Man and his Symbols

This is the book that I have not put it down after I downloaded it on my kindle: Man and his Symbols, by Carl Jung. In this precious book, Jung, an influential psychotherapist of 20th century and a student of Freud, talks about the importance of unconsciousness. While Freud was the pioneer for studying the unconscious or subconscious, Jung believes that the unconscious is far richer than merely a place for sexual repression as Freud argues.

Jung believes that the unconscious hosts a great deal of knowledge which is gained through evolution. It is not only our physical body that inherits the characteristics of our ancestors, our psyche (or soul) collects thousand years of wisdom of our ancestors as well. How could we scientifically proof this? No idea. However, Jung concluded this theory as he examined rituals of primitive tribes and many religions. He observed that similar patterns, so-called archetypes, are repeated in these spiritual rituals, while it is very unlikely that many of these groups, for example primitive tribes, have had any access to other ones. I wish I could have asked Jung (perhaps some one else had already asked, and I am unaware of) whether these similarities could simply origin from the fact that we are humans with similar physical constraints; why do we need to have the assumption of the accumulation of knowledge inherited from our ancestors? I think this is not really his point. It is clear that evolution influences our brain as much as our skeleton. He mostly wants to turn our attention to the unconscious, instead of taking solely the conscious into account.

Jung argues that the conscious is a novel phenomenon that has recently emerged in human species. Observing the behavior of primitives, he reports that they are not aware of the reason of doing their rituals. They do not think, they rely on their ancestors' wisdom. Nowadays, the role of consciousness is becoming so important. This is good, of course. But, in Jung's opinion, we pretend that we have been fully developed in terms of consciousness, we pretend that we are rationalized and we do not need any superstitious or spiritual belief, however, we feel inside its lack, especially when we face difficult situations. Jung believes that if we want to learn about our true selves, we must listen to our unconscious.

The unconscious talk with us in our dreams. Its language is symbolic. Symbols are not universal, and they should be interpreted differently for each dreamer. However, some patterns or archetypes exist in dreams, what Jung uses as a clue for his theory of the unconscious as the collective thoughts.

I have just finished the first chapter of this book, which is written by Jung himself. Other chapters are written by Jung's followers. This is a really really strange book, I feel so close to it. I always believe that we should listen to history, we should not disregard all past humans learned for thousands of years.

Last nights I have been paying much more attention to my dreams, not just regarding them as the representation of my worries during a day. I have also started painting the ideas that come to my dreams. I will soon publish some.

I also found these documentaries about Jung interesting. Hope you enjoy as well:

Carl Gustav Jung Documentary Pt. 1 of 2

Carl Gustav Jung Documentary Pt. 2 of 2