Carl Gustav Jung (1875 to 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology. He gave us many of the words we now use for the inner world: the collective unconscious, archetypes, the Shadow, the persona and individuation. Therapeutic Shamanism uses several of his ideas, always in its own terms, and goes further than he did in one important way: it treats the beings met in the shamanic realms as real others, not only as parts of the human psyche.
Who was Carl Jung? #
A Swiss doctor who spent his life exploring the depths of the psyche. He was born on 26 July 1875 in Kesswil, a village in Switzerland, studied medicine in Basel, and trained as a psychiatrist at the Burghölzli clinic in Zurich.1 In 1907 he met Sigmund Freud in Vienna and for some years was seen as his likely successor, but his own way of thinking led to a break with Freud in 1913, followed by years of deep inner crisis.2 Out of that crisis came his own approach, analytical psychology, and much of his later work. He died at his home in Küsnacht, near Zurich, on 6 June 1961.3
His memoir, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, was published after his death, in 1963, and The Red Book, the private record of his inner journeys during the crisis years, was not published until 2009.4
What were his main ideas? #
The ones Therapeutic Shamanism uses most are explained in What can Jung’s psychology offer shamanic work?: the Shadow, the persona and the archetypes. Three more come up often.
The collective unconscious was, for Jung, a layer of the psyche shared by all humans. In his words, its contents “have never been conscious and they are not acquired, but inherited.”5 Individuation was his name for the lifelong process of becoming a whole person. He was clear that this does not mean drawing away from others: “the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation.”6 And through what he called active imagination, he would let inner images unfold and speak, and engage with them as if they were real.
The Jungian analyst Jolande Jacobi, who worked closely with Jung for many years, set out the stages of individuation in The Way of Individuation (1965). As she describes it, the first half of life is an “initiation into outer reality”, building a stable ego and a place in the world, and the second half turns towards the inner reality and what is essential, with the crisis of mid-life between them.7
What did Jung meet in his inner journeys? #
Beings he did not feel he had invented. The best known is Philemon, who first came to him in a dream as an old man flying out of the sky. “He had the horns of a bull and the wings of a kingfisher.”8 Jung painted him, and came to treat him as an inner teacher. The author C. Michael Smith, who has written on Jung and shamanism, does not go so far: “It is difficult to say that Jung was a shaman in the classical sense of the term”.9 See Are Power Animals and Guides just archetypes?
Did Jung meet indigenous peoples? #
Yes, and the meetings stayed with him. In 1925 he visited the Taos Pueblo in New Mexico, where he talked with a chief named “Ochwiay Biano (Mountain Lake)”. Mountain Lake told him that white people think with their heads. ““We think here,” he said, indicating his heart.” Jung took it as a mirror held up to Europe: “What we from our point of view call colonisation, missions to the heathen, spread of civilisation, etc., has another face”.10 On a journey to East Africa later that year and into the next, seeing a lone hunter on a hillside, he felt that “his world had been mine for countless millennia.”11
These writings criticise colonialism, but they also use the language of their day about “primitive” peoples, and Jung sometimes supplied his own meanings for what he saw.
Why does Jung matter to Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Because his maps of the psyche help us understand what happens on the way down. Jung is among the psychotherapists drawn on for Therapeutic Shamanism’s picture of what a healthy Adult is: “particularly from Rogers, Maslow, Reich and Jung”.12 He also had an important insight: “He discovered that we are programmed to seek out the Archetypal patterns in these layers.”13 All three of Paul Francis’s books list four of Jung’s books in their reading lists, including The Earth Has a Soul, a collection of his writings on nature.
Therapeutic Shamanism uses his words in its own way, too. Where Jung saw the collective unconscious as something we inherit, Therapeutic Shamanism puts the emphasis on what a culture pushes away: “The material that we repress collectively, as a society as a whole, becomes the ‘collective unconscious’.”14 See What is the under-world, and how is it different from the Lower-World?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism part company with Jung? #
Over whether the beings we meet in journeys are only inside us. Jung treated the figures he met as parts of the psyche, however deep. Smith writes: “Unfortunately Jung did not address the possibility of independently existing spirits”.15 Therapeutic Shamanism also notes the limits of his time: “Jung lived before the development of things like eco-psychology and eco-therapy”, and he “worked with individuals”.16 Therapeutic Shamanism meets Power AnimalsPower Animal. The Oversoul of a wild species, met as a single Lower-World being and bonded with in a deep, committed, usually lifelong soul-bond of unconditional love. The practitioner’s first and foremost Guide: Panther, not “my panther”. Read the full answer, 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 and the other-than-human Peoples as real others, in relationship. See What can shamanism offer Jungian work?
Is Jung’s work controversial? #
In some respects, yes. Scholars have questioned whether archetype theory can be tested at all. The researcher Christian Roesler, himself a Jungian, writes that Jung’s way of defining the archetype “has made this concept immune to every empirical review.”17 Some Jungians have answered by reworking the idea rather than defending it as Jung left it. The analyst Jean Knox, drawing on research into infant development and attachment, treats archetypes as patterns that form in early life rather than images we inherit,18 and Roesler himself suggests that “we are not born with a collective unconscious, but we grow into it.”19 Others have gone the opposite way and grounded the archetypes more firmly in biology. The psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Anthony Stevens, in The Two Million-Year-Old Self (1993), holds that the archetypes are “biological entities” that “evolved through natural selection”, and reads Jung’s “two million-year-old man that is in us all” as a vivid metaphor for the evolved human psyche.20 His writings on race and his conduct in the 1930s have also been criticised. The Jungian analyst Ruth Williams calls his pronouncements on race “unfortunate”, and records that Jung later admitted to the rabbi Leo Baeck: “Well, I slipped up”.21 Some who knew him answered the charges. Aniela Jaffé, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who was his pupil and collaborator, wrote an essay weighing the evidence for and against him, as a way of countering the claim that he had been a Nazi and an anti-Semite.22
