We must begin here if we want to make sense and use of them now. This isn’t at all unique what is unique is that these larger cultural biases had an effect on the specific models that Jung constructed. In the case of the materially castrated Christian world, this process involves re-integrating some of the “primitive’s psychology,” though now under the light of reason. For instance, the constant reference to “primitive people” implies a kind of wistful, noble savage myth, and this seems cognate with the ultimate goal of the Jungian psychoanalytic approach, which is to say, individuation. This was frequently the metaphorical-spatial sense he used when creating symbols, as we see in the layout of his mandalas or the quadripartite ‘types’, or the many other circular center oriented symbols he uses as guides.Įvidence for this rather sweeping claim is seen both in the language used, though much if not all of this is merely picked up from his own social environment rather than appearing as the result of particular malice. It may even be a symptom of the Enlightenment ideology to hang Foucault’s pendulum in the center of the city of one’s birth and arrange the whole world round that psychological center. Meditation is such a challenge in part because it seeks to make our time-travelling more at our will, rather than the whim of our unconscious). For example, as you walk down the street you think of a song from your youth, you laugh and it makes you think of a school dance ten years later, then you hear a car honk in the moment, and it puts you in another time. (Chronological-historical is not the only way to arrange a narrative, indeed, our experience of life is multi-threaded and non-linear. He chose to interpret a room in a multi-level house in terms of a cultural history of religion, industry, and colonialism, and that those strata should be arranged in such and such a way. The final flesh would be style, meaning, and the aesthetics that reflect back at the surface. From the choices made in terms of which pieces to value, and in what order they are presented, one’s authorship is defined. In fact, in literary analysis, the basis of narrative is generally understood as just that: the narrative skeleton is the collection of facts in a particular order. The specific history this dream lays out is in fact quite telling, as it is at least one vantage point of Jung’s sense of his own collective history, the history of western “progress.” A linear history, such as one presented within a worldview or ideology as the Enlightenment, is also a narrative. We can at this point move away from his own interpretation to consider it in its own context. To his thinking, this dream demonstrated the way that what he calls the collective unconscious overlaps the personal one, or perhaps how it is all a progressive shade of grey without a single defining line, save the ones we bring. In this dream, the house is built up in layers, a level and room atop the next, and it later occurred to him that these showed an ideological history which shaped his thought to that point, but in which he was also an active participant - the basement was built upon by the first floor, and so on, just as the “primitive” world was, according to this narrative, proceeded by the dark ages and Christian eras that were quickly losing power by the late 1800s. I discovered two broken skulls, obviously very old and half disintegrated. Thick dust lay on the floor, and in the dust were scattered bones and broken pottery, like remains of a primitive culture. These, too, I descended, and entered a low cave cut into the rock. When I pulled it, the stone slab lifted, and I again I saw a stairway of narrow stone steps leading down into the depths. It was of stone slabs, and in one of these I discovered a ring. As soon as I saw this I knew that the walls dated from Roman times. Beyond it, I discovered layers of brick among the ordinary stone blocks, and chips of brick in the mortar. I went from one room to another, thinking, “now I really must explore the whole house.” I came upon a heavy door, and opened it. The furnishing were medieval the floors were of red brick. There everything was much older, and I realized that this part of the house must date from about the fifteenth or sixteenth century. Descending the stairs, I reached the ground floor. I wondered that this should be my house, and thought, “Not bad.” But then it occurred to me that I did not know what the lower floor looked like. On the walls hung a number of precious old paintings. It was “My House.” I found myself in the upper story, where there was a kind of salon furnished with fine old pieces in rococo style. I was in a house that I did not know, which had two stories.
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