What is "Jungian astrology"?

[athenian200]

Athenian200, you asked why I cared so much that Jung falsified his data. I actually went into a lot of detail on Jung's specific examples (like Nicholas of Flüe) in a thread on Jungian astrology on the Astrodienst Forum and could possibly retrieve them if my own evidence is of any interest. See also Richard Noll on Jung's bogus "phallic solar man" example. (No? Phew!)

I think you figured me out pretty well in your post #33. (Which is also why, passiflora, I don't discount charges of fraud in psychology departments.) Academics have lost their jobs and reputations over charges of plagiarism and falsifying data. But the enormity of Jungian influence is far greater, when one considers the massive influence Jung had on analytical psychology and "modern psychological astrology." I can only attribute this to Jung's probable charismatic Alpha Male personality, and that the very density and variety of themes in his publications scared off anyone tempted to undertake a critical analysis.

Ah, I have to admit, I never really realized that those examples were meant to be evidence. I honestly just believed Jung was sharing anecdotes and discussing experiences that explain how he came to believe things, I didn't realize he was using those examples as justification and laying claim to an objective truth, possibly getting academic praise and influence for something like that. To my mind, they just sounded like Jung telling a story about his experiences, and I never really took it as more or less than that. And since I saw Jung as a guy trying to tell an interesting story above all else, I wouldn't have really thought anything of him exaggerating a bit to make it more grandiose. So in some ways, I saw Jung more clearly than most people in terms of what he was actually doing, but missed the moral problem with it because I didn't realize how he was trying to be perceived by others and saw only the mystic and storyteller without ever really noticing the fraudulent academic trying to appear respectable. I think part of it is because by modern standards, I would expect an objective study to have a lot of charts and mathematical justifications, so I naturally think if someone is just telling anecdotes then it's about as meaningful as some random guy on a forum telling me what worked for him.

Somehow it manages to educate therapists who actually help people.

Yeah, but sometimes I wonder if the primary value is the counseling itself. Just having someone to talk to about your problems who doesn't judge you, and seems to be applying some kind of system in the process.

As an INTJ (or its vernacular equivalent) my main approach to life is analytical and even skeptical. I do have a strong spiritual component, but it is non-Orthodox. I was raised by parents who called themselves "free thinkers." I was never baptized, confirmed, or told I was anything other than vaguely Protestant. My ex-husband is Jewish and I converted to Judaism prior to our marriage (me at 24) because it was so important to him. I was active in that faith for 20 years. At our separation and divorce I became inactive; and throughout I picked up on some other belief systems, but nothing involving a renunciation of Judaism or conversion to another faith. I will add, that as an academic, I had colleagues who were both scientists and active members of their religious faiths. My husband is an atheist but he never minded my excursions into several different thought systems, including astrology. The older I get (b. 1949) the more I glimpse God's Plan for my life (however one defines Divine Consciousness.)

Wow, you've had an interesting life, explored a lot of different belief systems and been encouraged to think for yourself from a young age, in a time when people were probably not as open-minded about such things as they are now.

As an INFJ, my approach to life is... complex. The best way I've found to describe it is this dream-image that always stuck with me. It's a bit long and drawn out, so I've italicized the text in case you want to skip it.

Picture three characters. One is a redcoat named James, looking like he's straight out of the 18th century from fighting the Revolutionary War on the British side. He's always holding a Bible and a sword, though sometimes the Bible turns into other things, like a student handbook or any kind of instruction manual. He generally is extremely dutiful, modest, respects authority, follows the rules, and tends to focus on things like morality, duty, behaving properly, etc. I'd say he's the main "face" I tend to show people in real life. If he were a real person, someone might diagnose him with dysthymia, because he is unable to derive pleasure from his own actions and is totally dependent on the approval of external authority figures to feel happy.

Another is a Vulcan from the 23rd century named Solok, looking like he just stepped off a starship. He holds a communicator and something like either a magnifying glass or a microscope, always looks at things more closely and scrutinizes them, while always sending and receiving observations. He tends to be very stoic and always points out when the other characters are doing or saying something illogical. He always tries to analyze everything and reduce the world to logic, tends to be most interested in technology and generally thinks technology and logic can solve every problem. He generally feels very detached from the world and from himself, just seems to be an observer who feels like he's watching everything from the outside. Almost seems dissociated in some way.

Finally, you have a girl named Althea. She would be an American artist and writer who was born about 10 years before I was in real life, with painted nails and a blue dress. For whatever reason she doesn't like shoes, or at most will wear flip-flops. She's always holding a pencil and a mirror. The pencil she uses to record her thoughts and express herself, and the mirror is something she's always using not only to gaze at her own appearance, but she also uses it to see other worlds, other times and places, etc. Basically, the impression you get is that she's very imaginative, creative, curious, tries to predict things. The main problem is that, well, she's female and doesn't feel very comfortable living in my male body, so she usually lets James or Solok face the world while she stays in the background.

So now, you can see why Jung's typology seems mostly reasonable to me. James and Solok come very close to being obvious analogies to Thinking and Feeling, because James and Solok are always arguing, with James negatively comparing Solok to French revolutionaries and various Enlightenment figures, saying he's seen that kind of thing before, and Solok pointing out how James isn't very logical and is too attached to authority figures and the past. Which leaves Althea (who I suppose would be Intuition) usually being the one to try and stop the fight, to come up with a compromise the other two can live with. Or, to put it another way... in some ways, it's like the dynamic in Star Trek, with James being a bit like McCoy and Solok being like Spock, with the problem that there is no Kirk or Picard figure who can take charge. Just Althea, who really doesn't want to be in charge, but is somehow more competent than the other two in any situation where there aren't clear rules or logical objectives to follow.

I don't think I can convince a believer in Jung or Cayce of my critique. Probably the diplomatic course of action is to look for common ground. So far as Jung goes, I'd be happy if we could move beyond the Collective Unconscious as unnecessary to whatever one wants to extrapolate from it, and the "animus-driven woman." Jung apparently got his concept of the "anima" from his childhood home's housemaid and Germanic folklore about Nixies, with an admixture of literary and historical references to men's muses.

Oh yeah, I definitely feel like the anima concept doesn't work well for me and has never described my experience very well. And I would say the Collective Unconscious isn't really necessary in astrology in particular, because you already have the planets named for the gods, and the signs with strong symbolism. If you study astrology, you already believe in the power of archetypes in some form or another, so a collective unconscious as a justification for teaching people to see the value in archetypes is hardly needed... well, unless you're in the Southern Hemisphere and you need a justification for why the tropical zodiac based on seasons should still work "normally" rather than being aligned to the actual seasons of the Southern Hemisphere. LOL.

I do think the idea of Shadow Material has a lot of relevance to astrology. Having natal Pluto opposite sun, I was often plagued by bullies (typically employment supervisors) who seemingly disliked me as an Uppity Woman, and tried to destroy my career. Pluto was never a planet I particular understood or wanted. Then one day I realized that I am all of the planets in my chart, whether I like them or don't. I had to own my "inner Pluto." The bullies dropped away, except for a few subsequent kerfuffles that quickly passed.

That makes a lot of sense to me. And that can be especially difficult, particularly when some of the planets are in opposition or work at cross-purposes.

 

[david starling]

Jung on Numbers - Jungian Center for the Spiritual Sciences

Sue Mehrtens is the author of this and all the other blog essays on this site. The opinions expressed in these essays are her own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of other Jungian Center faculty or Board members. Jung on Numbers A mathematician once remarked that...

jungiancenter.org

 

[passiflora]

I will mention a third time that the Myers-Briggs isn't representative of Jung. There is a wide gap between describing types in written work and translating them into an instrument. Despite being a psychiatrist, Jung was a counselor and therapist.

I believe there are some common things you can stabilize for people, like meditation, exercise, diet, work, sleep -- and I know how to help people self-tailor those things without causing harm. Like, how to look at astrology but hold it lightly, or choose the right kind of meditation for the moment, or take a literary approach to your own life. Therapy is both art and science, because people are DIFFERENT. They internalize and externalize the same things differently. To not form a wrong framework and get a person stuck in it, learning compulsively helps (especially learning about different cultures), but you have to stay humble even with that.

Training in research psychology (the field that claims to be more of a science, and has the repeated problems) and counseling psychology are very different. Research psychologists can't sit with people. There are lots of people who get THAT kind of training in the hopes of becoming the next Edward Bernays. You can get a PhD without ever applying the experimental and academic concepts to the real world of helping people.

Thank goodness for trauma therapists! Their work is hard. If I had a wish for them it would be ... let less trauma to be visited on others at the policy level.

You mentioned anima and animus. They are pretty interesting concepts, especially as shadow or yin/yang. A lot of women in the west have a really hard time admitting they might be angry, just as men have a hard time with acknowledging their own femininity. The manifestations are different across cultures and even across people. I'm pretty sure the Moon in 10th of one of my kiddos is a reference to the father. Another indication archetypes are to be treated as dynamic entities, not literal ones with lists of fixed characteristics.

 

[athenian200]

I will mention a third time that the Myers-Briggs isn't representative of Jung. There is a wide gap between describing types in written work and translating them into an instrument. Despite being a psychiatrist, Jung was a counselor and therapist.

Well, I would actually argue that Myers-Briggs does at least represent an offshoot of Jungian thought, and that Jungian ideas do tend to enter the mix when having longer discussions about self-discovery of type rather than just taking the test and having done with it. But the problem is there are tons of offshoots of Jung's ideas. Lenore Thompson had her idea of what Jung meant. Dario Nardi had his. Liz Greene had her ideas. And if you read Gifts Differing, Isabel Myers actually summarizes a lot of key points about Jung's typology. And someone named Augusta in Russia came up with a totally different way of interpreting Jung's typology that isn't compatible with MBTI at all, called Socionics.

My point is, they are all rooted in Jung, but none of them agree exactly. They all fall under a very, very broadly "Jungian" umbrella but have only a little bit of common ground. Like, for instance, Orthodox, Catholic, Gnostic, and Protestant groups may all be denominations of Christianity, but they would all have wildly different ideas of what they believe in and what they think Jesus actually stood for. It's the same way with schools of thought influenced by Jung. There are several groups branch off from him, and none of them agree with each other 100%.

 

[waybread]

One thing that's always puzzled me about Jungian practice and writings, is that he is so typically the reference point. Jungians continually go back to the well of Jung's authority. Sometimes his disciples are mentioned, but it's usually (so far as I can determine) done as an elaboration of Jung's thought, not as an expansion into new directions. Myers-Briggs either being claimed as a useful exception but still rooted in Jung, or disavowed as in, "It's not really Jung."]

[Correct me if I'm wrong about that.]

This is so different from other fields where founders are acknowledged and even revered, but not the usual reference point. In evolutionary biology, for example, Darwin is acknowledged as The major founder, but the field has been modified extensively by newer research in genetics, paleontology, and research at the cellular and even molecular level.

So far as religion goes, sometimes the founders get pushed pretty far into the background, as more recent leaders propound their doctrines and gain new followers.

 

[passiflora]

Yes, as time passes it's true interpretations may change. Others may use or appropriate concepts, and some have less fidelity to the spirit than others. Where the MBTI is concerned Jung went to great lengths not to instrumentalize the types, because he was concerned that would get people stuck. So the MBTI being the most famous "Jungian" thing is distasteful if you've spent time reading him. The joke is that Jung would not have liked Jungians, because they do this "thing" of trying to systematize, fix, and enshrine things that should be understood as both dynamic and as products of their time.

If you read the article linked earlier in the thread about the way the MBTI institute tries to enshrine the instrument, and conceal Isabel Myers' writings (especially on race), you'd see the perfect example:

"But Whether decidedly inferior or not, for Isabel, the "colored woman" was not a person but a lesser projection of the white office worker's psyche. In a long letter to Hay, Isabel criticized the office worker's "fervent insistence upon the symbolically true proposition" that "everybody is equal, of equal value, with equal prospects for development." Symbolically, all men may have been created equal. In reality, equality seemed an impossible aspiration for a personality test that was constructed in 1947.

I learn that, in the beginning, men's and women's questionnaire results were evaluated on notably different scoring scales, particularly when it came to the thinking (T) and feeling (F) functions. These, it was assumed, were differently accessible to men versus women. Isabel was hardly the first person to suggest that women, as a matter of biological destiny, set greater store by "sympathy" and "appreciation" than men, who were more logically inclined in their decision making. She was, however, one of the first to institute this difference in workplace evaluations." - from Uncovering the Secret History of Myers-Briggs

This last couple of sentences drives me crazy, because... well... it confuses nature and nurture, and personality / shadow effects. If you watched the presidential debate recently, one thing that is striking is how emotional Donald Trump is. Kamala got under his skin right away.

 

[waybread]

Ah, I have to admit, I never really realized that those examples were meant to be evidence. I honestly just believed Jung was sharing anecdotes and discussing experiences that explain how he came to believe things, I didn't realize he was using those examples as justification and laying claim to an objective truth, possibly getting academic praise and influence for something like that. To my mind, they just sounded like Jung telling a story about his experiences, and I never really took it as more or less than that. And since I saw Jung as a guy trying to tell an interesting story above all else, I wouldn't have really thought anything of him exaggerating a bit to make it more grandiose. So in some ways, I saw Jung more clearly than most people in terms of what he was actually doing, but missed the moral problem with it because I didn't realize how he was trying to be perceived by others and saw only the mystic and storyteller without ever really noticing the fraudulent academic trying to appear respectable. I think part of it is because by modern standards, I would expect an objective study to have a lot of charts and mathematical justifications, so I naturally think if someone is just telling anecdotes then it's about as meaningful as some random guy on a forum telling me what worked for him.

Yeah, but sometimes I wonder if the primary value is the counseling itself. Just having someone to talk to about your problems who doesn't judge you, and seems to be applying some kind of system in the process.

Wow, you've had an interesting life, explored a lot of different belief systems and been encouraged to think for yourself from a young age, in a time when people were probably not as open-minded about such things as they are now.

As an INFJ, my approach to life is... complex. The best way I've found to describe it is this dream-image that always stuck with me. It's a bit long and drawn out, so I've italicized the text in case you want to skip it.

Picture three characters. One is a redcoat named James, looking like he's straight out of the 18th century from fighting the Revolutionary War on the British side. He's always holding a Bible and a sword, though sometimes the Bible turns into other things, like a student handbook or any kind of instruction manual. He generally is extremely dutiful, modest, respects authority, follows the rules, and tends to focus on things like morality, duty, behaving properly, etc. I'd say he's the main "face" I tend to show people in real life. If he were a real person, someone might diagnose him with dysthymia, because he is unable to derive pleasure from his own actions and is totally dependent on the approval of external authority figures to feel happy.

Another is a Vulcan from the 23rd century named Solok, looking like he just stepped off a starship. He holds a communicator and something like either a magnifying glass or a microscope, always looks at things more closely and scrutinizes them, while always sending and receiving observations. He tends to be very stoic and always points out when the other characters are doing or saying something illogical. He always tries to analyze everything and reduce the world to logic, tends to be most interested in technology and generally thinks technology and logic can solve every problem. He generally feels very detached from the world and from himself, just seems to be an observer who feels like he's watching everything from the outside. Almost seems dissociated in some way.

Finally, you have a girl named Althea. She would be an American artist and writer who was born about 10 years before I was in real life, with painted nails and a blue dress. For whatever reason she doesn't like shoes, or at most will wear flip-flops. She's always holding a pencil and a mirror. The pencil she uses to record her thoughts and express herself, and the mirror is something she's always using not only to gaze at her own appearance, but she also uses it to see other worlds, other times and places, etc. Basically, the impression you get is that she's very imaginative, creative, curious, tries to predict things. The main problem is that, well, she's female and doesn't feel very comfortable living in my male body, so she usually lets James or Solok face the world while she stays in the background.

So now, you can see why Jung's typology seems mostly reasonable to me. James and Solok come very close to being obvious analogies to Thinking and Feeling, because James and Solok are always arguing, with James negatively comparing Solok to French revolutionaries and various Enlightenment figures, saying he's seen that kind of thing before, and Solok pointing out how James isn't very logical and is too attached to authority figures and the past. Which leaves Althea (who I suppose would be Intuition) usually being the one to try and stop the fight, to come up with a compromise the other two can live with. Or, to put it another way... in some ways, it's like the dynamic in Star Trek, with James being a bit like McCoy and Solok being like Spock, with the problem that there is no Kirk or Picard figure who can take charge. Just Althea, who really doesn't want to be in charge, but is somehow more competent than the other two in any situation where there aren't clear rules or logical objectives to follow.

Oh yeah, I definitely feel like the anima concept doesn't work well for me and has never described my experience very well. And I would say the Collective Unconscious isn't really necessary in astrology in particular, because you already have the planets named for the gods, and the signs with strong symbolism. If you study astrology, you already believe in the power of archetypes in some form or another, so a collective unconscious as a justification for teaching people to see the value in archetypes is hardly needed... well, unless you're in the Southern Hemisphere and you need a justification for why the tropical zodiac based on seasons should still work "normally" rather than being aligned to the actual seasons of the Southern Hemisphere. LOL.

That makes a lot of sense to me. And that can be especially difficult, particularly when some of the planets are in opposition or work at cross-purposes.

I'd have to go back over some old Astrodienst posts to cite specific passages from Jung, but my recollection is that they were from his book Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, but it might have been something else, and that Jung wrote it specifically to provide evidence in support of his theories. If that's not what he was doing, the question becomes, where and what actually is the evidence?

In the past, I think people were scared off by Jung's erudition, but today we have the Internet which pre-digests a lot of information and makes it easier to find.

One of Jung's first and most telling example, to me, was his use of Nicholas of Flüe as this simple Brother Nicholas sequestered in a remote mountain area, who could not possibly have had the grandiose visions he expressed unless they emerged from the collective unconscious. I looked him up, and it turned out this Nicholas is the patron saint of Switzerland. In his day, he was well connected with the Vatican and the larger world of education.

It's hard to say what Jung's motives were, but I wonder if he saw himself as the great man who formulates reality.

Your dream is really interesting: certainly ripe for Jungian analysis! Did you record the date? A long time ago I kept a dream journal, and was struck by how dream symbolism showed up in daily transits; notably by and to the "subconscious" planets: moon, Pluto, and Neptune. If you know the dream date, it would be interesting to look at your natal chart with transits, and to see how dream symbols match up with the heavens.

For example, the woman with bare feet. Pisces rules the feet. Mars rules the color red and soldiers. Star Trek Vulcans seem like a mix of Mercury and Saturn; but underneath their remarkable self control were volcanic emotions.

 

[waybread]

Hi, Passiflora -- I learned a new term from one of your posts: "iatric," where you referred to harm done to people by medical or psychology professionals.

I think there is a problem of health professionals writing and treating patients/clients out of their own ethnic biases. I think there are research specialties that look for more culturally appropriate approaches to health care, like medical anthropology and cultural psychology.

I can't say that Jungian psychology ever harmed anyone. But I wonder if some of the concepts did people much good, either. I personally have trouble with the idea that the psyche consists of an inner feminine and an inner masculine. I've seen them described in very traditional terms: caring and nurturing, versus courageous and assertive, for example. I understand that there is a way to view these abstractly, but then how many women have been criticized for being animus-driven (or its vulgar slang equivalent.) How many boys have been mocked mercilessly for being too effeminate?

I'm curious as to how you see Jungian psychology today dealing with gendered roles and identities.

 

[athenian200]

I'd have to go back over some old Astrodienst posts to cite specific passages from Jung, but my recollection is that they were from his book Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, but it might have been something else, and that Jung wrote it specifically to provide evidence in support of his theories. If that's not what he was doing, the question becomes, where and what actually is the evidence?

In the past, I think people were scared off by Jung's erudition, but today we have the Internet which pre-digests a lot of information and makes it easier to find.

One of Jung's first and most telling example, to me, was his use of Nicholas of Flüe as this simple Brother Nicholas sequestered in a remote mountain area, who could not possibly have had the grandiose visions he expressed unless they emerged from the collective unconscious. I looked him up, and it turned out this Nicholas is the patron saint of Switzerland. In his day, he was well connected with the Vatican and the larger world of education.

Yeah, I certainly don't buy into the idea of a collective unconscious with rich, specific images like Jung is talking about. I believe there might be shared instincts that act like a sort of primal grammar that prepares us to acquire certain archetypes from our culture (like warrior, father, wise elder, caregiver, etc), but nothing as elaborate as what Jung was claiming. If anything, the biggest problem with Jung's claim isn't even that the story might be false. It's that if it were true, a collective unconscious wouldn't be the only rational explanation.

For instance, how does Jung know that this Brother Nicholas himself hasn't had a past life where he did learn all of that stuff? Past lives and remote viewing are just as probable as a collective unconscious. Or, what about telepathy? Who is to say he is getting the images from a collective unconscious rather than from a specific person's mind through an unusual mechanism? The mere fact that Brother Nicholas is seeing something that he has no experience with tells us nothing about how he is seeing it, therefore it wouldn't be evidence of a specific theory even if the story was 100% true, at least not in my mind. In fact, Brother Nicholas himself would probably say it came from God. Is that any more or less likely than the collective unconscious? So yeah... I guess my issue is that the whole idea is unfalsifiable in the first place, and I am not sure how Jung got academics to take him seriously in this regard to start with if they valued solid evidence.

Your dream is really interesting: certainly ripe for Jungian analysis! Did you record the date? A long time ago I kept a dream journal, and was struck by how dream symbolism showed up in daily transits; notably by and to the "subconscious" planets: moon, Pluto, and Neptune. If you know the dream date, it would be interesting to look at your natal chart with transits, and to see how dream symbols match up with the heavens.

I appreciate the interest! I don't know the exact date, but I do know the original dream must have been during the summer of 2007, after I graduated from high school but before I tried going to community college for the first time. That's the only way the timeline for the dream makes any sense, because I know I'd already graduated from high school but hadn't had any college classes yet. That's unfortunately a pretty large window, and while I did record the dream, it wasn't on anything that gave it a timestamp.

For example, the woman with bare feet. Pisces rules the feet. Mars rules the color red and soldiers. Star Trek Vulcans seem like a mix of Mercury and Saturn; but underneath their remarkable self control were volcanic emotions.

Well, I am definitely not too surprised by most of the symbolism, even just looking at my natal chart. Althea would mostly be centered around Venus. I tend to associate her with Venus in the 12th (12th house has the same body part associations as Pisces) in Taurus, ruling over the Moon in the 5th house in Libra, and also over Jupiter which is also in the 12th in Taurus. As for James, I have an entire stellium of planets (including Mars and Saturn) in Capricorn, as well as the Sun in Aries. It's really less clear what Solok represents in the chart, but I do have an Aquarius Midheaven, as well as Mercury in Pisces conjunct the North Node, so he could be connected with that. Really, I should probably start a thread related to my chart somewhere if I want to go into more detail on this, though.

 

[passiflora]

Jung's writings on gender are a product of his time and place and pretty unappealing. His own behavior was rank. He married his wife for money and both depended on her and treated her badly. How much worse he was than his contemporaries, not sure. Sleeping with your patients is a total abuse of authority several steps above general patriarchy. For what it's worth, none of my own analysts absorbed the nasty dimensions of his writings or behaviors literally or imposed them.

Wading through these concepts is a constant exercise in hold the baby, drain the bathwater. Sometimes it was only possible by looking at other cultures' similar concepts and trying to pause on rejection/judgment. Like, yin/yang also have gender, color, temperature characteristics. When I was in my 20s and 30s it was easy to interpret "the feminine" as equivalent to the female, which is not necessary. It's more valuable to see series of polarities, which are compatible with there being a spectrum between poles.

After a long time I came to see anima and animus as helpful thanks to astrology. Meeting men with their Sun conjunct my Mars and observing their personalities triggered better understanding of my own animus. Animus is not only anger, the way Mars is not only war. Now this is one of my favorite lightweight things to do in "civilian" life, to look at the ways charts line up for understanding more about our social and projective identifications with the world.

 

[waybread]

Athenian200, I just googled, "what is the evidence for Jung's collective unconscious?" and up popped this article from an international Jungian organization:

The Collective Unconscious – International Association of Analytical Psychology – IAAP

iaap.org

So yeah-- it looks like a lot of anecdotal examples that could just as easily be explained by learned transmitted narratives and imagery. Psychologist Richard Noll pointed out that the man with the solar phallic dream was not even Jung's patient; and that the imagery of Mithraism was in vogue at the time.

I don't know if you want to look at transits at the approximate time when you might have had that dream, but I found that transits to or by the "subconscious" planets Pluto, Neptune, and moon were the most common. That might help narrow down the dates some.

Passiflora, thanks for your explanation. If there are polarities within the psyche, it would be nice not to encode them as male or female, but as **human** traits.

 

[david starling]

Athenian200, I just googled, "what is the evidence for Jung's collective unconscious?" and up popped this article from an international Jungian organization:

The Collective Unconscious – International Association of Analytical Psychology – IAAP

iaap.org

So yeah-- it looks like a lot of anecdotal examples that could just as easily be explained by learned transmitted narratives and imagery. Psychologist Richard Noll pointed out that the man with the solar phallic dream was not even Jung's patient; and that the imagery of Mithraism was in vogue at the time.

I don't know if you want to look at transits at the approximate time when you might have had that dream, but I found that transits to or by the "subconscious" planets Pluto, Neptune, and moon were the most common. That might help narrow down the dates some.

Passiflora, thanks for your explanation. If there are polarities within the psyche, it would be nice not to encode them as male or female, but as **human** traits.

Question - did Jung ever express an opinion about "Yods"?

 

[athenian200]

So yeah-- it looks like a lot of anecdotal examples that could just as easily be explained by learned transmitted narratives and imagery. Psychologist Richard Noll pointed out that the man with the solar phallic dream was not even Jung's patient; and that the imagery of Mithraism was in vogue at the time.

Yeah, it honestly sounds like Jung had no evidence at all, and people just ignored this for whatever reason.

In fact, I think I may have actually come up with better evidence off-the-cuff for my idea of what I assumed Jung meant, than Jung himself did for his own theory. Like, I was prepared to talk about how ducks imprint on humans instead of their mothers in some cases, and then suggest that ducks have a vague, unformed "mother archetype" in their minds on some instinctive level, which has to be filled out with experience, and if it gets filled in with the wrong thing or with nonsense, the ducks will behave strangely. Also, each culture usually has a clear warrior archetype, a clear caregiver archetype, etc... even if the details are different, the core of the archetype tends to be there in totally unrelated cultures across time and space.

My idea was to claim that humans have more complex minds that need to imprint on multiple vague, unformed archetypes similar to a duck with their mother at a young age, and that this process can very easily be messed up. The reason why my theory wouldn't be exciting? Well... because... the only implications if it's true, are that it's really important for parents to read a lot of stories to their children and make sure they are exposed to a variety of good role-models from a young age, so that they are aware of how many different ways people can be in the world at various stages of life, what kind of careers there are, etc. Which isn't that far off from common sense about how to raise children anyway.

But what I didn't realize is that Jung is not claiming that we have specially-shaped empty archetype slots in our mind at birth waiting for culture to fill them in with something more proper later on, he's claiming the archetypes exist in a complete, detailed form somewhere waiting to be accessed, and that we would have these very specific images in our head without learning. I mean, I think I assumed Jung meant something more like what I described above rather than what his evidence shows he was actually saying, because I was mostly focused on his typology and his list of archetypes, wasn't as interested in his evidence or understanding exactly what he meant by collective unconscious.

I wonder now... it is possible that people didn't want to correct Jung on this too much because he was a big name at the time, and they all wanted to cite him in their own research for whatever they thought he meant in order to get funding and grant money to take whatever inspiration they got from assuming they knew what he meant and run with it, sort of like I just did?

I don't know if you want to look at transits at the approximate time when you might have had that dream, but I found that transits to or by the "subconscious" planets Pluto, Neptune, and moon were the most common. That might help narrow down the dates some.

I definitely will try looking at that, I just never would have thought to do that without you suggesting it. Thanks for the idea!

 

[waybread]

Well, now I am starting to wonder about sociobiology and its academic cousins like ethology and primatology.

Although I think a lot of Jungian archetypes could be traced to their pathways of origin and diffusion, some seem to be cooked into basic human biology and social organization. The Mother. The Rival. The Elder. Even thinking about the Bible (Old Testament), with its clear Egyptian and Mesopotamian antecedents, we can see archetypes like the Patriarch, the Rebel, the Outcast, the marriageable Young Woman, that were part of the extended family clan structure of the ancient Near East. There may be a chicken-and-egg question here about archetype origins, but I don't think Jung ever extended his archetypes to higher primates, where we see a hierarchical social organization in extended family groupings.

So maybe Darwin is more relevant than I first thought. Imprinting in young birds gives them a better chance of survival. (Noticeable if you watched a mother duck swimming with her brood spread out behind her.) "Survival of the fittest" seemingly selects for larger more aggressive males.

It's as though Jung, in promoting the Collective Unconscious, missed ethology on the one hand, and ancient literary traditions, on the other.

Cultural traditions often express or mask basic animal behavior. "Our guys are bigger and tougher than your guys." (Sounds a bit like football rivalries.)

 

[athenian200]

Yeah, so now I think I finally understand why no one questioned Jung's idea of the collective unconscious. It's probably because he was challenging an idea that everyone knew was flawed or missing something... the concept of tabula rasa, or blank slate, which suggests everything in a human's nature is entirely the result of nurture and purely arises from culture and upbringing.

So, a biologist would see it and think he's suggesting we've evolved biological instincts that drive us to understand and occupy various roles in society simply as a part of being social animals, and those roles are represented in our minds as primal archetypes. A philosopher might think he's simply reformulating Plato's theory of forms and feel vindicated in that way. A sociologist or an anthropologist might think Jung is talking about how the various forms of human social organization tend to give rise to similar social roles and archetypes across very different cultures, and also think that is common sense. And of course, we all know what an astrologer is going to think... that the archetypes arise from the planets and constellations somehow.

I suspect at the time Jung was proposing this idea, everyone was tired of the old tabula rasa theory of human nature, and anything that was pushing the other way was seen as legitimate. Jung sounded upon superficial analysis, like he was saying something reasonable to people in any field that might have been interested. His idea was vague enough that he didn't seem to be taking anyone's side, and what he was saying sounded like a very profound way of saying something so close to common sense for several possible scientific fields, that everyone thought they agreed with him or got what he meant. But in reality, no one got what he meant and everyone was too overconfident in their assumption that they understood what he was getting at, just like I was.

Best of all, his most vocal critics at the time likely would have been those who were invested in the old tabula rasa concepts, and thus wouldn't have been taken seriously by the majority who were challenging it.

 

[passiflora]

"Jung missed ancient literary traditions" is a bizarre place to land after 3 pages of discussion! There are really wonderful post-Jungian writers out there, so I hope you don't miss out on them due to holding conclusions too closely. It's actually that comparative literature studies in university missed Jung. How much painful reading of Lacan, Julia Kristeva and the other post-Freudians did I endure as an undergrad before discovering Jung.

 

[athenian200]

"Jung missed ancient literary traditions" is a bizarre place to land after 3 pages of discussion! There are really wonderful post-Jungian writers out there, so I hope you don't miss out on them due to holding conclusions too closely. It's actually that comparative literature studies in university missed Jung. How much painful reading of Lacan, Julia Kristeva and the other post-Freudians did I endure as an undergrad before discovering Jung.

I think all this means is that people shouldn't cite Jung in academic papers, and that he simply didn't have the needed rigor in his ideas for them to hold up in the university environment. Basically, you wouldn't want to use these concepts in a serious situation where someone might die if they are not 100% objectively true in a rigorous, scientific sense.

But on the other hand, if you really don't care very much about Jung's theoretical justifications for his typology and archetypes, and just want to use his typology and archetypes as he did, in trying to perform psychoanalysis and interpret people's dreams, then the flaws in the collective unconscious as a scientific concept really aren't a major problem. Especially not for Jungian astrologers, who are already practicing an art that no official educational accreditor would be willing to accredit degrees or courses on anyway, and which has largely been dismissed as pseudoscience.

In other words, being associated with Jung is not really a liability for your typical astrologer, unless they are the kind of astrologer that clings for dear life to the Gauquelin studies and continues to insist they have objective statistical evidence for astrology to this day. But otherwise, astrology pretty much falls into the same category as faith healing or religious counseling. Yes, they will let people receive counseling according to their personal beliefs, but no one in academia or science is going to take it seriously.

I will admit, the discussion we had likely shouldn't affect the average astrologer. It's just that she used to be in academia, and I'm still in college, so I can't help but care at least a bit about the fact that Jung's ideas were originally proposed in an academic context and no longer hold up there, even if I know that astrology isn't practiced in that realm anyway. The issue for me is that I'm also into psychology and I'm a bit saddened at how Jung's credibility has fallen through in that field, leaving Jungian psychologists who've spent years building stuff on his work as a foundation on the fringes. Though, perhaps everyone else who followed him and used his work will have to rise to the task of putting foundations under the castles that Jung built in the air someday.

Don't mind me too much... I'm just a person with a Gemini ascendant and a Mercury in Pisces that occasionally laments the fact that so many of the things I want to have certainty about and know precisely are ultimately unknowable and lost in a miasma of subjectivity and guesswork that makes me fairly uncomfortable at times.

 

[david starling]

Astrology is an artfully crafted philosophy. If one doesn't subscribe to it, one won't be able to see it manifesting.

 

[waybread]

I happen to think evidence is important. Astrology is not and will not become a science. This doesn't mean it's not empirical. History, and legal studies are not sciences ( humanities) but nobody could write a serious work of history or try a court case without actual evidence.

The problem I have with Jung is that his evidence is so thin and much of it appears to have been falsified. Like seriously so.

I went through a period of a few years in the 1990s of keeping a dream journal I took a dream workshop with a woman who had a Ph. D. in counseling and a Jungian diploma. Very rarely did my dreams include real archetypes, and our coaching from the convener had no reference to archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Rather, she said to ask, in reviewing a dream, "what do these symbols or people mean to you?" Also, that a known person in a dream suggests that their meaning to the dreamer is up to consciousness. A stranger in a dream, particularly one of another ethnicity (race) symbolizes something not yet brought up to consciousness.

Most dreams are pretty goofy, and consist of a reorganization of events in the person's real life. One in a while (like Athenian200's dream) they can be highly symbolic and powerful, but most dreams are pretty ordinary.

Combing a nativity, its transits, and dream records is pretty revealing.

It is hard to remember dreams, but with effort and practice it can be done. The problem, for busy people, is more about finding the time between waking and having to start the rest of the day.

And who needs the Collective Unconscious? What useful purpose does it serve? Would Jungian analysis collapse without it?

(speaking here not as a moderator or authority, but as someone who appreciates a good discussion, like this one.)

 

[david starling]

The most collective placement in an astrological chart is the Age-marker - it's in EVERYONE'S natal chart in the same sign for Centuries, close-orb for one generation after another. It shapes our underlying environment, whether one realizes it or not - "does a fish know it's wet?"

Jung thought that the Aquarian Age would bring the Unconscious into our Consciousness.