Jungian Semiotics

Perhaps Carl Jung gives us the best possibility of making something worthwhile out out of
the current rather arid state of Saussaurean and Piercean semiotics. The basic idea is
fine: human beings live in a context of signs and symbiology which must be recognised
and interpreted for us to live meaningful lives. Problems emerge when the deep-rooted
significance of signs and their importance are examined. For the father of modern linguis-
tics, Ferdinand de Saussure, human language was itself a set of signs and symbols
through which we viewed the world: though there was no necessary connection between
the real world and the concepts in our mind that were merely an interpretation of it. For
Saussure, the connection between the signifier and the signified was "arbitrary". This is to
say the signs we used to describe the world, including language, had no necessary logical
connection with reality. "Cat" could just as easily mean "mountain" as a small furry domes-
tic animal. In other words, the symbols and signs we use on an everyday basis are given
meaning only by ourselves and have no significance outside of their collectively perceived
meaning. Now this is a rather dry and soulless interpretation of symbiology and signs: the
world is full of signs and symbols that have been created and given meaning only by our-
selves. The reality is that the world exists outside our categorisation of it and the ways we
talk about it have no significance outside our own perception. It is at this difficult point that
Carl Jung's ideas can possibly begin to help us--though only if we are prepared to accept
that there are aspects of existence that we simply don't understand very well.

Many of Jung's ideas and concepts have established themselves in "the collective uncon-
scious" to use one of the Swiss psychologists most famous ideas. Jung also introduced
the ideas of "introvert" and "extravert", "archetypes", feminine and masculine sides to the
personality, "synchronicity", "mid-life crisis" and gender ruled by "Logos" and "Eros". He
even referred to the "dark side" of the human psyche--an idea picked up by George Lucas
in his "Star Wars" movies. This idea of the human psyche having a "dark side" that would
prove hugely destructive if not acknowledged and controlled, provides one connecting
point between Jung's ideas and modern semiotics--and points to ways in which Jungian
psychology may enrich our present view of semiotics.

For Jung, modern humans lived in a particularly difficult world. The foundations of Christi-
anity had been blasted asunder by science and modern man, unlike his ancestors, lived in
a world dedicated to science and reason. However, the problem was that man was only
"reasonable" up to a certain point. Like Nietzsche before him, Jung believed that in order
to find peace, man had to give up at least a part of his reliance on reason and accept "the
dark side" of his personality. The dark side was irrational, but also the place where creativ-
ity and instinctual knowledge was born. Man had insisted on "goodness" and "light" too
exclusively for too long. Jung saw this as a dichotomy between man's "Appollonian side"
dedicated to higher reason and knowledge and his "Dionysian" side dependent on the irra-
tional and symbols. If this latter aspect of man's psyche went unacknowledged for too long
it did untold harm in the individual and collective unconscious of man, resulting in brutal
wars of aggression that allowed us to express our inner demons in a cathartic way that
could be sanctioned by society through "projection". "Projection" for Jung was the way in
which the anger of men could be channelled against other men by believing one side was
right and the other wrong. It was his belief that suppressed primitiveness was the cause of
much mental illness as well as those periodic orgies of violence that mankind regularly in-
dulged in (and of course, Jung lived through both world wars). Jung was sure that unless
modern man accepted the dark and irrational elements in his own nature then eventually
he was sure to destroy himself in a paroxysm of violence. It is interesting to recall Yeat's
poem, "The Second Coming" in this context:

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

This is surely the finest poem of the 20th century just because it so effectively tunes into
the symbiology of the times. In Jungian terms, the "rough beast" would be the dark side of
humanity that has been denied adequate expression for so long and now is about to wreak
its consequent havoc on the "reasonable" civilization that denied its existence or only saw
it active in others (rather than as being present in the unconscious of all men). According
to Jung, the apocalyptic disaster foretold so eerily and well by Yeats, could still be avoided
if man accepted that the modern age did not give him sufficient spiritual sustenance: and
for Jung, man was above all a spiritual creature:

"Since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life
holds sway in the unconscious. That is why we have psychology today, and why we speak
of the unconscious. All this would be quite superfluous in an age or culture that possessed
symbols. Symbols are spirit from above, and under those conditions the spirit is above
too...Our unconscious...hides living water, spirit that has become nature, and that is why it
is disturbed. Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists and the divine
empyrean a fair memory of things that once were. But 'the heart glows' and a secret unrest
gnaws at the roots of our being."

(Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious)

Specfically on man and his need for symbols and a cause greater than himself, Jung says
the following:

"Everything is banal, everything is 'nothing but'; and that is the reason why people are neu-
rotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of the banal life, and therefore they want
sensation. They even want a war; they all want a war. They are all glad when there is a
war; they say, 'Thank heaven, now something is going to happen--something bigger than
ourselves.

These things go pretty deep, and no wonder people get neurotic. Life is too rational,
there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my
role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life... That gives peace, when peo-
ple feel that they are living the symbolic life, that they are actors in a divine drama. That
gives the only meaning to human life; everything else is banal and you can dismiss it. A
career, producing children, are all maya compared with that one thing, that your life is
meaningful...But we cannot turn the wheel backwards; we cannot go back to the symbol-
ism that is gone. Doubt has killed it, has devoured it...I cannot experience the miracle of
the Mass...It is no more true to me...Dreams were the original guidance of man in the great
darkness...When a man is in the wilderness the darkness brings the dreams--somnia a
Deo missa--that guide him. It has always been so. I have not been led by any kind of wis-
dom; I have been led by dreams, like any primitive. When you are in the darkness you take
the next thing, and that is a dream. And you can be sure that the dream is your nearest
friend; the dream is the friend of those who are not guided any more by the traditional truth
and in consequence are isolated."

(The Symbolic Life)

Most importantly, for Jung man was "Homo Religiosus": he needed religion for the welfare
of his psyche and in the modern atheistic world the absence of religion and religious sym-
bols led inevitably to mental illness:

"During the past thirty years, people from all the civilized countries of the earth have con-
sulted me. Many hundreds of patients have passed through my hands, the greater number
being Protestants, a lesser number Jews, and not more than 5 or 6 believing Catholics.
Among all my patients in the second half of life--that is to say over 35--there has not been
one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is
safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of
every age have given to their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did
not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular
creed or membership of a church."

(Psychotherapists or the Clergy)

Jung's own view of religion is obscure. His work concentrated more on the need for some
spiritual reality in human life and he did not prefer one creed over another (though interest-
ingly, he did advise against a too easy acceptance of Eastern traditions by people from the
West). He did, however, insist on the importance of ritual in the sacred life. From time im-
memorial, man has marked the change of seasons and the cycle of birth and death with
various propitiation ceremonies full of symbolic acts. It was this symbolism that put him in
touch with nature and himself--and it is precisely this quality that has been lost in our mod-
ern world. One might say that any religion that was full of symbolism would be appropriate
to man's spiritual salvation. Jung himself (like Wittgenstein) toyed with the idea of joining
the Catholic church because he admired its rich symbolism. His idea was that one could
give a symbolic meaning to everything that the clergy insisted was literally true. After a
while, however, he dropped the idea--no doubt disillusioned by the rigidity of the church to
accept his symbolic meanings. We do know that two childhood experiences greatly influ-
enced the views of the grown man. In the first, he dreamt that he was looking down into a
rectangular hole in the ground with a flight of steps leading down. He descended these
steps and in a subterranean room he viewed a giant phallus sat on a majestic throne. At
the tip of the phallus a single eye looked unblinkingly upwards. Later, Jung described the
dream as a vision of how man has sanitised religion and concentrated on the light to such
an extent that he has ignored God's terrible aspect and the dark side of himself. This has
led to the collapse of belief and now God must find a new way to recreate himself--from
below so to speak. The second vision (not a dream this time) is in some ways even more
shocking. The adolescent Jung was looking at his town's cathedral when he had a vision
of God sat in splendour on a throne, directly above the cathedral. Suddenly a turd dropped
from the throne and fell on the cathedral destroying it completely. Jung interpreted this as
meaning that the divine spirit was unhappy with the interpretation of him given by his fol-
lowers. He was a two-sided God of light and darkness and not the anaemic creature that
existed in conventional religious texts.

This has been a mere introduction to some of Jung's ideas on symbols. However, it seems
to me that a researcher genuinely interested in semiotics can find a rich world of symbols
and ideas in the works of Jung that could deepen and make more profound the, at pre-
sent, somewhat anaemic study of signs and symbols that is semiotics.