1 - Map of the Psyche
Summary
What is the psyche? Jung's definition. What do we mean by psycho-logical? What is a psychological process? What is a psychological reality? What is psychic energy and how does it function? Introversion and extraversion. Conscious and unconscious: the centre of each. Qualities of consciousness; qualities of unconscious. Components of the unconscious: shadow, animus and anima, Wise Old Man and Wise Old Woman. The ego and persona. Meaning of person and individual. Psychological experience and its sources.
Examples: quotes from C G Jung
No 1
Psyche for me an inclusive term for the totality of all the so-called psychic processes. Spirit is a qualitative designation for certain psychic contents (rather like "material" or "physical")....... Psychic experience has two sources: the outer world and the unconscious. All immediate experience is psychic. There is physically transmitted (outer world) experience and inner (spiritual) experience. The one is as valid as the other (Jung in a letter 13 February 1951).
No 2
........The psyche has two important conditions. One is the environ-mental influence, and the other is the given fact of the psyche as it is born. As I told you yesterday, the psyche is by no means a tabula rasa. We are a definite mixture and combination of genes, and they are there from the very first moment of our life, and they give a definite character even to the little child. This is the subjective factor, looked from the outside. Now if you look at it from the inside, it is just as if you were observing the world. When you observe the world you see people, you see houses, you see the sky, you see tangible objects. But when you observe yourself within, you see moving images, a world of images, generally known as fantasies. Yet these fantasies are facts. You see, it is a fact that a man has such and such a fantasy, such a tangible fact that when a man has a certain fantasy another man may lose his life. Or a bridge may be built--these houses were all fantasies. Everything you do here, all of the houses, everything was fantasy to begin with, and fantasy has a proper reality. This should not be forgotten, fantasy is not nothing. It is of course not a tangible object, but is a fact nevertheless. It is like a form of energy, despite the fact that we can't measure it. It is a manifestation of something, and that is a reality just as much as the peace treaty of Versailles, or something like that. It no longer exists, you can't show it, but it has been a fact. So psychic events are facts, are realities, and when you observe the stream of images within, you observe an aspect of the world, of the world within. Because the psyche, if you understand it as a phenomenon occurring in living bodies, is a quality of matter, just as our as our body consists of matter. We discover that this matter has another aspect, namely a psychic aspect. It is simply the world seen from within (Jung in The Houston Films in C G Jung Speaking (ed McGuire), pp 302-303).
No 3
As a scientist I see merely with human eyes, judge by means of human
understanding, and presume to no other knowledge than is afforded me by scientific insight. I can therefore only establish that Brother Klaus did not see his image as a concrete, material figure in space, that it was not the product of delirium or intoxication, but was on the contrary "psychogenic," i.e., a psychic fact to be evaluated as a spontaneous product of certain processes in the "unconscious." This "unconscious" consists, as I have said, of empirically demonstrable, subliminal contents (or contents that have become subliminal), and to that extent it is designated the "personal unconscious" and may therefore be considered altogether "psychic" (in contradistinction to "somatic"). But over and above this there seem to be contents which cannot be explained as individual acquisitions (they correspond to the complicated instinctual dispositions of the animal kingdom). They correspond to the inherited modes of behaviour which are present a priori at any time....... They influence psychic behaviour and express themselves in psychic forms; hence we speak of them as psychic contents, a façon de parler which does not accord badly with their phenomenology. At bottom we naturally don't know what their nature is since we know only their numinous effects. We know as little about their origin as about the origin of cosmic rays. Beyond that I know nothing.
So-called "spiritual" existences are verifiable for me only as psychic (likewise, of course, all "metaphysical" existences). This is the standpoint of the scientist and phenomenologist...... (Jung in a letter 8 February 1946).
Relevant books to read
HUMBERT, E. C G Jung: The Fundamentals of Theory and Practice. Chiron Publications, Illinois, 1988 chapter 1.
JUNG, C G. Two papers "The Structure of the Psyche (1927)", paras 283-342 "On the Nature of the Psyche (1946)" pars 343-387 in CW 8.
JACOBI, I. The Psychology of C G Jung (various editions) chapter 1.
WHITMONT, E. The Symbolic Quest. Princeton University Press, 1969 chapter 2
Questions for Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Q 1 How does Jung describe psyche? Copilot
Q 2 What do we mean by psychology? Copilot
Q 3 What is meant by the reality of the psyche? Copilot
