would be a folly of the kind Jung argued against in the work that followed his recovery from the breakdown.

In particular he wrote two pieces, known as the Two Essays, that provide a succinct introduction to his mature work. (He can otherwise be a rambling, elusive writer.) On the Psychology of the Unconscious completes his separation from Freud. He shows how tracing the origins of a personal crisis back to a childhood trauma, as Freud was inclined to do, might well miss the significance of the crisis for the adult patient now.

In The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious, he describes a process whereby a person can pay attention to how their unconscious life manifests itself in their conscious life. It will be a highly personal and tortuous experience. "There is no birth of consciousness without pain," he wrote. But with it, the individual can become more whole. . . .

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/13/carl-jung-red-book-unconscious

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 2: A Troubled Relationship with Freud – and the Nazis." GUARDIAN June 6, 2011.

All in all, from early on, Jung was nagged by the thought that Freud placed his personal authority above the quest for truth. And behind that lay deep theoretical differences between the two.

Jung considered Freud too reductionist. He could not accept that the main drive in human life is sexual. Instead, he defined libido more broadly as psychic energy or life force, of which sexuality is just one manifestation. As to the Oedipus complex, Jung came to believe that the tie between a child and its mother was not based upon latent incestuous passion, but stemmed from the fact that the mother was the primary provider of love and care. Jung had anticipated the attachment theory of John Bowlby, which has subsequently been widely confirmed.

Jung also believed that the contents of the unconscious are not restricted to repressed material. Rather, the unconscious resources an individual's life. A human person is built up of layers. The conscious aspect is the psychosomatic whole that comprises the body and cognisant mental life. Beneath that lies a personal unconscious, a supply of material from the life of the individual. And beneath that lies a collective unconscious that is inherited. Jung believed he had objective evidence for this common heritage from his studies of schizophrenics, who apparently spoke of images and symbols they could not have discovered in their reading, say, or culturally. . . .

Visit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/jun/06/carl-jung-freud-nazis.

Vernon, Mark. "Carl Jung, Part 1: Taking Inner Life Seriously." GUARDIAN May 30, 2011.

If you have ever thought of yourself as an introvert or extrovert; if you've ever deployed the notions of the archetypal or collective unconscious; if you've ever loved or loathed the new age; if you have ever done a Myers-Briggs personality or spirituality test; if you've ever been in counselling and sat opposite your therapist rather than lain on the couch – in all these cases, there's one man you can thank: Carl Gustav Jung. . . .

Visit: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/may/30/carl-jung-ego-self.

Corbett, Sara. "The Holy Grail of the Unconsious." NEW YORK TIMES September 16, 2009.

Jung, Carl. The Red Book. Ed. Sonu Shamdasani. Trans. Mark Kyburz and John Peck. New York: Norton, 2009. This is a story about a nearly 100-year-old book, bound in red leather, which has spent the last quarter century secreted away in a bank vault in Switzerland. The book is big and heavy and its spine is etched with gold letters that say Liber Novus, which is Latin for “New Book.” Its pages are made from thick cream-colored parchment and filled with paintings of otherworldly creatures and handwritten dialogues with gods and devils. If you didn’t know the book’s vintage, you might confuse it for a lost medieval tome. And yet between the book’s heavy covers, a very modern story unfolds. It goes as follows: Man skids into midlife and loses his soul. Man goes looking for soul. After a lot of instructive hardship and adventure — taking place entirely in his head — he finds it again. Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book — what it is, what it means — is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much of a look at it. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/20/magazine/20jung-t.html?_r=2&ref=magazine&pagewanted=all.

"Carl Gustav Jung." GREAT LIVES. BBC Radio 4. May 1, 2009.

Matthew Parris presents the biographical series in which his guests choose someone who has inspired their lives. Ruby Wax discusses the life and work of Carl Gustav Jung, who has been called 'the father of analytical psychology'. Along with author and Jungian analyst Professor Andrew Samuels, Ruby discusses Jung's theories of personality and psychological types, and reveals how his work has affected her own life. To listen, visit the following URL: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00jxhdd.