Thread: Carl Gustav Jung - Videos, Books, Ruminations

Originally Posted by Rosanna

Just catching up today, it's always a Thursday or Friday, which are my alternating days off, I'm not fit for anything at the beginning of the week

... And it seems you keep kicking off each new page of this thread with a new question that sets the tone for that page. So far anyway (ok this is the second time )

Originally Posted by Rosanna

I'll reply properly in a while but I get what you're saying about a single art project not being enough to start off a process of individuation, I do respect your initial response because I'm just playing with these ideas in a way, for creative purposes....for me, when I work with people to encourage them to do their creative work (I am a support worker), I noticed there are many fears to start with, but if they stick with it, in a way they are transformed at the end. I know it's not strictly the same, but I was likening it in my mind to an alchemical process, or a hero's journey....and that led me to explore individuation. But I totally respect that what Jung was talking about was much more profound and as you say, a much much bigger process going on.

Yes, a single art project absolutely can kick off the Individuation process - it would be like the first yellow brick that begins the road. But best if they keep laying down more bricks. Or would it be discovering more? yeah, I think that works better. As if there are bricks embedded just under the surface of the ground that most people never see but if you scrape a little bit here and there in the soil (symbol of the unconscious) they're there - the symbolic gold bricks leading toward your destiny or your golden future. Do you know why gold has always been the symbol of eternity and everlasting perfection? Because it doesn't tarnish or rust like other metals, so anything made of gold will still be exactly as it was when buried even if dug up centuries later - whereas any other metal will be destroyed. Plus of course its color and brightness are reminiscent of the sun, which sets every night but then always resurrects (like the Son - of God). What could be a more perfect symbol of either eternity or the eternal cycle of symbolic death and rebirth? This is why gold was so important to the alchemists - for its symbolic link to eternity and resurrection. Transformation into something beautiful and permanent. Permanence symbolizes the realm of heaven or spiritual perfection, whereas temporality - the state of being in flux or change all the time, is symbolic of material life here in the drab plane of mortal life. The worldly word of non-permanence where death and disease etc exist. Lead is a good symbol for that, being a very common and valueless substance. Therefore the importance of the process of transmuting lead into gold through alchemy.

Originally Posted by Rosanna

Darkmatters, do you think there are similarities between the stages of alchemy and the ones of individuation? As always, just by pass anything that you feel isn't helpful to this thread, and thanks.

Yes, absolutely! This was one of Jung's last major discoveries, as he was becoming too old to really pursue it as strenuously as it required, so he began the work and then turned it over to his acolyte Marie-Louise Von Franz. The chemical processes the metals were subjected to in the alchemical lab were literally analogous to psychological stages of Individuation. They didn't really have an understanding of the unconscious, so what they did and what they wrote is a weird mix - to some extent I think they understood that it was symbolic of something else unseen and incomprehensible that was going on inside (or somewhere, like Plato with his World of Perfect Forms they thought it might be a real place somewhere out there). But they were working beyond the pale of human understanding of the time, so it all seemed quite magical to them, though they knew things were actually happening and some kind of transformation was taking place. I think they considered it spiritual or religious, and they knew the all-powerful Church considered them heretics, so they continued to write about it as if it was all strictly material transformations in metals taking place in their forges and furnaces, but many of them knew it was really something else. And what they were groping toward was the individuation process - they just used a very fanciful language of symbols to describe it. Symbols like those in dreams and religious visions and fairy tales. In other words the symbols of the unconscious. Jung said that alchemy was one of the finest examples of this kind of symbolic language being used to describe individuation (many fairy tales, myths and religious stories also describe it) because it was late in the period of human unconsciousness of the mind (before the discoveries of science and rational materialism and psychology) but it's incredibly rich with symbolism and hasn't been forced into dogmatism like religions have or re-written over and over and inevitably changed in the process the way fairy tales etc have been, which filters out a lot of the original symbolism. So the alchemical texts still retain all of the forceful original symbolism and the actual process of discovery of the original writers/explorers.

But it's also very complicated and a real maze to work through. I find it fascinating, but you want to begin by learning about individuation through more mundane means like a few textbooks. Or at least also be learning it that way at the same time - I guess you don't need to study one first, though I do think it would ease a lot of confusion. I highly recommend Von Franz's book Alchemy. I haven't looked at Jung's book about alchemy yet - but that would obviously be one of the best as well. Oh, I suppose I need to be more clear - just realized his Mysterium Conjuntionis is also about alchemy, but I was referring to - not sure what it's called - let me google that real quick...

In fact here's the search page that comes up - many of these books look excellent: Jung Alchemy @ Amazon.

The one I was referring to is Psychology and Alchemy right at the top.

Oh, another thing I think you would like is Jung's technique of Active Imagination. That link goes to an excellent book about it. He calls it "dreaming with eyes open" and it was his chosen way of interacting directly with the unconscious and the archetypes. You can find a lot of info if you just do some googling, but the book is great.

Wow, Darkmatters you are a treasure trove of knowledge, to be honest I feel a bit guilty because I don't have the same mental energy to discuss it all, but I'm definitely reading it all and absorbing, it's just such a huge subject that my brain is awash with it but not best able to respond to it all at the moment. Except with questions, lol, it's very rare I ever find anyone or any site on the net that addresses questions that I'm interested in , so hugely grateful to you!

I did a little bit of reading on the net this afternoon and it was talking about how Calcination is similar to the dropping of the Persona, Dissolution similar to the beginning of discovering what's underneath the Persona, Separation similar to meeting with the Shadow, as one separates out what is good and bad withing themselves.....ok that's as far as I got. I think my main fascination is the use of all these theories and concepts in art and literature, movies, etc, than perhaps their use in psychological therapies. I have a psychology degree, I think I said, so I have done all that stuff, but I think it's art and stories that move people, perhaps more than therapy, when therapy is delivered in a dry fashion (which I feel it often is)......again I'm rambling....

Originally Posted by Rosanna

to be honest I feel a bit guilty because I don't have the same mental energy to discuss it all, but I'm definitely reading it all and absorbing, it's just such a huge subject that my brain is awash with it but not best able to respond to it all at the moment. Except with questions, lol, it's very rare I ever find anyone or any site on the net that addresses questions that I'm interested in , so hugely grateful to you!

Actually this is totally working for me. Don't feel bad, the conversation is flowing well, and I think if you'd make longer more detailed responses you might burn me out trying to keep up with it all, since the questions tend to be brief and the answers long. I find a dialogue works best to bring ideas out and develop them, and I also find I respond well to questions. Also, I tend to be a bit old fashioned (by today's internet standards) - I like to write things out in conversational tone rather than in the text-speak shorthand so many people prefer to use. I often see people apologize for such a lengthy post when they've only written a very brief paragraph that IMO is more like a headline than an article, you know? Like they're just posting a brief outline of their thoughts, or showing you their own notes rather than using them to write up the final product. For me writing things out completely actually helps to develop the thoughts, and if you abbreviate too much you won't really develop them very much. And I must admit - I'm using this thread mostly to help myself learn and understand what I've been reading, at least as much as to help other people understand it. So it serves both our purposes at once.

There's so much I could say about this stuff - and I plan to - but I need to pace myself or I'll burn out and everybody will get tired of seeing me post too much.

But I like what you've just said:

Originally Posted by Rosanna

I think my main fascination is the use of all these theories and concepts in art and literature, movies, etc, than perhaps their use in psychological therapies. I have a psychology degree, I think I said, so I have done all that stuff, but I think it's art and stories that move people, perhaps more than therapy, when therapy is delivered in a dry fashion (which I feel it often is)......again I'm rambling....

I completely agree!! A huge part of my interest in all this stuff is to help develop my inner world - the world of imagination, which is sacred ground for any kind of artist. It needs to be fertile with symbolism, and all this Jungian symbolism (which really is the archetypal symbolism of the unconscious) is amazingly good!! One idea I've encountered recently and latched onto is that there are facts and there are truths - facts being scientific, rational and materialist, and truths being profound human truths that resonate deeply, even if they're not factually true (such as Bible stories, myths or fictional stories). Of the two - the facts are vitally important only to scientists and technicians - they're good for developing technology in new ways and deepening our understanding of the world so we can create better medicine etc (which is really a technology). But for ordinary people (which even the scientists and technicians are when they're not at work) the truths are of a whole different caliber. They're transcendent in a spiritual way really. The human mind thinks in story - this is why dreams are little stories - and they don't need to be logically coherent as long as there's an emotional through-line (this is something I learned from studies in writing) or as long as they connect deeply in some way. To pay too much attention to logic and coherency is a distraction from the deep realities, at least the realities of the unconscious, which works more in dreamlike fashion through metaphor and symbols. As I said earlier, the conscious mind is very recent in evolutional terms - sort of a recent add-on, and in a way all logic and reason stands on the shifting sands of the unconscious. That's not to say logic and reason are fallacies - they're not. I see logic and even more-so the scientific method (logic taken to its ultimate level) as a sort of screening process - I call it a bullshit filter that allows us to see things objectively, which is foreign to the natural (unconscious) way of thinking.

But now it's me who's rambling. And of course that's often when we're saying the most important things.

Originally Posted by Rosanna

I did a little bit of reading on the net this afternoon and it was talking about how Calcination is similar to the dropping of the Persona, Dissolution similar to the beginning of discovering what's underneath the Persona, Separation similar to meeting with the Shadow, as one separates out what is good and bad withing themselves.....ok that's as far as I got.

I'm glad you found that information. I went looking through a couple of books for it - I know I had seen it somewhere, but couldn't find it, and I didn't remember it clearly enough to say anything about it. I would have messed it all up.

Wow, I was surprised to run across this today, after just talking about it recently. It's directly related to the last few posts, and he actually does mention Carl Jung (!) so here it is - short and sweet:

Hey sorry man, I missed this post and just happened to check back a page and found it.

Originally Posted by snoop

Interesting, my first concussion was from a discus hitting me in the head just above the left temple, so basically the (left) temporal lobe and I guess if you want to get technical part of the frontal lobe/PFC.

So we both got nailed in the same spot - though you definitely got it worse. I guess you win the scar comparison contest! Not that that's actually a good thing. But wait - I just realized - you got hit with a discus, but I got hit in the side of the head by a planet!! (Ok, a discus is definitely worse)

Originally Posted by snoop

one of my only true passionate interests academically speaking is the study of the brain and the phenomenon of consciousness and how it's proposed to be produced (I like space stuff and what not too but yeah). I think I was lucky to have found psychology closely related enough

I've always been deeply interested in the unconscious - loved dreams for as long as I can remember and was always naturally inclined to think a lot about them and about the unconscious in general. A few years back I decided to delve into actual brain science - though it was specifically related to the unconscious. Mostly through a fascinating book called The Brain at Night. In fact, going back a bit farther - through my late teens and 20's and well into my 30's I continuously wrote and re-wrote an idea called The Dreaming, which went through many different forms. At various times it was going to be an animated movie, a novel or series of them, a comic book series, or graphic novel. In the beginning it was very comic-book; based largely on the X Men, but in my late 20's I changed it to something much more psychological and unconscious-based, and it became much more sort of indie comic-ish.

It was essentially about a guy who develops the ability to dream his way into other dimensions and accidentally brings down a horde of interdimensional alien mind parasites into our world that he then has to fight (he's the only one who can, being a sort of next stage of human evolution sort of a dude), the whole time struggling to strengthen his lucid abilities, because when he lucids, he actually changes waking reality as well. And the part that made it really fun - if he has a bad night of dreaming he can screw up our entire world, so he has to also train in all kinds of Eastern stuff - Buddhism and Yoga discipline etc, in order to get his state of mind under control. Even now when I think about it I start to get all worked up and almost want to start re-writing it again. Funny story though - on an art site where I used to (and still do) hang out, I learned that apparently every aspiring artist had a huge massive project that they tirelessly wrote and re-wrote all through their late teens and 20's (if not beyond). The Dreaming was mine. Oh, and the name - I really liked the sound of both The Shining and The Howling - I had no clue until later that there were actually aboriginal tribes in Australia who practice a shamanistic ritual called The Dreaming. Cool bonus.

Originally Posted by snoop

I've actually read plenty of articles that most traumatic brain injuries don't typically cause any kind of permanent brain damage in terms of the physical structures being harmed.

What I read once that was only more recently that I actually believe to be the case (maybe not completely, but it probably accounts for a lot more than most people who've suffered TBIs and any kind of psychological issues afterwards are capable of accepting the responsibility for) is that what's likely happening is that the immediate, short-term physical trauma and the stress it causes (including in what it takes to recover properly on a physical level but aren't aware of) causes the initial psychological symptoms for a period of time, but not any where near as long as it takes most people to recover from it (considering it took me 10 years myself, I'm guessing let's sat ~2 years). After that initial set of issues, be it they were caused by imbalances of neurotransmitters or for whatever reason, they more or less go back to normal, and the problem at that point isn't something you can point to as having physical origins like physical trauma, it's purely psychological. The idea is that the sudden change in world view, perception of yourself, your life, others, pretty much everything, etc., hits so hard and fast that you are essentially experiencing symptoms of PTSD. but there isn't an external trigger you have because what caused it to develop was the rug being pulled out from under you completely after 3 months to a year of not having any real symptoms from the concussion.

That's fascinating stuff, and I didn't know it. Does make sense though.

Ok, a few Jung videos to keep the thread on track:

These are Chapter 3 of Aion - The Szyzygy, Anima and Animus;
part 2


part 3


part 4

Jordan Peterson also has some excellent videos about Jung - here's a 2 parter (longer than the rest I've been posting - his tend to be classroom lectures of an hour or 2):

For anyone who's interested in all this Jungian stuff more in the context of art/entertainment rather than clinically, I would recommend reading or watching things based on mythology, religion or fairy tales that are done in an artistic, thought-provoking way - especially if they bring something really interesting to the material. A couple of examples - some of the best I've seen, which are definitely the stuff fascinating dreams are made of, would include the short novel Weight; The Myth of Atlas and Heracles (The Myths) by Jeanette Winterson. and Grendel by John Gardner. Grendel is an account of the story of Beowulf (one of the earliest written stories in the English language) told from the viewpoint of the monster Grendel. Both of these books have a wild, primordial sensibility about them that's fascinating and gives a glimpse of how primitive people might have thought. I also highly recommend the tales of Angela Carter (particularly her short stories as collected in Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories. Her works stir the imagination deeply and are very close to myth or fairy tale, but not related in a straightforward objective fashion. They draw you in powerfully.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Jordan Peterson also has some excellent videos about Jung - here's a 2 parter (longer than the rest I've been posting - his tend to be classroom lectures of an hour or 2):

Interesting. I can see how the people projected badness onto the Jews....

But what was the 'shadow' in Nazi Germany? I'm being really thick this afternoon, it's because I have chaos and disorder in my own home, lol, family visiting, etc when I really wanted some space this weekend....never mind....

but the shadow wasn't Hitler, because at the time he was seen as good...

So the shadow was the Jewish people? Because at the time they were perceived as bad?

I suppose I'm confusing myself because I'm talking about a collective shadow here...

thanks for the other videos Darkmatters, which I'm going to watch now.

Oops, I quoted the wrong part above. I thought I was quoting the first Jordan Peterson video. :-)

The Jews were just being projected onto - the shadow would be the simmering hatred and absolute despair in the hearts of the German people because of what happened to them in WWI, plus maybe other factors. I don't know much about it, but I do know that the country was absolutely demolished by WWI. The economy was completely ruined - I think a loaf of bread cost the equivalent of a thousand dollars or something like that. People would load up wheelbarrows full of all the money they had saved and go to a store to buy a single meal - money that before the war would have been a fortune. So there was terror, anger, aggression etc - the perfect storm of shadow conditions. It was going to be projected onto somebody or something - Hitler just gave it a target, and as Peterson said, it really wasn't him who even chose the target - he was just a typical opportunistic politician at the time. The people chose and he responded.

In a sense he was Germany's scapegoat. They chose him as their savior, they loaded all their sins (hatred etc) on his back and then sacrificed him (by disowning him and blaming him for all their own sins after the fact). Similar to what Christ was - he took the sins of the people onto himself and was sacrificed in order to purge those sins. The difference of course being that Hitler actually did terrible things, whereas Christ healed the sick and preached love.

Hmm - actually it's a little more complicated than that - first he convinced Germany to scapegoat the Jews, and then they (the Germans) scapegoated him in order to get rid of the collective guilt they felt over what had been done to the Jews.

Yes, I realise the Jews were NOT the shadow, I'm just thinking again about shadow 'characters' in films, etc, and wondering how it would work in this real life situation. Because in film/stories, the shadow character, the bad one, is actually just a projection....it's just in the story it's seen as a real, external thing/character....hence why i was wondering if the Jewish people were (in this real life story), the shadow figure(s)....but not really we know because it comes from within those doing the projecting.....this probably isn't very clear.....I mean, to those doing the projecting, they were the shadow, the dark figures...

I just wrote out a brief second post and lost it.....What I was adding, was, in relation to the links between alchemy and the stages of individuation, I'm thinking that Conjunction is the meeting and marrying of the animus/anima or opposites. The Fermentation stage is the death of the child of that 'marriage' and then it's spiritization, which is associated with the final stage of indivuation......

of which I know nothing about, and know not what I'm talking about, so will leave it there until I understand it. But thought I'd put my thoughts down, should you want to correct me or add to it etc :-)

Ah ok, I get it now. And of course you've got it right.

But the question made me think about something I had never really thought about before - something I always do but wasn't aware of it until this discussion made me look at it more closely. I'm going to go off on a little side road now.

If I'm talking about a dream or a movie, I will absolutely say that a person (well actually a character or a figure) is a 'shadow character' or a 'shadow figure' - because they were created specifically for that purpose and have no other reality besides it. But unless I'm just getting lazy with my grammar I'll never call them a shadow.

But (and this is the part I had never thought about before but that I always do) I never call an actual human being a shadow or even a shadow character. It doesn't seem correct to me. I would refer to them as a person who is having shadow material projected onto them. Well, I'd probably try to find a less clumsy way to say it. Because they absolutely are not the shadow - the shadow is something coming from inside somebody else. The person (the one being projected onto) might have some resemblance to what's being projected on them - in fact they undoubtedly do or they wouldn't be a very suitable substrate for the projection - but it absolutely is not who or what they are. It's just somebody else's illusion. In fact sometimes I even imagine a projector beam coming out of a person's forehead - the third eye area - and beaming an ugly face onto them. Just to keep it straight what the shadow actually is and where it's coming from.

Ok sorry - I know you didn't need to read all that - I Just wanted to write it up (helping develop the ideas and all that).

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

Ah ok, I get it now. And of course you've got it right.

But the question made me think about something I had never really thought about before - something I always do but wasn't aware of it until this discussion made me look at it more closely. I'm going to go off on a little side road now.

If I'm talking about a dream or a movie, I will absolutely say that a person (well actually a character or a figure) is a 'shadow character' or a 'shadow figure' - because they were created specifically for that purpose and have no other reality besides it. But unless I'm just getting lazy with my grammar I'll never call them a shadow.

But (and this is the part I had never thought about before but that I always do) I never call an actual human being a shadow or even a shadow character. It doesn't seem correct to me. I would refer to them as a person who is having shadow material projected onto them. Well, I'd probably try to find a less clumsy way to say it. Because they absolutely are not the shadow - the shadow is something coming from inside somebody else. The person (the one being projected onto) might have some resemblance to what's being projected on them - in fact they undoubtedly do or they wouldn't be a very suitable substrate for the projection - but it absolutely is not who or what they are. It's just somebody else's illusion. In fact sometimes I even imagine a projector beam coming out of a person's forehead - the third eye area - and beaming an ugly face onto them. Just to keep it straight what the shadow actually is and where it's coming from.

Ok sorry - I know you didn't need to read all that - I Just wanted to write it up (helping develop the ideas and all that).

Actually I think this is good for the clarification. My understanding is as you've described. I was, earlier, trying to consider it from the point of view of the projectors, but yes, it's coming from inside them.

Aion chapter 3 part 5:


Edward Edinger on Aion Chapter 3:


And here's something a little different - a video about Individuation from the channel Think Neo, Think!

I'm not posting all the videos here, but this one is particularly good - especially the idea that in psychology you must experience things inside yourself rather than just get an intellectual idea about them.



I like the way he put the bloopers together at the end.

Oh, I should also add - I now have the book Mysterium Coniunctionis, and I'm amazed at how thick it is!! Massive!! Like a freakin' phone book. Turns out it's essentially Jung's summation of all of his later work - all through the lens of psychological alchemy. So I now think of it as Mysterium Con JUNG tionis. I already had Edinger's Mysterium Lectures and glad I do - I wouldn't understand just about any of Jung's book without it!

Thanks Darkmatters! Lots for me to catch up on.

In trying to wade though just the first few pages of Mysterium Coniunctionis I came up against wording and ideas that are so difficult and opaque that even after developing my tolerance to Jung extensively, it started to give me headaches and I felt lost pretty much the whole time. It's like reading word salad - I had no sense of understanding through entire paragraphs - or at any point really - until I would close the book and read the appropriate section of Edinger. Then some things started to come into clearer focus - well ok, certain ideas are explained quite clearly by Edinger really - but I get the feeling he's only explaining selected ideas and leaving a whole mass of them untouched. Like choosing one thread from a dense complex tapestry and tracing it through the various twists and turns, but meanwhile leaving dozens of threads untouched and unexplained.

Then today I went to the basement and dug up my older Jung books from years gone by and flipped through a few of them to bring them back into memory. Such a huge contrast!! Paging through The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious and its companion piece Aion, these books are entirely readable and comprehensible (well especially Archetypes - Aion is a bit more difficult). They both deal with the main archetypes (shadow, anima/animus, and self plus several of the secondary ones such as the mother and father complexes etc). The books also deal with the collective unconscious, the objective and communal half of the unconscious, which houses these archetypes. As far as I'm concerned, these are the most important aspects of Jung's work and the parts most people know nothing about. They're also the parts concerned directly with the individuation process, which he deals with in these books.

So what I'm saying is - I recommend these particular books, as well as several books about Jung and his theories, and I recommend people to put off the more difficult books like Mysterium until you're very familiar with the basic material (as presented in these books). So far the only book I enjoyed about the psychology of alchemy was Von Franz's Alchemy. I also remember reading somewhere that Jung's later work on alchemy was too difficult and labyrinthine - I can now attest to the truthfulness of it!! I was fascinated by the idea and tried - but I'm officially giving up on Mysterium - at least for the present. Maybe in years to come, after becoming thoroughly familiar with the earlier work and the basic breakdown of the archetypes and how they function. Apparently in his advancing age he gave up on writing for a general public and concentrated on getting his most advanced ideas down rapidly for a professional reading audience, who has some chance of understanding and eventually elaborating on it to make it more accessible. That makes sense and I see the wisdom of it - better to get his most advanced thoughts jotted down than not.

Another book I highly recommend to anyone wanting to become familiar with Jung is The Essential Jung, selected and introduced by Anthony Storr. Eventually I'll review some more and put together a list of recommendations - but that's going to take a while.

I'm so impressed with the first few pages of The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious that I wanted to see if I could find them somewhere online to link to. Haven't found quite what I'm looking for yet, but the search did turn up a couple of very similar things that I think are perfect for this thread.

The first is a PDF file. I'm not sure what it is exactly - I notice the title of it is missing the first "The" - so it isn't quite identical to the title of Jung's book. Not even sure who wrote it, but it's definitely a practicing Jungian analyst who knows Jung's writing quite well. It includes an excellent description of the collective unconscious and what archetypes are, along with a few stories from some of his or her case files, with the names of the clients swapped out for just a single letter, as is the custom throughout the writings of Freud and Jung, and I assume all psychoanalysts. I rate this one a full 5 stars.

***** Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious Author Unknown


The second is a pamphlet or very short book hosted on Archive.org, meaning it's in the public domain and free to distribute and download. I've only read the beginning of it, but it seems to be excerpts from Jung's books that are directly relevant to the subjects at hand. Tentative rating 4 stars. Great content, but really messed up typos all over.

***** The Collective Unconscious and its Archetypes by Philippe L. De Coster, D.D.


... And finally - I have now located exactly what I was hoping to find. The link goes to The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious on Amazon - click the Look Inside link to read the beginning of the book. Fortunately the preview is big enough that, even with the table of contents, editorial note, and other ephemera, it still includes the first few pages in their entirety. This is Jung at his most lucid and informative, explaining the concepts with incredible clarity. Obviously 5 stars.

***** The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious by Carl Gustav Jung

Edinger's commentary on chapters 43-67 of Aion:



The reason I wanted to post today's video was to add this:


Ego-Self-Axis by Darkmatters, on Flickr

Here's my own way to conceive of this idea -- It's the psychological version of the birth and growth of a child. That really is exactly what it is - at first the ego is completely contained within the larger Self, just like a fetus in the body of the mother. It gradually emerges until it achieves complete separation and independence, though in a good relationship they remain in contact for the rest of their lives.

At first the ego is completely contained in the self. In many people this situation continues throughout the rest of their life, as they remain dependent and rather childish. If circumstances force a person to toughen up mentally/psychologically and become more independent, or if the person decides to work toward that independence and self-sufficiency, then the ego begins to emerge more and more from the self.

This is called ego development, and is done largely through becoming consciously aware of your own shadow projections and anima or animus projections. I believe this process is essentially what individuation is.

That's my take on it anyway.

I seem to be the only person still interested in this thread (or am I just posting too much for anybody else to keep up? )

In today's Jung related news, I just ordered a copy of his Symbols of Transformation, the book documenting the period when he individuated from Freud and started delving into his own ideas concerning the objective, collective nature of a part of the unconscious. This apparently is the book where he first went deep into exploring myth, fairy tale, and religion. These books from the period before he moved into alchemy seem to me to be some of his best and most readable work, and also to pretty clearly lay out his ideas. Of course that doesn't mean any of his books are easy - I probably can understand them pretty well now because of the foundation laid by all those books stacked on my table in the earlier pictures. But what I'm trying to get across is, for people wanting to really get to the chewy center of what Jung is about, I think this period is the one you want. From his split with Freud (coinciding with Symbols of Transformation) up until somewhere in the vicinity of Answer to Job and his plunge into Alchemy. Beyond that point you need a solid understanding of his basic concepts like Individuation, the Collective Unconscious, and the Archetypes.

Also, here's this:


EDIT - I decided to look up a listing of the Collected Works (< link to wiki page). So it looks like the section of it I'm interested in ranges from volume 5 (Symbols of Transformation) to vol 12 (Psychology and Alchemy), where he starts to veer off into alchemy. I'm using this thread, in part, to put together a resource for myself and anyone else who wants to make use of it, so sometimes I'll post stuff like this in here.

Originally Posted by Darkmatters

I seem to be the only person still interested in this thread (or am I just posting too much for anybody else to keep up?

I have so much school work right now that I have been avoiding it. But since most of what I know about Jung is from psychology textbooks and Alan Watts I have been intending to use this thread as a point of immersion.

Not today though.

Thanks Vader! I just feel kind of weird making post after post in here with nobody else popping in. But then since it is supposed to be a resource thread I guess that doesn't really matter - it can become conversation from time to time and then drop back to just my own posts I suppose.

suppose


suppose....