Climate Inside: The Thin Thread of Consciousness

In 1957, when Carl Jung was 82 years old, he sat for a series of film interviews over four days in the August heat of Zurich, conducted by a psychologist from the University of Texas.  Jung did not give many such interviews, but did so this time because it was principally meant for psychology students.  Still, in the midst of talking about his work over half a century, he made a statement, almost a plea, of wider application and great urgency.
  "Nowadays particularly the world hangs on a thin thread," he said.  The U.S. and the USSR were building thermonuclear arsenals with the power to destroy civilizations in minutes.  Jung pointed out that the threat to humanity was no longer from outside. "We are the great danger," he said.  This of course is true today as well.  Even if the threat of thermonuclear destruction has receded, humanity as well as much of the natural world is endangered by the climate change that humanity is causing.

Why? It is not because we lack knowledge, or the power to confront this challenge.  There are economic and political forces preventing it, but given the gap between the kind of knowledge that usually prompts action, and the failure to accept it,  much of the responsibility must lie in the climate inside.  Just as it had something to do with how we learned to stop worrying and love the Bomb.

"The psyche is the great danger," Jung continued.  "And so it is demonstrated in our day what the power of the psyche is, how important it is to know something about it.  But we know nothing about it."

Jung meant not only the dearth of serious attention by experts, but mostly the refusal of even an educated public to take the psyche seriously.  "Nobody would give credit to the idea that the psychical processes of the ordinary man have any importance whatever." 
     
So why do they have any importance?  Especially during the first half of the twentieth century, Freud, Jung and others investigated psychological phenomena and began to explore how the psyche works.  They came up with tools that allow everyone to understand themselves and each other better, and to assert more control over their behavior.  Despite today's emphasis on drugs and very targeted therapies, these concepts and tools are widely accepted, even if mostly implicit.  I have found that the conceptual tools I will describe in this series--according to my own crude understanding of them--to be very useful.  They are useful in understanding attitudes of others that have political and very real consequences.  But I use them to understand my own attitudes and to check my rationales for my behavior.

I use Jung as a guide because he is the broadest and deepest of these thinkers and investigators.  But also because Jung emphasized the individual.   He thought the psychical processes of the ordinary person have great importance.  He insisted that the psyche of every individual is unique, and that the mix of forces and tendencies that his theories name are different for everyone.  But the more the individual knows, the better equipped the individual is to figure things out and to act on that knowledge.

I use Jung also because he thought about the psychology of all human individuals-- not just the very sick persons, but people with ordinary problems--problems and potentials we all have in common.

The most basic concept is the psyche itself, which is composed of the conscious and the unconscious.  This division didn't begin with Jung or Freud.  It's ancient.  Thoreau wrote in his journal about the relation of the two in the writing process with great sophistication.  But Jung developed it further.

These are complex subjects but just three things are most important for now.  First, the unconscious is vast and powerful.  Another psychologist likened consciousness to the froth on a wave in comparison with the ocean of the unconscious.  And the unconscious is unknown.  There are ways of thinking about it, ways to investigate it, but by its nature (and by definition) it is outside conscious knowledge or control.  "...the unconscious is always unconscious," Jung said in these interviews. "It is really unconscious."

But (second) the unconscious isn't just a murky place of fantasy--it motivates and inspires behavior.  People can and do act directly at the direction of their unconscious.  If you don't understand or accept that this happens, the unconscious has really free reign. "If you are unconscious about certain things that ought to be conscious," Jung said, "then you are a man whose left hand never knows what the right is doing, and counteracts or interferes with the right hand."

That's partly and most importantly because (third) the unconscious can supply rationales for what it does.  The unconscious routinely deceives the conscious mind as well as bypassing the conscious mind.

Some believe that's why the trickster figure--including the devil on your left shoulder, etc.-- is so prominent in stories everywhere and at every time.  We sense the power of self-delusion and self-deception.

This may seem to quash human freedom, the importance we give to conscious control.  But once I understood these elements of the psyche, I found it liberating.  It meant that by understanding that the unconscious can lie to you in the language of reason, and by using conceptual tools Jung and others developed to test whether something was likely coming from the unconscious, I could increase conscious control over behavior.  Even knowing that these complexities exist, and a little of how they work, increased my sense of who I am, and of being human.

Next time, the first of those conceptual tools for understanding one way the unconscious works to influence and even define how we see the outside world as well as ourselves, and consequently what we do.