Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido. A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of ThoughtJung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Philosophy
Psychology of the Unconscious: A Study of the Transformations and Symbolisms of the Libido. A Contribution to the History of the Evolution of Thought
Jung, C. G. (Carl Gustav)
Libido (Psychology); Mother and child; Psychoanalysis; Subconsciousness; Symbolism (Psychology)
The psychologist should accept this viewpoint without reservation as
peculiarly applicable to himself. To-day, indeed, in our civilization
the phallic processions, the Dionysian mysteries of classical Athens,
the barefaced Phallic emblems, have disappeared from our coins, houses,
temples and streets; so also have the theriomorphic representations of
the Deity been reduced to small remnants, like the Dove of the Holy
Ghost, the Lamb of God and the Cock of Peter adorning our church towers.
In the same way, the capture and violation of women have shrunken away
to crimes. Yet all of this does not affect the fact that we, in
childhood, go through a period in which the impulses toward these
archaic inclinations appear again and again, and that through all our
life we possess, side by side with the newly recruited, directed and
adapted thought, a phantastic thought which corresponds to the thought
of the centuries of antiquity and barbarism. Just as our bodies still
keep the reminders of old functions and conditions in many old-fashioned
organs, so our minds, too, which apparently have outgrown those archaic
tendencies, nevertheless bear the marks of the evolution passed through,
and the very ancient re-echoes, at least dreamily, in phantasies.
The symbolism which Freud has discovered, is revealed as an expression
of a thinking and of an impulse limited to the dream, to wrong conduct,
and to derangements of the mind, which form of thinking and impulse at
one time ruled as the mightiest influence in past culture epochs.
The question of _whence_ comes the inclination and ability which enables
the mind to express itself symbolically, brings us to the distinction
between the two kinds of thinking—the directed and adapted on one hand,
and the subjective, fed by our own egotistic wishes, on the other. The
latter form of thinking, presupposing that it were not constantly
corrected by the adapted thinking, must necessarily produce an
overwhelmingly subjectively distorted idea of the world. We regard this
state of mind as infantile. It lies in our individual past, and in the
past of mankind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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