This essay is influenced by (but in opposition to) Jungian psychology. Jung's psychology does not equate to culture and psyche running side by side with one another. Rather Jungian psychology splits culture and psyche by establishing compensation as a key principle. Hence, the psyche compensates for culture and focuses on what culture misses out. A cursory glance through Jungian texts will show up a mountain of esoteric material (myth, fairy-tale, spiritualism, alchemy, Gnosticism, traditional religion, story-telling romanticism, mysticism) and overlook almost entirely that which is contemporary. The reason why Jung (himself) compensated for the culture that he was born into was because he was a childhood neurotic and his answer to neurosis was to immerse himself in numinosity. We see this kind of attitude and response to neurosis in existentialism today. Jung was not comfortable in contemporary life.
[...] If one doesn't possess developed differentiated ego consciousness then one may experience a kind of neurosis as one gets a sense of not fitting in. The transpersonal Jungian territory is alien to us. We do not really understand Jungian territory. It is another culture. It entices because we do not really understand it. That is what the esoteric does. But the Jungian introvert can hide there and get lost in the fog. If psyche and culture parallel one another in their evolutionary journey then most of us need to accept this reality for ourselves not by attaching to culture. [...]
[...] So one must possess a developed differentiated ego that more than compensates for any attachment to money, celebrity, a sports team (etc) that one may be a little guilty of. Differentiated ego (ego = subject, outer phenomena = object) goes with western science whereby subject and object are split. They aren't one. It is only by splitting subject and object that the person is able to think and work anything out at all. Those who haven't at all established differentiating ego consciousness is stuck in a primitive or Middle Ages mentality; a kind of superstition-orientated psychology. [...]
[...] It helps the person in-question because the establishment of differentiated ego consciousness equates to the person being able to work things out because one is ‘not' tied to the outer object but is different from it. However, Jungian psychology often does the exact opposite. Rather than appreciating the importance of psyche and culture complementing one another, the Classical Jungian analyst threatens to further split the neurotic patient from his or her cultural life. Even Michael Fordham realized this. Quoted by Andrew Samuels in Jung and the Post-Jungians, Fordham writes Achilles heel of the historical amplificatory method is this: the patient can never have been present in the historical context. [...]
[...] The differentiated ego or scientific type of thinking that has emerged since Descartes (or at least since the scientific revolution) means that there is now a new type of attachment radically different to stagnant attachments that have always existed. Now there is an attachment to a thought process of working out puzzles, of thinking things through to a logical conclusion. Of course we may fail and mess up. Or we may succeed in thinking things through effectively. The point here is that the attachment to thinking is a new kind of attachment. [...]
[...] It primarily is a label that declares the contents to which it is applied as fundamentally taboo, untouchable: inaccessible to conscious knowing and intellectual penetration. This label puts them into a particular logical status, the status of irrevocable un- consciousness. It erects an insurmountable, namely logical, barrier. To be sure, consciousness is permitted to look at the “contents of the unconscious” [but only] through the glass pane of the logical isolation ward that they are now confined in.”2 This opening paragraph of the conclusion to this essay sums up Jung's way of going beyond cultural ego. [...]
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