Questions and Reactions regarding Jung’s Approach to Religion
Please leave your thoughts about Jung’s theory of religion and its relationship to the psyche.
Please leave your thoughts about Jung’s theory of religion and its relationship to the psyche.
November 7th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
A lot of Jungian ideas can be applied to politics. For example, Jung wrestled largely with the idea of fantasy and imagination. He broke the definition of a down into active and passive attitudes toward one’s fantasies. Active attitudes toward fantasies are those we evoke when we turn our attention toward the unconscious with an attitude of expectation; through this process unconscious affects and images are clarified and brought closer to consciousness. On the other hand, passive attitudes toward fantasies does nothing at all, fantasy does not become realized, can drift around unnoticed or possible burst into consciousness uninvited.
Entertaining active attitudes toward fantasies leads toward Jungs theory of Active imagination, and it is this active imagination, given form through fantasy that truly has allowed many people to come to terms with unconscious complexes that have prevented what Jung would call the “trancendant function” which is facilitates the transition from polar opposites toward central common channels.
So, Jung’s ideas of imagination and fantasy applied to the recent election mean what? It means that we are a nation of dreamers. From the past, dreams that Martin Luther King liberate the black man, to dreaming about JFK and his promises for democracy, to dreams of Jackie Robinson and his triumphant entrance into the major leagues, and so on. Whether we like to admit it or not, race was a huge part of this election, and it was a dream of so many that a black man would become the president
Active attitudes of focused imagination created this event, and I believe that Jung would agree with me. People had a way to unify polarized energies, by merely voting for Barack Obama, they were embracing the dream that racial tension would subside, and what better indication of such a fact than by the election of a black president. Blacks are not a majority in this country, so other must have voted for him, and that also plays toward the themes mentioned above. For some now, as Jung would also say, it’s not simply a matter of it being either this way or that way, but now many see things as both this way and that way.
Don’t know how much sense all of that makes, but at least I gave it a shot.
November 9th, 2008 at 2:50 pm
I know that I tend to get off subject a lot in class and on the discussion board. That is just the way my mind works.
I was trying to think of recognized examples of collective unconscious phenomenon and this one came to mind. This link takes us to the press release for the 2007 Nobel Prize in Physics, which was award for the simultaneous discovery of technology that was used to increase the storage capacity of information on computer hard drives. The two recipients made the discoveries simultaneously while working in different countries.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2007/press.html
So we have a few other examples of non-religious phenomenon like the recent election or simultaneous scientific discoveries that would seem to involve the collective unconscious. It seems that at the very least, Jung has tapped into something that is operating in the world, whether we wish to acknowledge it as the collective unconscious or not. But if all stories and narratives take elements from the pool of the recurring archetypes and story structure, then this scientific discovery or our recent election results were only the natural (perhaps inevitable?) conclusions of the growth of scientific knowledge or our national experience, respectively.
What, if anything, this says for the collective unconscious as a religious concept, I am unsure. But I am curious about other examples of this phenomenon in all forms.
November 15th, 2008 at 12:31 pm
Nice example Chuck, it made me remember the quarrel between Gottfried Leibniz and Issac Newton over who first discovered the calculus. Both men lived in opposite parts of the world around the same time and both claim to have discovered the calculus without any knowledge of the other’s work. Now there is a lot of debate as to the particulars of each man’s discovery, but still, to have two people living in isolation from each other both discover something so complex and beautiful, at or around the same time, speaks to the possibility of some sycncronicitous force out there that might contain knowledge any man can tap, any where, and at any time.