The first half of the 20th century brought into
the light of Western consciousness the great discovery of the unconscious. The great initial pioneer Sigmund Freud,
followed by the even greater explorer and surveyor Carl G. Jung, showed the
world the actual workings of the unconscious in our conscious lives, from the
most individually mundane effects, such as our tics and foibles, to the most
collective inundations of our collective consciousness in war and mass phenomenon
such as fascism, communism, and commercialism.
Then after the most compelling and complete demonstration of
the overcoming of collective rationality by the irrationality of the collective
unconscious from WWI to the culmination that was World War II, Western collective
consciousness reacted by closing down and shutting away the very
acknowledgement of the unconscious.
Western psychology turned to rationalism in hope of explaining the
irrational, and the unconscious was driven out of psychology, with “psychology”
being redefined without the unconscious element as “behaviorism,” “cognitive
studies,” ”neuro-psychology” “evolutionary psychology,” etc. This is an utter and complete failure,
because the totality of the psyche includes both the conscious and the unconscious,
and any attempt to rationally explain the irrational aspects of the unconscious
by ignoring the unconscious is set up for failure.
The rationalist delusion of the previous 70 years has forced
the psychology of the unconscious underground.
And as Jung noted over and over again, when an important part of our
psychic reality is submerged, it always and inevitably comes back to overwhelm
us in ways we find problematic. The
denied elements of our personal unconscious, the complexes, reappear as disturbances
in our body or mental functions, as somatic symptoms or psychic disturbances
such as hauntings or obsessions. The
denied elements of our collective unconscious, the archetypes, reappear in
stark polarized contrasts as “demons,” “daimons,” or “divinities,” as social
contagions resulting in genocide, occupation, and apartheid, as social mass
movements for weal or woe seeming to appear overnight, etc.
No matter how much people may try, there is no exclusively
rational explanation for the election of Donald Trump as president, because it
is an expression of the repressed unconscious factors that created a “faith”
mentality in the people who voted for him. The rationality of consciousness
(organized as it is around the ego complex) can never deal with faith, because
the best that rationality can offer can never touch the unconscious basis of
faith. Rationally can only call “faith”
a form of nonsense, i.e. irrational, and then believe it has taken care of the
matter.
In analyzing the problem of the rationalist critique of
faith without reference to the unconscious, Jung wrote in “A Psychological
Approach to the Trinity”: “Naturally, it
never occurs to these critics that their way of approach is incommensurable with
their object. They think they have to do with rational facts, whereas it
entirely escapes then that it is and always has been primarily a question of
irrational psychic phenomena.” (p. 153 of Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11.) It is the denial of a basic recognition of
the collective psychic phenomena at work in the Trump election that befuddles
all attempts by the political and social pundits to explain it.
We have seen over and over again interviews with “Trump
followers” who deny the basis facts of Trump and instead project onto Trump a
faithful expectation that he will eventually fulfill their desires for a better
government. This is an act of faith of
the deepest feelings. The factual historical personality is obscured behind the
projections of the unconscious looking for an appropriate screen upon which to
projects its symbols. When faith is at
work for a “higher cause,” it is invariably the archetype of the totality of
the person, i.e., the individual’s wholeness, attempting to find its way into
consciousness. The psychic phenomena of
a person who feels cut off, separated, and estranged from both themselves and
their society stimulates their collective unconscious to respond by insinuating
the archetype of their self-realization of their fundamental totality into
their personal consciousness. This is
experienced directly and irrationally, and even the person’s own
rationalizations used to explain it come after the fact.
The recognition of the unconscious opens a door to the
confusing and terrifying emotions, imaginings, and thoughts of our inner life
that most people are more than happy to close immediately. The anti-Trump voter
as well as the Trump voter are equally eager to pretend there are no psychic
phenomena at play here, and it is all just a matter of rational analysis and
discussion to determine the facts. But the abrupt and widespread appearance of
the social meme of “fake news” in conjunction with the “Trump-era” shows the
archetypal influence behind Trump’s meteoric rise in politics. The label “fake
news” is telling us to our faces that the collective social forces we are
dealing with are irrational psychic forces working on the level of symbols not
facts. Itr is not a question of which media outlet is or is not dealing in
“fake news,” because at bottom, they all are in their own ways. The New York Times has its particular way of
presenting “fake news” just like FOX News has its own way of presenting “fake
news.” The common denominator of all fake news is its failure to address its
contextual prejudices supporting its perspective, and this is due to the
failure to acknowledge the unconscious psychic phenomena at work in the
presentation of the news.
The completeness which the archetype of our own wholeness
seeks is not something that can tamed or determined by our conscious ego. Our conscious ego seeks our wholeness from
within the bifurcated environment of consciousness, and therefore can only
conceive of wholeness and totality as “perfection.” But real wholeness and totality must
necessarily include our nocturnal side, the very aspects of ourselves that we
have shunned or exiled. Thus when we
consciously open ourselves to a search for our wholeness, we are faced with the
problem of suffering and “evil” in the world and in ourselves as intimately
expressed by our own shadow side. People
who long for such wholeness, but have no personal guide who has experienced the
journey, are confused by the necessity to confront the world of suffering
directly and personally as the gateway to inner unity. They think they can find
the perfection of wholeness without facing suffering. In his extensive monograph “Aion: Researches
Into the Phenomenology of the Self,” Jung notes:
“To strive after teleiosis in the
sense of perfection is not only legitimate but is inborn in man as a peculiarity
which provides civilization with one of its strongest roots. This striving is
so powerful, even, that it can turn into a passion that draws everything into
its service. Natural as it is to seek perfection in one way or another, the
archetype fulfills its own completeness, and this is a τελείωσις (teleiosis)
of quite another kind. Where the archetype predominates, completeness is forced upon us against all our conscious
strivings, in accord with the archaic nature of the archetype. The individual may
strive after perfection (“Be you therefore perfect— τελειόι--as also your heavenly
father is perfect.”) but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for
the sake of his completeness.”(p. 69 Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 9, Part
II.)
When we seek the wholeness of ourselves, we are usually
drawn by affinity to a living archetypal symbol of that wholeness such as the
Buddha or the Christ. If we follow the
Buddha we must begin the journey with the First Noble Truth of Suffering, and
if we follow the Christ we must begin with identification with the Passion
(i.e., suffering) and crucifixion of the Christ. The Taoist archetypal symbol of wholeness,
the Taiji is not anthropomorphic, but
its containment of the opposites of yin and yang, dark and light, within the
circle of completeness confronts the follower directly with the necessity of
dealing with their own dark side if wholeness is to be realized. Ultimately there is no way to wholeness except
through the confrontation and integration of suffering and the shadow side of
ourselves. We can’t become complete by running away from suffering.
It is the archetypal unconscious impetus to seek
completeness being perverted by the conscious prejudice against suffering that
leads to the illusion we can become perfect by getting rid of the “bad things
of life.” This psychic phenomenon is exactly expressed in the Trump voters’
resonance with the symbol of “draining the swamp” projected onto
government. Those who would be
personally perfect and then project this desire onto the social screen desire a
perfect government. Their own sense of imperfection, as a being personally filled
with swamp creatures within their own inner world, is projected outward onto
the government as a swamp needing to be drained. The psychic dimension of this projection is
evidenced by the denial of the Trump voters who literally can not see that
Trump has brought more “swamp creatures” into his government than any previous
president. This self-blinding in consciousness is a primary symptom of the
archetype’s unconscious influence.
Trump is the manifested expression of our denial of the
unconscious. The so-called anti-Trump resistance is also an expression of our
denial of the unconscious as shown by its psychic contagion of a new Mc Carthyite
“red scare” anti-Russian hysteria.
Because the anti-Trump forces can not acknowledge either the conscious
or unconscious psychic forces behind Trump’s popularity, they project their
dissociated psychic contents, with the sense of “evil,” onto an available
target like “Russia,” so that they no longer care for the facts to be proven
before they are certain of their conclusions. Their certainty before the
determination of any evidence and their eager grasping at any straw or
suggestion of “collusion” without a verification demonstrate conclusively the
unconscious influences.
So what happened to the unconscious? It seems that humankind’s struggle with its
own dark side in WWII was so traumatic that our collective consciousness
revolted against itself and drove out the messenger that offered the only hope
of understanding what had happened because merely trying to understand was too
terrible. Using the terminology of rationalism, the study of the unconscious
was tarred and feathered as “mystical” or, to use a more technical term, “woo
woo.” .
This kind of over-rationalization and sloganeering literalization by the
perspective of materialism shows the unconscious influence in the repression
itself. Materialism became the new
religion of science and dogmatically repressed the scientific study of psychic
phenomenon from the psychological perspective.
Only the materialist perspective was officially allowed in the post-war
study of the psyche within the major educational institutions funded by commercial
and military interests.
Psychology deals with the facts of mental contents. The fact
that the idea or symbol exists as a psychic phenomenon is the truth that
psychology studies. Thus the fact of the idea or symbol of a God (or the
Buddhist Dharmakaya of Taoist Taiji) as the symbol of our own desire for
wholeness, and the incarnation or birth of that symbol as a person who
manifests that wholeness in human form (e.g., Christ, Buddha, or Immortal), is
the rightful object of the study of psychology, and this is not a question of
neurons firing or the literal historical objectification of the symbol in any
particular individual. It is not the individual but the archetypal symbol
projected onto the individual that allows the historical person to be honored
or worshipped far beyond the historical death of the individual, precisely
because the archetypal aspect is collective not individual..
As Jung said, “It is certainly a good thing to preach reason
and commons sense, but what if you have a lunatic asylum for an audience or a
crowd in a collective frenzy? There is not much difference between them because
the madman and the mob are both moved by impersonal overwhelming forces.” (p.
15 of Coll. Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 11.) The impersonal overwhelming forces of the
collective unconscious that brought Trump to the presidency must be studied and
understood or we make a fatal mistake in regard to the human psyche as well as
to our society and culture. .
~end~
