[Beneath the Surface] -- Last weekend, I attended an introductory session on Jungian Psychology and Transpersonal Psychology. Carl Gustav Jung was something of a Renaissance man. His interests ranged far and wide, from mythology and dreams to science and medicine. He turned his keen intellect first on his own psyche, and used what he found to help his patients. During his journey, he helped to found and establish the field of psychoanalysis. In doing so, he invented the concepts of collective unconscious, synchronicity, introversion, extroversion, and even developed the association word test. Jung fully believed that symbols are the language of the unconscious, and he advanced the use of archetypes to illuminate both personality as well as literature. Well, not all 80s song lyrics make for great literature, but I would wager all of our favorite artists were drawing, in one way or another, from the "collective unconscious." Let's briefly look at these Jungian concepts in Jung's own words.
Jung on the collective unconscious:
The collective unconscious - so far as we can say anything about it at all - appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents. In fact, the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious... We can therefore study the collective unconscious in two ways, either in mythology or in the analysis of the individual. (From The Structure of the Psyche, CW 8, par. 325.)
Jung on the archetypes:
The archetype concept derives from the often repeated observation that myths and universal literature stories contain well defined themes which appear every time and everywhere. We often meet these themes in the fantasies, dreams, delirious ideas and illusions of persons living nowadays. (From Carl Jung Resources. http://www.carl-jung.net/archetypes.html)
Jung on Synchronicity:
The philosophical principle that underlies our conception of natural law iscausality. But if the connection between cause and effect turns out to be onlystatistically valid and only relatively true, then the causal principle is only of relative use for explaining natural processes and therefore presupposes the existence of one or more other factors which would be necessary for anexplanation. This is as much as to say that the connection of events may in certaincircumstances be other than causal, and requires another principle of explanation.
We shall naturally look round in vain in the macrophysical world for acausalevents, for the simple reason that we cannot imagine events that are connected non-causally and are capable of a non-causal explanation. But that does not mean that such events do not exist. Their existence- or at least their possibility- follows logically from the premise of statistical truth. (From Synchronicity — An Acausal Connecting Principle.)
Hopefully, you're as fascinated by these ideas as I am. Maybe you're even wondering what 80s tunes have obvious -- or not so obvious -- ties to Jungian concepts. But even if you're not, you can still enjoy some great 80s selections after the break.
