Consuming Jung

The final (for now) episode in the Consuming Jung podcast. Tim summarized chapters 1-9 of Man and His Symbols and reads them out in this episode. Logan reacts and adds context. It's been real.

Tim's notes are below.

Chapter 1 The Importance of Dreams

-Symbols imply something wider than their obvious and immediate meaning, including things beyond the range of human understanding.

-Man produces symbols unconsciously and spontaneously in the form of dreams.

-Our unconscious mind processes more of our experience than our conscious mind. Most of what happens to and around us falls below the threshold of consciousness. But subliminal (inadequate to produce a sensation or a perception) experience is absorbed by the unconscious. The significance of that unconscious perception is revealed to us in dreams where it appears not as a rational thought, but as symbolic images.

-Evolutionary we would expect unconsciousness to predate consciousness. Which is to say an organism in the evolutionary hierarchy reacted to its environment before it was conscious of doing so.

Chapter 2 Past and Future in the Unconscious

-Dreams should be treated as facts that make sense and as specific expression of the unconscious.

-The psyche (the totality of elements forming the mind) is beyond our understanding. It is absurd to think that consciousness is the extent of our selves.

-Interaction between the conscious and unconscious is a common occurrence. For one thing we can only be conscious of a sliver of what we know or experience. It is widely understood that we cannot know everything we know at once. If we did not forget our mind would become impossibly cluttered. However, we can recall to consciousness what we knew previously. We take this for granted. More strangely perhaps is the apparition of brand-new ideas that seem to come out of nowhere.

Chapter 3 The Function of Dreams

-Dreams depart from our rational ordered waking life, this makes dreams hard to understand and tempting to dismiss. We are accustomed to rationality and dismiss anything that cannot be explained by common sense. 

-Ideas we have about our life and their emotional significance are not as precise as we like to believe.

-The civilized lives we lead are stripped of emotional energy. Others stimulate or depress us in ways unsuited to our individuality. We are influenced by prejudices, errors, fantasies, and infantile wishes which widen neurotic dissociation and lead to artificial life. The general function of dreams is to restore psychological balance by producing dream material that reestablishes psychic equilibrium.

-Dreams also have predictive power. Really this is the psyche noticing patterns that do not rise to the conscious level and symbolically representing insight in dreams.

Chapter 4 The Analysis of Dreams

-Symbols cannot be consciously created. They are created by the unconscious. Dreams are symbolic. Dreams are not disguised emotions or energizing thoughts, if you interpret them as such you will only find what you already know.

-Dreams must be interpreted symbolically and the individual having the dream is the best interpreter.

Chapter 5 The Problem of Types

-In dream analysis the whole of one’s personality is required. However, predilections and prejudices must be suppressed. Without moral relativity the dream analyst will not get past their theories.

-Theories and techniques are inadequate for dream ana...

In this episode, we review the section Healing the Split, the last section of the book Jung directly writes. We touch again on many of the themes in previous episodes: the possible hubris of pure rationality, the immaturity of man, and the promise in the approach of consulting the symbology around us.

Tim dreams about gross spider guts and competing with men.

Logan fails to report any dream, tanking his GPA.

In this episode, we review the section The Role of Symbols. A main theme in this section is a strong metaphor Jung makes between an individual’s lifetime and the maturity of mankind, making the argument that mankind’s current state is that of an adolescent who has rejected many child-like modes of thought, while still dealing with a lot of confusion.

Logan and Tim both share lame half-remembered dreams, and squeeze by with a passing grade.

In this episode, we review the section The Soul of Man. Jung argues that while modern man typically views himself and his society as “in control” of its desires and actions, this is demonstrably false and naive. Also covered is “the shadow”, perhaps the most well-known Jungian concept. We continue the discussion on the value of religious thinking and stories, as contrasted with more nuanced or ambiguous ethical frameworks.

Logan dreams of a physical altercation with a jock and his posse.

Tim dreams of an emotionally charged encounter with an old woman.

In this episode, we read the section The Archetype in Dream Symbolism. Jung defines archetypes as mental structures that we inherit from prehistoric evolutionary pressures, and describes how these can impact modern man. We also continue the related themes of comparing modern man to prehistoric man, and religion to strict rationality.

Tim dreams of the death of an unfamiliar coworker, and Logan dreams of travel to a promised land.

In this episode we discuss the section The Problem of Types, where Jung delves further into some issues that may arise from differing personalities between the analyst and the subject. He also alludes to a mechanism by which dreams are made without an “author”, which we spend some time discussing.

In this episode we discuss the short section The Analysis of Dreams, where Jung develops a distinction between symbols and signs, and starts discussing some of the issues that may come up during a psychoanalysis session, even using his contemporary Freud as an example of this. We also discuss the symbolism in religion, which leads to some exploration into the positive and negative aspects of religion.

This is episode, we discuss the section The Function of Dreams, where Jung covers the vast nature of the unconscious and the role it plays in our everyday lives, at once mystifying it and grounding it in commonly observable phenomena. We also discuss Jung’s comparison between modern man and ancient man, and muse on what, if anything, modern life has lost of importance that was more common in ancient times.

In the second episode of Consuming Jung, we read the short section “Past and Future in the Unconscious” from Carl Gustav Jung’s book Man and His Symbols. In the section Jung simultaneously demystifies the unconscious and grants it remarkable powers of insight and even intelligence, setting some groundwork for the next sections of the book.

This is the premiere episode of our first series, Consuming Jung.

We begin reading the book Man and His Symbols by Carl Gustav Jung, first published in 1964. Having both read up until the section labelled "Past and future in the Unconscious" (the first 31 pages of the Doubleday 1969 version), Tim and Logan have a free-ranging discussion on the text, symbols, and dreams.