Autor: Doran, Robert; Tyrrell, Bernard

Buch: Trinification of the Word

Titel: Doran, Robert - Christ and the Psyche

Stichwort: C.G. Jung: das Psychische u. Psychoide; transzendentale Prinzipien: Geist (ultraviolett) - Instinkt (infrarot); Archetypus; Korrelation: Geist - Materie; Parapsychologie, Astronomie; unus mundus

Kurzinhalt: Jung thus postulates two "transcendental principles" quite separate from one another: spirit and instinct ... while spirit is the psychic ultra-violet, neither physiological nor psychic. The psyche unites spirit and matter in the image.

Textausschnitt: The Psychic and the Psychoid

119a The last twenty-five years of Jung's life saw his thought move far beyond medical psychology. His work became an empirical science of the human soul, and as such it becomes directly pertinent to the theologian.1 Among the notions of his thought which were affected by this development are the archetypes of the collective unconscious. (Fs)

119b In Jung's early work, the archetypes are not distinguished from archetypal images; namely experienced representations of typical forms of behavior which tend to repeat themselves in the course of the living of the human drama. From their centre, creative forces emerge which shape and transform life and which are ultimately responsible for genuine intellectual and artistic achievements. The ego needs the archetypes for its own continued vitality, but the archetypes also need the ego if they are to be consciously realized. (Fs)

119c In his later work, Jung distinguishes the archetype-in-itself from the archetypal images, and he focuses more on the background of the images. He realizes more and more the incomprehensibility of the archetype-in-itself, its permanently unknown meaning.2 The core of meaning, what the images refer to, remains unknown, as though it belonged to a realm transcendent to the psyche. This core of meaning expresses itself in metaphors which, while issuing from the realm beyond subjectivity, nonetheless are related to the life of the individual, regulate that life, stimulate psychic happenings, order them to or away from the goal of individuation, and seem to possess a foreknowledge of the envisioned terminus.3 (Fs)

119d Jung is led by these data to posit the presence of spirit in the psyche and to relate archetypes to this spirit factor. The collective unconscious had always consisted for Jung of vestiges of biological evolution and heredity closely connected with instinct. The archetypes had been and remain correlative to instincts. But, says Jung, they "are not just relics or vestiges of earlier modes of functioning; they are the ever-present and biologically necessary regulators of the instinctual sphere" and stimulate images which represent the meaning of the instincts.4 But these images are also numinous or spiritual or mystical in their character and effects. They can mobilize religious convictions and draw the subject under a spell from which he cannot and will not break free, so deep and full is the experience of meaningfulness he enjoys.5 Thus, "in spite of or perhaps because of its affinity with instinct, the archetype represents the authentic element of spirit, but a spirit which is not to be identified with the human intellect, since it is the latter's spiritus rector."6 Instinct and archetype, "the most popular opposites imaginable," yet "belong together as correspondences, which is not to say that the one is derivable from the other, but that they subsist side by side as reflections in our own minds of the opposition that underlies all psychic energy."7 (Fs)

120a Jung thus postulates two "transcendental principles" quite separate from one another: spirit and instinct. Their tension is the source of psychic energy, which moves to unite them. They are mediated by the archetypal image, through which spirit becomes incarnate and instinct consciously meaningful. Spirit and instinct are not themselves psychic, but psychoid, that is, understood by relation to the psyche, but autonomous from the psyche and not subject to will as is the psyche's disposable energy. Archetypes in themselves are no longer psychic, but are transcendent principles of spirit determining the orientation of both consciousness and the unconscious psyche. Instinct is called the psychic infra-red, passing over into the physiology of the organism and merging with its chemical and physical conditions, while spirit is the psychic ultra-violet, neither physiological nor psychic. The psyche unites spirit and matter in the image. (Fs) (notabene)

120b On the basis of the hypothesis of the psychoid, Jung found himself in a position to understand somewhat better certain phenomena which had always interested him: parapsychology, extra-sensory perception, and astrological correlations. He came to regard these phenomena as synchronistic, that is, as manifesting a meaningful but acausal concurrence of mind and matter. Their just-so orderedness is rooted in the psychoid parallelism of spirit and matter. The archetype-in-itself is thus an a priori ordering principle which cannot be distinguished from continuous creation understood either as a series of successive acts of creation or as the eternal presence of one creative act.1 Synchronicity points to an ultimate unity of all existence, the unus mundus. The collective unconscious becomes the timeless and spaceless unity underlying empirical multiplicity, a transcendental psychophysical background containing the determining conditions of empirical phenomena. As such, it is a darkness beyond the categories of the mind, incommensurable to consciousness, less and less accessible to conscious correction and reasoning - yet the darkness, not of meaninglessness, but of a superabundance of meaning beyond the powers of rational comprehension and influence, and yet involving ego-consciousness and the unconscious psyche as participants in a world-creating drama to which the individual has no choice but to submit. In this surrender one finds the self, finds his life, but no longer claims it. He lives the "just-so" life, without ulterior motives, without desire and without fear. In the experience of the self the dark background of the empirical world approximates consciousness. This is the experience of bounded infinity, of finite boundlessness, where the incommensurable distance of the unknown draws very near.2 (Fs) (notabene)