Exploring Man and His Symbols

I’m 59 pages into Man and His Symbols. Carl Jung was a name I had always heard of but never read. What ultimately led me to his work is a very personal journey that I am not going to share, but it has come during a time of great internal transition. I have always been interested in Psychology, Philosophy and all of their intersections. This book is one of many that has recently scratched that itch. Here is my exploration of the ideas that stood out to me in this opening chapter.

On page 26, Jung goes into why dreams seem so random and incomprehensible to the conscious mind. If the conscious mind values, reasoning, logic and clarity, why does the unconscious mind seem to do away with all of that? Jung argues that everything that enters the conscious mind, can enter the unconscious mind. This is where that information or idea can develop unconscious roots. These unconscious roots will be different from person to person even for information that is matter of fact. Jung demonstrates this by showcasing the words

– State
– Money
– Wealth
– Society

We all understand the general notion of the words, but the exact meaning will be slightly different. Not only in its intellectual understanding, but in its undertones and application. When you read “Wealth”, what pops into your head in those 3 dimensions? You can intellectually understand wealth is an abundance of resources, did you default to money as the resource? Did that assertion gross you out and make you angry? Notice the emotional undertone. Because so many people have hatred toward the rich, the word wealth has different roots for those people. Some may not have defaulted to money, some may have and not felt any hatred or disgust. Jung uses this to point out “even the most matter of fact contents of consciousness have a penumbra of uncertainty around them.”

This was explored in the concept of dream analysis but that’s not the part that interested me. The unconscious root of words and meaning itself fascinates me. I feel as if this is one of the reasons that discourse on social media (and real life) falls apart. How easy is it to misinterpret what someone said with character limits, the absence of tone and non verbal communication? Pretty easy, I’ve been misinterpreted and I’ve misinterpreted what seemed like the most matter of fact information. Now to think that even without those barriers, factual terms can carry completely different roots for people only amplifies the problem. I can’t help but think of how many words I’ve heard that carry different unconscious roots for me versus other people. That itself is not a problem, but understanding your own roots will shed light on your own biases and mental pitfalls.

On page 55, Jung writes “Just as the human body represents a whole museum of organs, each with a long evolutionary history behind it, we should expect to find that the mind is organized in a similar way. It can no more be a product without history than is the body in which it exists”. This alludes to Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious and it’s a compelling way of looking at the mind. The organs in our body have evolved over millions of years to what they are today. Looking at the human eye, it evolved using the structure of the lesser evolved eye before it, evolution is a cycle of progressing structures. The eye didn’t pop into existence of its own blueprint at a point in time. The same can be said about the mind. What Jung calls archetypes are those mental structures in the mind. These aren’t specific memories, they are instead instinctual mental patterns that have been ingrained into the evolution of the mind. 

Viewing the mind in this framework legitimizes it. Society has awareness of mental health and illness but on a societal scale, very little progress has been made aside from performative little phrases. We are preoccupied with what we can directly observe and point to. The mind is not physical, this already diminishes its importance and place in everyday life. If we can take the enigmatic mind and view it in the same way we view concrete things through Jung’s theory, it strips a bit of its mystery away. We make it more approachable and observable. We legitimize it and all that comes with it. 

There are tons of mental struggles aside from mental illness. Low self esteem and an active ego are not diagnosable mental health issues. To deal with these, we need a set of mental skills that we lack. How do you handle egoic fear that stops you from pursuing what you want? The first step is recognizing that there’s a part of you that is fearful. This isn’t reframing, it’s recognizing the mind’s structure. The mind is built upon uncountable years of evolution, and what you do when you point these things out, is bring that inherited structure into the light.