The Flight Into the Unconscious A psychological analysis of C.G.

Jung's psychology project Wolfgang Giegerich (Steinebach near Munich) Now, at the end of the century of psychology and at the threshold to a future that will no longer be psychological, it is time to look back upon C.G. Jung's psychology project, not by way of paraphrasing what Jung taught, but by way of reconstruction. I place my talk under the motto of a logion that Jung liked to quote: If indeed thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed: but if thou knowest not, thou art cursed. I begin with a text in which Jung as an old man described the significant moment at the time after the publication of his first major book, Transformations and Symbols of the Libido (1912), and

after his separation from Freud in which his psychology of the unconscious 1 can be said to have begun. The text reads, About this time I experienced a moment of unusual clarity in which I could see the path I had traveled so far. I thought, Now you possess a key to mythology and are in a position to unlock all the gates to the unconscious human psyche. But then something whispered within me, Why open all gates? And promptly the question arose of what, after all, I had accomplished. I had explained the myths of peoples of the past; I had written a book about the hero, about the myth in which man has always lived. But in what myth does man live nowadays?In the Christian myth, the answer might be.Do you live in it? something in me asked.To be honest, the answer is no! It is not the myth I live

in.Then we no longer have any myth?No, evidently we no longer have any myth.But then what is your myth? The myth in which you do live? At this point things became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a boundary. (MDR, p. 171)2 Jung's first thought is, Now you possess a key to mythology and are in a position to unlock all the gates to the unconscious human psyche. Jung feels himself, as it were, in the position of a psychological St. Peter. But then something whispered in him, Why open all gates? Truly a surprising question. To open all gatesis this not what science, what particularly psychoanalysis, is all about? The whispered inner voice is crucial. It calls Jung to his destiny, to his very own conception of the unconscious, and this is probably why Jung experienced this moment as one of unusual clarity.

Before, he had still tried to take refuge under the wings of Freud's theoretical framework. But now he was going to have to sew his garment himself (cf. CW 9i 27). His inner voice tempts Jung into giving up his power of the keys. It aims for a receding, a holding back. Instead of a course of thinking without restraints, it suggests leaving at least some gate unopened. The reflections initiated by the whisper from within culminate in the twofold result, No, evidently we no longer have any myth.But then what is your myth? The myth in which you do live? One would normally assume that once it has become clear that we have no myth, it would be impossible to ask, But then what is your myth? We have just learned that myth is out. However, as the But then shows, the two sentences belong together. They are two halves of

one whole, namely of the modern experience of the present. One moment, one now, unfolds as the double movement of a radical negation of the past and a longing for, indeed an insisting on, a new future, and thus it empties itself. The present as experienced by modern consciousness is a dissociation. As all major thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries did in various ways, so Jung, too, sweeps away all tradition. He makes a clean break with the myth in which man has always lived. For modern consciousness, the present (each new present) is an absolutely exceptional situation. Thus Jung states elsewhere, This distinguishes our time from all others (CW 10 161); This situation is new. All ages before us... (GW 9/I 50, my transl.). The idea of the exceptional situation is the lever for psychologically heaving human existence out from its actual embeddedness in the existing,

historically grown tradition and for splitting the now. Now we have arrived at a zero point, we begin with a clean slate. But the clean slate created by declaring myth and the whole religiousmetaphysical tradition reaching far back into the past obsolete is only the foil and the preconditionfor the insistence on my myth, the myth in which I live. Here two aspects have to be distinguished. The first is Jung's switching from myth as a social phenomenon to a myth of the private individual. Originally Jung had asked about the myth in which man lives or we live. After this myth has been declared to be today non-existent, he is concerned only about his own private myth. The later Jung knew that myth, that is, real myth as a historical phenomenon, is pre-eminently a social phenomenon: it is told by the many and heard by the many.3 Our text definitively

dismisses this myth and at once establishes the idea of a personal myth. Along with the entire tradition of the past, the sense for the public sphere as the locus of meaning and for the individual as an integral part of a people or community is dismissed, and instead the focus from now on is exclusively on the atomic individual. It is obvious that this existentialist turn was essential for the rise of a psychology as Jung developed it. The second aspect is that the word myth in No, we no longer have any myth and in But then what is your myth? is an equivocation. It refers to two fundamentally different phenomena, as already the so-cial/public dimension of the one and the private dimension of the other show. The one notion of myth is the myth that man has always lived in, the myth or the religious tradition that always precedes one's personal existence. One is born into it. The other,

decisively modernistic, notion of myth is the myth that is utterly new; it is not, but has to be sought; it is a program for the future. And it includes within its definition the debunking of myth in the first sense. It is cleansed from all remnants of existing public tradition. The driving force behind the clean break with tradition and the insistence on one's personal myth is the modernistic need for an unmediated beginning from scratch, with naked, abstract origins, in Jung's case, e.g., with Urerfahrung (originary experience), Urbild (primordial image) and archetype, which would later be imagined as the formerly unknown true origin even of the ancient phenomenon of myth. Normally an equivocation is rated as a fallacy. But here this fallacy has method. Rather than a personal mistake on the part of the author, it is an integral element of the idea presented. Just as the now is dissociated, the modernistic

idea of myth, too, is established as the dissociation between two extremes around an empty middle, the extremes of the myth of the past that is no more and the myth sought that is not yet. The mentality prevailing here is fundamentally different from all premodern thinking. Alchemy, for example, begins in the concrete middle. For it, the prima materia, the beginning, is the massa confusa at hand as it exists and results from the history that produced it. And the origin to be sought, the Mercurius, lies within the massa confusa itself, not outside at an extreme, behind or prior to it. Our text ends with the statement, At this point things became uncomfortable, and I stopped thinking. I had reached a boundary. Now Jung had arrived where the whispered question from the beginning Why open all gates? wanted to have him. The boundary closes the

gate to a relentless thinking that would go all the way. Now it was clear that the myth or pure origin that Jung was seeking had to be found on this side of the boundary, inasmuch as Jung's boundary was not a Rubicon to be crossed, not a taboo to be broken by an initiate. Throughout his life Jung respected the barrier across the mental world and vehemently condemned those who he believed had gone beyond it. The boundary forced Jung to reverse the normal direction of exploration, going no longer forward but backwards: introspection instead of thinking without restraints. What was this boundary? Our text lets us know. It consisted in stopping to think. The boundary is the objectified image in which the subjective attitude of refraining from thinking congeals. And the unconscious, as Jung conceived it, is the hypostatized boundary, the reified stopping to think. In the beginning of a

therapy, when a patient sought help from him, Jung liked to say that he did not know the answer to the patient's predicament either and suggested that they not think about it, but rather observe the patient's dreams. This move displays on a level of literal behavior what was also the principle constituting the logical structure of the psychology of the unconscious: a sacrificium intellectus. A contemporary of Jung though 16 years his senior, Husserl, was able to develop his pure phenomenology only by bracketing reality. Reality was not what Jung bracketed, and therefore his could not be a pure phenomenology either. Jung faced the all too real monsters in the unconscious. What he, with his sacrifice of the intellect, bracketed was something else: the transcendental ego. 4 Jung's bracketing resulted in his reducing the mind to the empirical ego, to the everyday mentality

of No. 1 personality. As empirical ego Jung of course could continue to think. The transcendental ego, the only one that might possibly have been up to the substantial metaphysical contents of myth and thus the only real addressee for them, was banished and extradited beyond the never to be transgressed boundary. Indeed, the boundary is the division between the empirical and the transcendental egos. What made the unconscious fundamentally unconscious was that it was deprived of an adequate addressee in consciousness. The movement described in our text has five moments: (1) the clean break with tradition and the actual historical situation, (2) the reaching out for a pure beginning, an absolute arch, (3) the insistence on this pure origin as myth, i.e., a higher meaning. (As an aside, I want to stress that in radical contrast to Freud's instinctual unconscious of desire and, later, Lacan's linguistic

unconscious, Jung's unconscious was cognitive, epistemic, an unconscious of meaning and knowing); (4) the rejection of the social and public and the restriction to the abstract individual, and (5) the sacrificium intellectus. Together they make up what was to be Jung's flight into the unconscious. With this phrase I am alluding to a formulation of the pre-modern thinker Hegel. About 90 years before Jung, Hegel had come to the realization that all the attempts at his time to rescue religion by rooting it, e.g., in ethics (Kant), feeling (Schleiermacher), art and aesthetics (Schelling, Hlderlin, and the early Hegel himself) had failed, and necessarily so. In view of this fact, he had suggested that the only way left to justify the substance of religion before consciousness was that it, religion, had to flee into, or take its refuge in, philosophy (in die Philosophie sich flchten). As Jaeschke pointed out, this

flight into the concept was a felix fuga, a happy flight, not an escape. It was a move forward, an advance both for the mind and for religion, because this flight would require careful work on the sophistication of the mind and its capacity of conceptual thought so that, as thinking rather than imaging mind, it might for the first time become adequate to the substantial contents that it entertained in religion; and so that religion, conversely, would attain to a higher form of itself, the form of its transparency. Jung, as a modern thinker, had to move into the opposite direction. He had to force myth or meaning underground, out of conscious thought, because under the conditions of the logic prevailing in modernity, mythic meaning could not stand up before the public waking mind and its intelligence. It had become illegiti-mate. 5 Thus it had to be logically stored away deep inside the private

individual, and it had to be purified, extricated from its concrete inherited and socially real contemporary form. And in order to recover this sterilized myth from within the individual, the mind had to fall asleep, both literally, in order to get dreams, and figuratively, by declaring itself incompetent in all essential matters. In essential matters, one had to wait for revelations from the unconscious. Jung believed that his dreams came from the unconscious as its purely natural products. But were they not much rather his own speculative ideas, the ideas of the whole man as conscious-unconscious unity, only that now they were disowned by and expelled from consciousness because under the conditions of the logic of modernity they could no longer be honestly thought ? They were allowed to reappear in consciousness only after having been forced into the guise of

dream or vision. In other words, in order to allow one's having such ideas at all today, man's intervention and the collaboration of the human mind an indispensable factor had to be made invisible (cf. CW 10 498). Jung criticized Albert Schweitzer for having run away to Africa as a missionary doctor, a task that could have been executed equally well by any other doctor. It would not have needed such a remarkably gifted theologian. Jung felt Schweitzer had deserted the spiritual or intellectual predicament of the Western mind, shrinking away from the consequences that his own studies concerning the historical Jesus were leading him to. But structurally, to literally escape to the dark continent of Africa seems to be the same move vis-vis the spiritual, intellectual predicament of the modern mind as to logically escape to the dark continent of the unconscious. For is the real

predicament really over there, in the unconscious, or is it not here, at home, in consciousness as the consciousunconscious unity of the mind? *** Now I want to look at how the sacrifice of the intellect, how boundary and dissociation determine the structure of Jung's developed psychology. Jung conceived his psychology as empirical science. The mind of the psychologist had to become exclusively receptive. Ideally it had to reduce itself to the mindlessness of a sensor, as in a robot, so as to simply observe the facts, nothing but the facts, without itself being intellect, reason, or knowing consciousness. The consciousness of the psychologist had to be innocent. It was forbidden to take any intellectual responsibility for the images of the unconscious. At the other end, on the side of the

object of psychology, the unconscious for Jung was conceived as pure nature, the dream as direct, unmediated (unmittelbar ) expression, spontaneous product, unintentional eventwithout any admixture of any conscious mind activity and untouched by reflection and civilization. The images of the unconscious were archetypal. Concerning his own fantasy productions Jung vehemently insisted, No, it is not art! On the contrary, it is nature (MDR p. 186). The unconscious as this virginal nature has thus become the exclusive locus of creativity and knowing. My unconscious is creative, my dreams know, not I. And only to the extent that I as consciousness become blind (refrain from thinking creatively of my own), can I partake of their knowledge and creativity. We see that underlying the psychology

of the unconscious is a fundamental dissociation: the splitting of the wholeness of the whole man (totus homo), as the living consciousunconscious, active-passive, creativereceptive, empirical-transcendental unity of consciousness. Now consciousness is not any more in itself the unity of itself and its other. Its one moment of unconsciousness has been ejected and positivized or ontologized as the unconscious. The contents of the unconscious are in themselves units of knowing and meaning, however a knowing in the form of natural facts, not in the form of knowing, and a meaning safely packaged in the meaninglessness of facts; they are ideas, images, symbols coming as nature. Archetypes are ultimately canned traditional knowledge, bottled up meanings, insights that are in themselves blind. The notion of the unconscious as a whole is the notion of

the spirit Mercurius, but only in the bottle, bracketed, encapsulated. There was a contradictory task, (a) the task of holding the mythic meaning in the bottle, packaged in the form of a text or mere image or statement (Br. 3, 317) of the psyche that we only quote, and (b) the task of nevertheless allowing consciousness to get in touch with this meaning. This task required that the empirical ego, the only one allowed, had to be split into two separate identities to compensate for the expelled actual addressee of essential knowledge, the transcendental ego. The one identity had the job of unmediatedly experiencing the dream without understanding and knowing; the other one had the task of understanding the meaning of the image without releasing this meaning from being merely what the dream said. If it had been released, one would have oneself become accountable for this meaning. One had

to (of course unwittingly) switch between the two identities; the spark was by no means allowed to spring over. For this would have meant the danger of inflation, of psychosis, a danger that for Jung had been most threateningly embodied in the figure of Nietzsche, who had dared to open all gates. There must never be a coniunctio, a vinculum or copula, 1. between the empirical observing and the emotionally affected subject, 2. between the image in the soul and what it says that it is the image of, 3. between the subject and what the experience of the subject is. But was the coniunctio not a favorite theme of Jung's? The thing to realize is that the coniunctio was precisely only a theme or motif that he studied. Semantically, the coniunctio is one of the most prominent ideas and goals for Jung. But the syntax of his theory contradicts its own semantics. As a subject-matter of a psychology of the

unconscious the coniunctio had to be bottled up, it had to be no more than an in vitro coniunctio, a motif in a text, an experience in a dream. But it was not allowed to escape the bottle and to permeate the structure of the theory or of the observer's consciousness itself. If that had occurred, the unconscious would immediately have disappeared and consciousness would have had to start to think all on its own responsibility again as the conscious-unconscious unity that it is. Only through the back door, namely as semantic contents and within the bottle, could Jung allow in such essential insights as: the transpersonal nature of the soul; the psyche as being all around us; psychological theory as itself a product of the fantasy activity of the soul, etc. The repressed transcendental ego was also only allowed to return projected into the unconscious, as the Self. But none of these insights was

allowed to get out of the bottle and have any effect on the logical structure of psychology. Inside the bottle all gates were allowed to be openedas long as the bottle itself stayed sealed. Psychology had to restrict itself exclusively to observing the semantics of psychic phenomena, their image, narrational, ideational aspect. This also explains Jung's remarkable general insensitivity to the logical form or status of phenomena. Indiscriminately he put Faust, Part II on the same level as immediate expressions of an individuation process. He was unable to see that this work had the utterly different structure of a highly reflected second order text, namely a text about texts and symbols. It was not symbolic, but a reflec-tion of symbols. By the same token Jung believed that he should understand Nietzsche's Dionysus archetypally, if not in terms of the Greek Dionysus then at least as a guise of the

Germanic Wotan, and he believed that in Richard Wagner and later in the Nazi movement the same Wotan was stirring from within, as he said, the Germanic soul, as if there still were such a thing as the Germanic soul. Impressed by certain semantic correspondences and ignoring the utterly different historical settings informing each of these phenomena, he simply had no feel for the incomparability between the manifestation of a god in an ancient society and the modern phenomenon of an ideological mass movement. The psychology of the unconscious would not be complete without Jung's transformation of the Trinity into quaternity. The motif of the Trinity was the one semantic element within psychology that threatened the syntax of the psychology of the unconscious. How? In accordance with a long tradition, Hegel stated that, Quadratum est lex naturae, triangulum mentis (the

square is the law of nature, the triangle that of the mind). The Trinity posed a mortal threat for the sacrificium intellectus, for the bracketing of the transcendental ego, for the bottling up of the spirit Mercurius. Of course Jung was right, the Trinity was incomplete and thus restless. It was incomplete because it aimed at our thinking, at the transcendental ego in us, as that in which it would find its completion. The Trinity as semantic content of consciousness aimed at a breakthrough through the level of semantics to the level of syntax. Jung just had to pull the Trinity's teeth. Its dynamic had to be pacified. And the pacifier was the Fourth, because the Fourth forced the movement aiming at our consciousness to return into itself. It now was complete and satisfied within itself. Wholeness had been successfully reduced to a semantic content of the unconscious, be it as an archetypal

fantasy expressed in the Assumptio Mariae yonder in heaven, or as an event or image in our personal dreams and as such an observable empirical fact, or be it as an ideal object that one might strive for. In other words, wholeness had been safely put inside the bottle, and the Fourth, as that which provides this intrabottle completeness, is at the same time the plug on the bottle, the seal protecting the unconscious as the unconsciousness of consciousness or as the mindlessness of the empirical ego. *** The text from Jung that we started with showed only how the fundamental principle operative in the generation of the concept of the unconscious first announced itself to Jung. What we discussed afterwards referred to the basic character of his developed psychological thought as a whole. But

the link between these two extremes, the actual transition from the first inkling to the finished, worked out psychology, is still missing. The sacrificium intellectus could not be a mere idea of such a sacrifice, this sacrifice of the intellect had to be actually performed. But it could not be performed as the subjective behavior of stopping to think. It had to become structural, syntactic. Only then could it be the factually existing, objective form of whatever contents. Such a real change of the logical constitution of experience required a ritual. How could the manufacturing of the unconscious be executed? Inasmuch as the unconscious was by definition essential knowledge as the opposite of knowing, namely as the un conscious, and inasmuch as it was something mental as the opposite of mind, namely as empirical-factual nature, the mind

had to within itself alienate or dissociate itself from itself. The unconscious had to be created as a condition of the mind itself, namely as its having gone under, consciousness intentionally resigning as waking consciousness and as creative, thinking mind. It had to intentionally discharge itself of any intellectual responsibility for the contents it entertained. The mind had to within itself reduce itself to a passive, innocent receptor and radically divorce itself from its own, the transcendental ego's, ideas, molding these ideas in such a way that they appeared to be natural objects vis-vis itself and as an independent reality, a stream of events that came to, or rather came over, consciousness all of their own accord, as if they were aliens intruding from outside. If the mind had to by itself bring about the partial eclipse of itself, it had to do this, of course, in such a way that it would be absolutely unconscious

concerning its own authorship in creating this eclipse as a state of itself. This self-contradiction was indispensable. The production in actuality of the notion of the unconscious through a self-induced eclipse had to itself be unconscious from the outset. The mind had to feel absolutely innocent about its experiences through which the reality of the idea of the unconscious was established. All awareness of a collaboration of the human mind itself in the realization of the unconscious had to be expunged. The moment there would have been the least suspicion that the realized notion of the unconscious owed its existence to its own doing, this notion would have collapsed. And the moment the images in Jung's dreams and visions would have been realized to have been his own ideas, merely bracketed and pushed down into unconsciousness, they would have lost their pure nature

and revelation status. This means that the establishment of the concept of the unconscious as real had to occur in the form of a petitio principii. The sine qua non of the production of the unconscious was that this production already occurred on the very basis of and within the result that it was supposed to produce. How is such a crazy, self-contradictory thing as the mind's self-alienation possible? There is only one real way: The ritual in which the concept of the unconscious was to be made real had to have the form of psychosis. Now we can return to Jung. The realization of the idea of the unconscious through the production of it as a natural reality occurred in the years of crisis after Jung's separation from Freud. This crisis has often been understood as a prolonged psychotic (or at least pre-psychotic) reaction. Such

explanations are clinical and not psychological. They take the crisis literally and do not see through it. Equally as naive as the clinical explanation is the opposite interpretation that sees in Jung's crisis, in analogy to a shaman's illness, his personal initiation into psychic reality. Seen psychologically, Jung's crisis was neither a psychotic reaction (to an event such as the loss of Freud or to childhood traumas), nor was it his personal crisis. The psychotic crisis was arranged, an arrangement in the sense of Adler and Jung. It was created, invented, not by Jung as ego-personality, but by the psyche as the whole man and for its own purposes. This means two things: it was logically, psychologically not a clinical illness, and yet semantically it indeed had the form of a clinical condition, the form of psychosis. Already the loss of orientation with which it all began was, as it were, artificially

produced in the service of the soul's project. It was not an event, a fact of naturepoor Jung being helplessly overwhelmed by his sudden loneliness after the break with Freud that his ego simply could not cope with. No, it was the beginning of a ritual, an opus of the soul. The other aspect of a psychological view is that the crisis was not really his, Jung's as person, part of his initiation or individuation process, but the crisis of psychology, a necessity of psychological theory, although, of course, it played itself out in the man Jung, and this again for a particular purpose. In this crisis the soul struggled to give itself a new definition, to house itself in a new building yet to be erected, namely in the idea of the unconscious as mythic meaning packaged as pure nature. Before his crisis, Jung had still tried to evade his own fate by hiding under the

wings of Freud's theory, in the hope that the soul would accept this abode and leave him alone. This hope had proved to be in vain. During the work on his Transformations and Symbols of the Libido it became clear to him that the soul demanded its right, demanded that Jung accept his fate to be the place in which the new structure of the psychology of the unconscious had to be erected. This had been his calling. The traditional locus of mythic and metaphysical knowledge had always been the objective mind; this knowledge had been out there in the proverbs containing wisdom, in the metaphysical doctrines, the mythic and religious tales publicly told and in the rituals publicly performed; it had not been inside. The personal crisis was indispensable because the establishment of the unconscious as nature required that the locus of essential knowing be transplanted into the personality in its

almost biological reality. It had to be bottled up in the empirical person. The idea of the personality was required because the unconscious could not be merely intellectually defined as pure nature, it had to be proven to exist as nature, to be actually rooted in the naturally existing person, as its interior; or, put the other way around, the personality had to be established as the existing bottle containing the spirit within itself. If this relocation was to be real, an empirical, natural process in the person was necessary: it required a selfsacrifice. I said that Jung's crisis was not a clinical illness and nevertheless had the form of psychosis. In medicine the word simulation is used in a moral sense and refers to a kind of fraudulent pretending. In computer technology simulation has a very different, neutral meaning (cf. flight simulator). It is in this latter sense that I say: Jung's crisis was a simulated

psychosis, a simulated personal crisis, or, on the symbolical level, a simulated descent into the underworld; it too was bracketed from the outset. It had to be simulation, because only simulation accomplishes the miracle of perfectly uniting authenticity and fake, innocent reception and intentional construction, whereby the authenticity and innocence of reception are experiential or semantic, the other two logical or syntactical. A genuine psychosis would have been an ordinary illness, a mishap, and not a ritual capable of transforming the entire logical constitution of the idea of soul. The voluntary (MDR, p. 178) or active moment contained in the simulated psychosis can be pinpointed. Jung tells us, It was during Advent of the year 1913 ... that I resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears [of succumbing to psychosis]. Then I let

myself drop ... (MDR, p. 179). This is the sacrificium intellectus come real, however not merely negatively and behaviorally as a conscious abstention, a conscious stopping to think, but positively as Jung's self-sacrifice, as the the whole man's self-reduction to the empirical ego. It is important to see that this sinking the mind was structural, syntactic and not semantic. It was not a particular technique of lowering the threshold of consciousness such as practiced when applying the method of active imagination. The application of a technique would still remain on the semantic level. Rather this going under of the mind was its logical reconstitution exclusively as the empirical ego that all of a sudden was confronted with the mind's own ideas now as the unconscious, incognito. It was necessary for the purpose that Jung would acquire for his own images and ideas the status of psychic

objectivity, the reality of the psyche. His inner imaginal figures, especially Philemon, taught him that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce (MDR, p. 183). This was the accomplished self-alien-ation of the mind that was the one point of Jung's crisis. The other was to acquire for the alienated images the status of an independent truth besides public truth: psychological truth, so that they could be considered to be images of mythic meaning, although they could not be held as one's own conscious thoughts or beliefs because they were no longer sustained by the logic prevailing in modernity. Without psychic objectivity (i.e., dissociation from oneself) and without psychological truth (i.e., the dignity of mythic meaning) those images and ideas would have had to be seen either as nothing but symptoms of a psychic disorder, maybe even madness, or as idle speculation, as ideologizing. #

On the one hand, Jung's crisis was the process of equipping the unconscious images with a separate, bracketed truth so that at a time when, e.g, in art Jung's contemporaries painted the falling apart of the natural image of the world, the mind might nevertheless still have access to mythic meaning even if only in the bottled, canned form of a commodityand so that it might delight in feeling like the age-old son of the mother, the son of the maternal unconsciou 6 even if only by way of simulated immediacy. On the other hand, his crisis had to be the process of interiorizing the alienation qua neurotic dissociation into the logic or syntax of psychology so that its interest in the said mythic meaning would not on the empirical level threaten the mind with alienation in the sense of madness, nor make it liable to the reproach of illegitimate metaphysicizing.

 And a (simulated) psychosis was needed in order to equip the inauguration of the structural neurosis as which the psychology of the unconscious exists with the unquestionable authority and innocence of a nature event; only a psychotic process was capable of freeing the indispensable neurotic dissociation from appearing as a subjective behavior and of installing it as the self-evident objective syntax of psychology itself. It took a number of years for Jung to truly sink his thinking mind into unconsciousness and to firmly establish the latter as his methodological standpoint. But once he had succeeded in solidly, i.e. logically, basing himself on the ground of the newly acquired, newly produced concept of the unconscious, he could emerge from his crisis. For now he was firmly secure in his standing as being not the whole man, not an artist, not a philosopher, in other words, not

the unity of empirical and transcendental ego, 7 but only the empirical observer of meaning-laden unconscious images as pure facts of nature. 1 Unless noted otherwise, the term the unconscious in this paper always refers only to the unconscious in the sense of C.G. Jung. In order to refer to his psychology, Jung often spoke of the modern psychology of the unconscious. 2 The page reference is to the Vintage Books edition. I slightly altered the translation given there to bring it more in line with the German original in Erinnerungen Trume Gedanken, pp. 174f. 3 Letters 2, p. 486 (to Pastor Tanner, 12 February 1959). 4 I use the term transcendental ego ad hoc only and do not hypostatize it, nor use it in the fixed technical sense of either Kant or Husserl. The term offers

itself in this context because Husserl introduced it in 1913, just about the time when Jung went through his decisive crisis. What I mean with the distinction between the transcendental and the empirical ego can be illustrated by reference, e.g., to the experience of any true thinker or true artist that what ultimately thinks or creates in him is not he personally. Only if this internal difference is opened up and active is a work of art truly art and of public, maybe even universal, interest. 5 Through a fundamental revolution the logic that once had given rise to, informed and sustained myth and metaphysical meaning had been replaced by a fundamentally new and different logic governing the soul of the age. On the basis of that new logic by which it was determined, consciousness could in the best case appreciate the contents of former myth and metaphysics only as odd curiosities, if it

did not brush them altogether aside as absurd or nonsense. 6 MDR, p. 225. Erinnerungen, p. 229: der uralte Sohn der Mutter. 7 This standing of his as not the whole man had of course been brought about by, and was an expression of, his being the whole man, his being the unity of empirical and transcendental ego. The whole man stylizes himself exclusively as the empirical ego that has an unconscious vis--vis itself. The sacrifice of the intellect is an achievement by this very intellect.