Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Though I became increasingly aware of the beauty of the bright daylight world where ‘golden sunlight filters through green leaves,’ at the same time I had a premonition of an inescapable world of shadows filled with frightening, unanswerable questions.”

Dualities are central to The Architecture of the Self. Jung describes individuation as a process of pulling out the archetypes of the unconscious and merging them with conscious experience to create psychic wholeness. In the architecture of the psyche, consciousness and unconsciousness help create a perfect circle. This circle is the self, incorporating both light and shadow.

“I have never forgotten that moment, for it illuminated in a flash of lightning the quality of eternity in my childhood.”

In this passage, Jung explores how archetypes that are part of his personal mythology emerged throughout his life, starting from childhood. He has realized that his childhood holds the key to unlocking unconscious experience and the discovery of deeper meaning.

“I have never fully unwound the tangle of my earliest memories. They are like individual shoots of a single underground rhizome, like stations on a road of unconscious development.”

Jung uses rhizomes to symbolize The Mythic Creation of Consciousness. Early in his childhood, he began to separate into two versions of the self: the social self and the authentic, inner self. The rhizomes represent the inner self that occupies unconscious experience. The social self, emerging from the soil, is the fleeting and shallow conscious experience.

“Nature seemed to me full of wonders, and I wanted to steep myself in them. Every stone, every plant, every single thing seemed alive and indescribably marvelous.”

From early childhood, Jung searched for connections and symbolism in everything around him. His description in this passage aligns with the connection he draws between childhood and collective unconsciousness. The time he spent alone in nature caused him to feel as though he was unified with everything around him. Jung felt the same sensation during his visit to East Africa when he saw a landscape uncorrupted by people.

“The play and counterplay between personalities No. 1 and No. 2, which has run through my whole life, has nothing to do with a ‘split’ or dissociation in the ordinary medical sense. On the contrary, it is played out in every individual.”

Jung describes the division that occurred between his inner self and his persona while interacting with his friends at school. This separation occurs for all people as they begin to navigate the need for a social self. Jung explains that this is an inescapable part of the architecture of the self as the need to protect deep levels of consciousness becomes increasingly necessary.

“I realized that paranoid ideas and hallucinations contain a germ of meaning. A personality, a life history, a pattern of hopes and desires lie behind the psychosis. The fault is ours if we do not understand them.”

Jung connects his spiritual ideas about wholeness with his work as a psychiatrist. He believed that his patients could be treated through individuation as a process of personal evolution. By uncovering archetypes and symbols and analyzing them, Jung believed that he could help his patients uncover the source of their illnesses and recover.

“That sentence burned itself into my memory; and in it the end of our relationship was already foreshadowed. Freud was placing personal authority above truth.”

Jung describes the moment when he parted ways with Sigmund Freud. After offering his thoughts on one of Freud’s dreams, Jung explained that his analysis needed more information about Freud’s history for accuracy. However, Freud was unwilling to set aside the mask of his persona for the sake of vulnerability.

“In the cave, I discovered remains of a primitive culture, that is, the world of the primitive man within myself.”

Jung views collective unconsciousness as representative of the primordial self. His characterization of collective unconsciousness as “primitive” and his alignment of the concept with the indigenous cultures he encountered have been criticized for colonial bias.

“Dreams like this, and my actual experiences of the unconscious, taught me that such contents are not dead, outmoded forms, but belong to our living being.”

Freud viewed dream interpretation as a way to root out and eradicate repressed memories that impact the psyche. However, Jung believed that the archetypes of unconscious experience need to be illuminated and incorporated into consciousness—something he saw as the outcome of individuation as a process of personal evolution.

“On August 1 the world war broke out. Now my task was clear: I had to try to understand what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with that of mankind in general.”

World War I provides historical context for Jung’s work. In Chapter 6, the psychoanalyst describes struggling to make sense of disturbing dreams just as World War I began. Jung’s mental processes were impacted by the collective cultural experiences of Europe, providing personal and historical insight into the nature of collective unconsciousness.

“When I was writing down these fantasies, I once asked myself, ‘What am I really doing? Certainly this has nothing to do with science. But then what is it?’ Whereupon a voice within me said, ‘It is art.’”

Jung’s scientific approach was unique in its incorporation of interdisciplinary study. Throughout his career, he challenged the status quo by taking risks on otherwise discounted and discredited areas of inquiry. When Jung first encountered Freud, the older psychologist’s work had been dismissed by the medical community. Jung’s research into alchemy offers another example of his willingness to take chances on alternative fields.

“Analytical psychology is fundamentally a natural science, but it is subject far more than any other science to the personal bias of the observer.”

Here, Jung presents a connection between his own work and G. W. F. Hegel’s work with phenomenology. Jung recognizes that the observer has the potential for allowing bias to impact interpretation. This consideration offers a new way of thinking about Jung’s personal reflection throughout the work.

“The experiences of the alchemists were, in a sense, my experiences, and their world was my world.”

One of the ideas that Jung presents is “synchronicity,” which is the seemingly coincidental occurrences in everyday life that Jung argues has meaningful significance. The prevalence of synchronicity in Jung’s philosophy is seen in how he interpreted a dream, which then led him to study alchemy.

“I had to achieve a kind of representation in stone of my innermost thoughts and of the knowledge I had acquired.”

Because Jung dedicated his life to the study of symbolism, he felt a compulsion to build a house that represented an outward manifestation of the architecture of the self. The Tower at Bollingen became a symbol of Jung’s personal process of individuation.

“I began to see on the front face, in the natural structure of the stone, a small circle, a sort of eye, which looked at me. I chiseled it into the stone.”

Symbols pervade all aspects of Jung’s life, beyond his work as a psychoanalyst with memory and dream interpretation. In this passage, Jung describes a compulsion to carve an eye into a stone after engraving an alchemist’s verse. The act of engraving the stone was reminiscent of Jung’s childhood experiences.

“The good fellow could have no notion of the thoughts which had struck me like a flash of lightning, suddenly illuminating my point of observation.”

In this passage, Jung describes his initial reaction at learning new information about a culture in North Africa. He soon realized that the ferocity of his reaction was representative of how deeply rooted Western ideology was in his psyche.

“I had the feeling that I had already experienced this moment and had always known this world which was separated from me only by distance in time.”

Jung believed that synchronicity and the feeling of déjà vu served as indicators that he was encountering something meaningful about the nature of the unconscious. While visiting indigenous cultures, Jung felt that he was coming closer to the experience of collective unconsciousness.

“This experience gave me a feeling of extreme poverty, but at the same time of great fullness.”

The totality of individuation represents total absorption into collective unconsciousness. Jung sees the universal archetypes of collective experience as an important part of the mythic creation of consciousness. During his near-death experience, he realized that part of absorbing into collective unconsciousness requires the total loss of the self—something that filled him with complicated emotions.

“What I have to tell about the hereafter, and about life after death, consists entirely of memories.”

Jung applies his recursive view of consciousness to the afterlife. In the work, the psychoanalyst presents a mandala as a symbol of psychic wholeness and the transcendent outcome of individuation as a process of personal evolution. Jung describes individuation as a way of uncovering the recurring images that construct the individual’s personal mythology. Therefore, childhood offers insight into old age, and old age offers insight into childhood, creating a circle of consciousness. With this logic, Jung suggests that archetypes have insight to offer about the nature of the afterlife.

“Today we need psychology for reasons that involve our very existence. We stand perplexed and stupefied before the phenomenon of Nazism and Bolshevism because we know nothing about man.”

Jung argues that self-reflection is the key to individuation and argues that a lack of self-reflection is the source of evil. His references in this passage add historical context to his autobiography and how he believes his work fits into a larger cultural conversation.

“Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.”

As a young psychiatrist, Jung was not content to merely diagnose the patient without offering a form of treatment. He believed that his work was only worthwhile if it had meaning. Jung’s tenacious search for meaning pervaded his work, forming the framework for his study of archetypes and the mythic creation of consciousness.

“Being a part, man cannot grasp the whole. He is at its mercy. He may assent to it, or rebel against it; but he is always caught up by it and enclosed within it.”

Although humans create personal mythologies, they cannot escape their position within the spectrum of collective unconsciousness. Jung argues that the process of individuation is a meaningful pursuit because it sheds light on how the individual and the collective interact.

“The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole.”

Jung returns to his emphasis of dualities by reframing the process of individuation. Like his assertion that symbolic work requires the reflective emergence of hidden archetypes into conscious experience, Jung proposes that individuation involves the balance of all dualities.