From: glad@Csli.Stanford.EDU (Clayton Glad)
Subject: Jung (Was: mystisism. and what follows)
Keywords: Re: mystisism. and what follows
Organization: Stanford University CSLI
Date: Mon, 5 Oct 1992 16:51:23 GMT

cranmer@ohstpy.mps.ohio-state.edu (Steve Cranmer) writes

| Although my first impulse is to recommend reading Jung himself, this has
| two drawbacks:
|  (1) he wrote *a lot*.
|  (2) his prose can be a bit, hm, sleep-inducing at times.  Very dry.

I've always been a bit baffled by this criticism, as I don't find
Jung's style dry at all.  But that's what graduate study in philosophy
can do to you.  Granted, he's not especially concise.

| There are many books out there that explain/extend Jung's ideas, so I
| could recommend one of them.  But there is one book that Jung himself
| worked on (and died in the middle of editing, if I have it right), that
| was intended to be a 'coffee-table'-type book, with lots of color pictures
| and things, that was designed to be a layman's introduction to Jung's
| ideas about mythology and archetypes.  It was published anyway, but I
| can't recall the exact name.  _The_Mythic_Imagination_ possibly?

The book you're thinking of is _Man and His Symbols_.  Only one of the
chapters was written by Jung, the others are by a number of his disciples,
including Joseph Henderson and Aniela Jaffe'.  Jung died before the
book was published but the idea for multiple authors was his.

It's, as Steve says, an introduction to some aspects of Jung's thought.
It's written at about the level of a PBS documentary and is certainly
an attractive book with lots of nice color plates. 

tucker@mitre.org (William Tucker) writes:

| I think the two key things that I remember related to Jung are the 
| "collective unconcious" and "synchronicity." Collective unconciousness
| relates to "racial memory," what we know in common and to some extent
| our cultural mythology that exists as a common thought pool that we
| dip into for our everyday thinking, it includes the concept of a shared 
| conciousness. 

While there's nothing *wrong* here I feel that it is misleading.  I hope
I don't sound too nitpicky in saying why.

Jung distinguished between the collective and personal unconscious.
The latter is formed by the sensations and experiences of the individual,
while the collective unconscious is the source of the unconscious motifs
that are found throughout human history.  But it's important to note that
Jung believed neither that there is some nebulous central repository
of human memory, nor that people are born with the archetypes and 
symbols in question imprinted upon the unconscious (two common 
misrepresentations).  Rather, he spoke of the collective unconscious
as *potential*.  That is, it's just a property of human unconscious that
it tends to produce these particular sorts of images, themes and symbols.

So it's not so much what we "know in common" as it is a function of
having the same unconscious potentialities.  In other words, we don't
find Achilles to be a compelling character because our ancestors read
about him for thousands of years, but because the story of the Hero
is one which is naturally produced and recognized by our unconsciousnesses.

The collective unconscious figures almost not at all in everyday
thinking.

I don't mean to present this as unproblematic, nor as a complete
exposition.  It's impossible to give general pointers to Jung's
writings, though each of the collected works volumes contains an
exhaustive table of contents to the series.  This is a good place to
look if you want a quick overview of the scope of his work.

The books I know of which were written for nonspecialists are the
above mentioned _Man and His Symbols_, _Modern Man In Search of a
Soul_, and _Memories, Dreams, Reflections_.  This last one -- partly
a unique sort of biography -- covers a number of Jung's lifelong
interests, and is not at all dull reading.

-- Clay
			"Words butter no parsnips."
				-- C.G. Jung