Carl Gustav Jung

Just as I was discovering Buddhism another profound influence came along.  The wise old man of Kusnacht; Carl Gustav Jung.  I found his work through teachings at Swinburne in 1985 as I was studying Organisation Behaviour.  It was presented as a counterpoint to the cognitive behavioural theories that were gaining ascendance at the time.  How revelatory it was.  Here was someone who could see the phylogenetic history of the homo sapien.  We weren’t born a blank slate ready to be written on.  The psyche was already inhabited, at the deepest level, by semi-autonomous archetypes which would activate when the circumstances were right.

Jung would have been “struck off” if he was still practicing today.  His long tern relationship with former patient, Toni Wolff became quite widely known.  She went on to become an analyst herself and is famous for naming the four aspects of the sacred feminine; the Amazon, the Mother, the Hetaria and the Medial.

 I think it was something of his humanness that drew me to Jung.  Not only did he have incredible depth but also amazing spiritual insight.  During his travels to India he studied the esoteric Hinduism and Buddhism.  He became fascinated by the mandala and symbolism in general.  He saw dreams as using symbolic language to express our inner workings:

 “Near a steep slope of rock I caught sight of two figures, an old man with a white beard and a beautiful young girl.  I summoned up my courage and approached them as though they were real people, and listened attentively to what they told me.  The old man explained that he was Elijah, and that gave me a shock.  But the girl staggered me even more, for she called herself Salome!  She was blind.  What a strange couple:  Salome and Elijah.  But Elijah assured me that he and Salome had belonged together for all eternity, which completely astonished me.     They had a black serpent living with them which displayed an unmistakable fondness for me.  I stuck close to Elijah because he seemed to be the most reasonable of the three, and to have a clear intelligence.  Of Salome I was distinctly suspicious.  Elijah and I had a long conversation which, however, I did not understand.”

The “Night Sea Journey” in Jung, A Biography, Gerhard Wehr, Shambhala, 1985.  pp 180-181.

The image of Philemon, as the Archetypal Wise Old Man; the Senex; arose for Jung out of this dream.  On a sky blue setting with the wings of a Kingfisher the impression of wisdom is overwhelming.  The images are deeply Christian, perhaps reflecting Jung’s background as the son of a rural pastor of the Swiss Reform Church.  In dreams, for the most part, we draw on the images that make up our own personal history or form part of our immediate environment and experience.  However there are archetypal images which appear in dreams across cultural boundaries.