Finished reading an exciting book — an introduction to Jung’s psychology By Frieda Fordham.

I found the book in OXFAM’s used book shop for 3 pounds.

I formally read some textbooks on psychology in my college days. I was put off by Freudian approach where it says that the suppressed infantile sexual instincts drive humans. It in , to me, a bit morbid and also inconvenient to look at all our relationships and our human condition in that currency. Later I drifted into Marxian philosophy and activism. For a Marxian everything could be explained by the economic relationship. I wandered in that arid land for years reached a different destination found the reading of Jung’s psychology as returning home. I found it more complete because it included collective Unconscious for the generations passed by and also the Freudian interpretation of sexual instincts is only symbolic and need not be as morbid as he explains. For example, Oedipus complex is man’s urge for rebirth and which one may call as coming off age.

On one side Marxists have not grown beyond Pavlovian conditioning and Behavioralism while Neo Freudians have gained a lot of ground in understanding the human nature in the ambit of anthropology, mythology and the consciousness and its manifestations. I want to explore further into the expression of the psyche in our language and the words which will flow and use through the books of Jacques Lacan

The theories of Carl Gustav Jung are-

The unconscious builds the conscious part of our psyche. The unconscious is the older part, and Our mind is the epiphenomenon on the works of it. The ‘Ghost in the machine’, Unconscious is no less real than the physical, and it has its structure and is subject to its laws.

There are two parts to it.

One we think that man is a rational, mean he processes, understand and acts in a rational way like any physical phenomenon. It is far from the truth, and the behavior of humans is complex and the hidden part of the human psyche is far more influential and foundational.

The second part is that the real psychical world is in the subconscious, and it shapes the conscious part continuously. The reconcilement of these two realms, conscious and the unconscious leads to individuation, and this continuous individuation is essential to maintain the personality, lest it will disintegrate throwing up neurosis and the rest of it.

This reconciliation or the rapprochement or constant evolution of the conscious in light of the subconscious calling will happen when one is ready to embrace the shadow and makes oneself a complete man. Each one of us has a shadow which waits for inclusion.

The Unconscious of an individual consist of the ‘personal unconscious’ and the ‘collective unconscious’.

The collective subconscious has archetypes, A search for meaning in the wise old-man, as in YODA in ‘Star-wars’, the great mother, spirit and trickster. All our mythologies and have the same characterization.

Identifying the archetypes, animus and anima, which is the feminine in man and vice-versa in woman, completes the individuation and evolves the humans.

The archetypes express themselves in the form of dreams. Identify the symbolism in the dreams through the ‘ free association’ method of reverie confining to the dreams, unlike Freud who let his clients drift without any limits and confines.

Jordan Peterson who is a personality psychologist at Toronto University, a public speaker and intellectual, his theme is that one should have a goal of life which makes you take up the responsibility which in turn make you acquire the requisite skills to embark on a journey, hero’s journey. It is immaterial whether you win or lose. What matters is whether you have journeyed or not. Peterson’s approach seems to be from Nietzsche, Jung and mythology from Joseph Campbell. I think if we get a basic understanding of these philosophers, we may understand the world better.