Exploring the Psyche

by Troy W. Pierce

Originally published in MoonRise News

    I would like to tell you of two shifts in human understanding and consciousness separated by more than 2,500 years. The first inaugurated the age of science, the second the age of psychology - let's hope it doesn't take two thousand years to catch on as well.

    Every history of Western Philosophy begins in the late 7th early 6th centuries BCE in the Greek colonies of Asia Minor. Thales of Miletus is credited as the first Natural Philosopher in the western tradition. His speculations included that thunder was caused by the breaking apart of clouds, and that lightning is a bright contrast of the break with the dark clouds. The one thing missing from this account (aside from electricity) is Zeus. Natural Philosophy while a long way from modern science, is itself a long way from mythology.

    F. M. Cornford's phrase for this period is, "the discovery of Nature."¹ Thales and his successors viewed the world as objective, as a thing in itself; in contrast to a more subjective view in which the world is seen as a part of, or only in relation to, the individual. There is no way of knowing how many such shifts of consciousness were necessary to get to this point, but we can get an idea from the psychological development of humans. This awareness of objective nature corresponds to Piaget's Operational stage and is not seen until early adolescence, and so is correspondingly late in evolutionary development.

    It was only a relatively small number of individuals who where able to peel their subjective elements off the external world, and those that did had varying success. An example of the general mindset a century later can be seen in the charge of impiety that Socrates was condemned for, which was based on the widely held belief (as portrayed in Aristophanes' The Clouds) that he was a Natural Philosopher and so did not worship the gods. However, this view of nature as a thing-in-itself continued through the rocky terrain of human history, and lead eventually to modern science.

    The development of psychological thought parallels that of scientific thought. The first explanations were mythological - external supernatural forces were the cause of madness, exorcism was the cure. Next, a medical model consisting of various imbalances among the four ancient elements, four humors, or more recently four neurotransmitters - leading to scalding, freezing, bleeding, and prescriptions to right the imbalance.

    With the 20th century came the rise of Freud and psychoanalysis, this corresponds to an animistic view of nature. The personality (the "I" or ego) is the only thing-in-itself in the psychological realm, with everything else originating with, and gaining its meaning from, its relationship to the personality. The unconscious just being a closet with the personality's skeletons.

    The 'Thales' of psychology, the discoverer of the psyche, was Carl Gustav Jung. Originally a protégé of Freud's out of enthusiasm for the older man's position that such things as dreams and fantasies had meaning, Jung found that he could not support Freud's dogmatic and reductionistic views. He broke with Freud by writing a book which compared the fantasies of an American woman with ancient myths.

    Jung's intuition that the unconscious was much deeper than Freud's conception, was further supported by an at times overwhelming encounter with the unconscious during the Great War. During this time he experienced waking dreams and visions, and held conversations with inner figures. These experiences were not created by him, nor where they arbitrary figments of imagination. He discovered that not only did subjective content have meaning, but it also had reality - that the psyche was, like nature, a thing-in-itself. In his later works he refers to this internal reality as the objective psyche. This is a major change from our current view in which 'subjective' has the connotation of 'arbitrary.'

    Finding that in most cases that other reality had a stronger significance for his patients than the objective one, Jung effected many 'cures' simply by attending to that other realm. And if Jung could be said to have a technique, it would be only that.

    The correspondences Jung saw across cultures, individuals, and historical periods lead to the development of his theory of the collective unconscious. Most of his work was, in effect, to explore and map this previously overlooked or misunderstood terrain. He used the term archetype to denote the transpersonal patterns that are at work in the individual's psyche. And he saw the course of an individual's life as an individuation process, becoming an individual by doing the work of bringing the light of consciousness into the unconscious and integrating our way towards wholeness.

    That this second great discovery is virtually unknown or misunderstood less than a century later, shouldn't come as a real shock. Psychology has changed dramatically with the development of drugs which can greatly relieve much systemic psychological suffering, and our knowledge of the brain is increasing exponentially. In an age that has seen such amazing gains in the objective world, there is a corresponding distrust of the subjective one. The belief that objective reality is the only reality is strong now, but at the same time we see a resurfacing of that archaic term 'soul' in our culture - and are reminded that 'psyche' is Greek for 'soul.'

¹ F. M. Cornford, Before and After Socrates, Cambridge 1932

© -1996 Troy W. Pierce