What can Jung’s psychology offer shamanic work?

Who was Carl Jung? #

“Carl Jung (1875–1961) was a Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist”, famous for founding his own system of psychology.¹ He called it analytical psychology. He regarded the spiritual and the numinous as the most important aspects of his work. Amongst his best-known ideas are the personal and the collective unconscious; the archetypes, deep patterns shared by all humans; the Shadow, the parts of ourselves we cannot admit to; the persona, “a public face that is assumed when relating to others”;² and individuation, the long process of becoming who we really are. Therapeutic Shamanism draws on several of them, always in its own terms.

What does the Shadow offer shamanic work? #

A clear account of what happens to what we push away. “Carl Jung, the psychoanalyst, referred to this repressed material as the Shadow. The more we disown and repress parts of our self, the stronger they become, and the more they seem to take on a life of their own.” And “The only way to heal Shadow wounds is to face and embrace the repressed and disowned parts of self.”³ The same is true of feelings: if we try to bypass them, “they do not go away, but instead become part of what Jung called the Shadow”, something that “haunts us and becomes stronger the more we deny it.”⁴

This matters for shamanic work because Therapeutic Shamanism sees a whole realm built out of repressed material, the under-worldUnder-world. The realm of our repressed and disowned psychic energies, personal and collective: Jung’s Shadow and the unconscious, mapped shamanically. A part of the middle-world, created by the Fall, not the Lower-World, and psychotherapy’s proper territory rather than shamanism’s. Read the full answer: “The under-world is the realm of our repressed and unconscious middle-world psychic energies.”⁵ Jung’s Shadow helps a shamanic practitioner recognise that realm, and not mistake its “demons” for the beings of the Lower-World. See What is the under-world, and how is it different from the Lower-World?

Why does “making the darkness conscious” matter? #

Because it is the opposite of spiritual bypassing. As Jung put it: “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”⁶ A shamanic practice that only sought the light, and the Upper-WorldUpper-World. The realm of Father Sky and of Spirit: spacious, rarefied and clear, layered in tiers, offering not escape but perspective. Not better than the Lower-World: we ascend rooted, and bring the gifts back down. Read the full answer, would be avoiding the very work Jung describes. Therapeutic Shamanism starts in the Lower-World, and asks for the inner work to be done alongside it. See What is spiritual bypassing and how can psychotherapy help prevent it?

What does the persona offer shamanic work? #

A name for the mask we mistake for ourselves. “In reality, the middle-world selfMiddle-world self. The everyday self (ego, persona, head-and-heart), made of our stories and experiences. A genuine and needed part of the Inner Tribe: of service, not in command. Read the full answer is a mask. It is what Carl Jung called the ‘persona'”. “The problem is that we come to think that the mask is who we actually are.”⁷ Seeing through the mask is part of hollowing-outHollowing-out. The core, lifelong discipline of setting aside the middle-world self, its stories, agendas and preconceptions, so the Guides can work through us. The image: the shaman as hollow bone. Read the full answer, which makes room for the GuidesGuides. The Lower-World and Upper-World beings a practitioner works with and learns from, of whom the Power Animal is the first and foremost. True Guides are ethical to their core; the shaman’s power comes from the depth of these bonds, not from the shaman. More about this to work. See What is hollowing-out?

What can Jung’s archetypes offer? #

A way of thinking about patterns that are bigger than any one person. Jung used the word archetype “to describe universal, original and fundamental patterns residing deep within the Human psyche”. “Originally, Jung described only four archetypes. These were all parts-of-self and, from a shamanic perspective, all aspects of the middle-world self.”⁸ In Therapeutic Shamanism’s reading, Jung later came to see that archetypes “exist not only in the human collective unconscious, but as patterns in something beyond human”, and he called these greater patterns ‘psychoid Archetypes’.⁹

That later idea comes close to the shamanic experience: “the archetypal energies of the shamanic realms also exist independently of us, just beyond our perception”, and in a journey we clothe them in imagery we can relate to.¹⁰ See Is shamanic journeying imagination, and how are journeys co-created?

Did Jung know shamanic territory himself? #

He came close to it. “Although we have no record of Jung doing what we would recognise as shamanic journeying, Jung’s work was influenced by shamanism.”¹¹ During the crisis of his middle years, according to the writer Ruth Snowden, “He read about the shamanic soul quests of people in primal cultures”.¹² The psychotherapist C. Michael Smith reads Jung’s crisis this way: “From a shamanic perspective, Jung was now suffering a form of soul lossSoul-loss. The sending-away of parts of the self in order to survive: through shock or trauma, or (the chief modern cause) exiling our own parts to fit in. With Power-loss, one of the two root causes of shamanic illness. Read the full answer”. Of the inner figure Philemon, Jung himself wrote that “Philemon represented a force which was not myself.” Smith writes that “It is difficult to say that Jung was a shaman in the classical sense of the term”, but that “Jung can in some sense be called a shaman”, and that “Jung does not specify that he had a power animal, but he is clear that he had a spirit guide”, and indeed more than one.¹³

Jung also wrote movingly about nature. In a 1958 letter he referred to “the old idea that every country or people has its own angel, just as the earth has a soul.” He wrote that “Nature is not matter only, she is also spirit”, and described what modern people have lost: “No river contains a spirit, no tree means a man’s life”.¹⁴ Jung shared the sense of what modern people have lost; Therapeutic Shamanism traces that loss to domesticationDomestication. The process by which, in domesticating other species, we domesticated ourselves. When dated precisely, Domestication begins with the Neolithic era, before the Fall proper, which begins with the first city-state cultures around 4000 BCE. What rewilding works to undo. More about this and the FallThe Fall. The catastrophe at the root of the whole diagnosis: the shift from animist, egalitarian hunter-gatherer life to owning, agricultural Taker culture. In domesticating other species we domesticated ourselves, cutting ourselves off from Mother Earth (Power-loss) and from parts of our own nature (soul-loss). When dated precisely, the Fall begins with the first city-state cultures, around 4000 BCE (Domestication begins earlier, with the Neolithic). A sickness, not our true nature. ‘Fallen culture’ is used interchangeably with Taker culture; the Great Rupture is a looser alternate name. Read the full answer.

How does individuation relate to the True Adult? #

Closely. The traits described by humanistic and depth psychology, including Jung’s, in people who have done the work very much match the descriptions of healthy hunter-gatherer adults. The only major difference is that therapy does not usually reconnect us with the other-than-human world. Snowden notes that Jung himself compared individuation to “the difficult initiation tests often undergone by members of shamanic tribes.”¹⁵

The psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Anthony Stevens, in The Two Million-Year-Old Self (1993), takes a related comparison into evolutionary psychiatry. Humans evolved and lived out the greatest part of their existence as hunter-gatherers, and in his view the challenges of that early environment shaped the archetypes, the inborn patterns Jung described. When the world a person grows up in fails to meet the needs they carry, the result is what he calls “the frustration of archetypal intent”, and this, for him, is a basic cause of mental illness.¹⁶ He places all of this within the evolved human psyche. See What does it mean to become a True Adult?