Carl Jung

Wilber's View

Jung is the other pole of the ch. 6 dispute Wilber stages with Freud over the mythic archetypes — and Wilber gives the disagreement a name that becomes a load-bearing concept for the whole book, the pre/trans fallacy: Freud was a reductionist, Jung an elevationist, the two sides of the fallacy. Both agreed the archetypal, mythic motifs that recur across cultures are collectively inherited (a point of real agreement usually missed); where they split was over what that inheritance means. Freud read it as merely infantile and regressive. Jung read it as a genuine repository of spiritual and transpersonal wisdom — and it's that second move Wilber contests, on the grounds that Jung, like Campbell after him, collapses the prerational (childhood, archaic, "next to the instincts") into the transrational (mystical, post-rational) because both merely look "nonrational" from the standpoint of ordinary waking reason. Wilber is careful about the shape of his own disagreement: he doesn't deny that archetypal material deserves serious engagement — "it is altogether necessary to contact and befriend them" — only that engaging with them is a different undertaking from mystical realization, and that Jung's own account of the archetypes as lying "next to the instincts" actually supports treating them as deep rather than high: proceed in the direction the archetypes point, Wilber argues, and eventually you reach not Spirit but atoms.

Wilber's verdict lands, structurally, in the same place as his verdict on Campbell (who he treats as extending Jung's move) — real respect for what Jung recovered (a rich, collectively-inherited symbolic inheritance worth "befriending"), paired with a sharp denial that this inheritance carries the elevated transpersonal status Jung claimed for it.

In Sex, Ecology, Spirituality

"Freud was a reductionist, Jung an elevationist—the two sides of the pre/trans fallacy"

Freud was a reductionist, Jung an elevationist—the two sides of the pre/trans fallacy. And the point is that they are both half right and half wrong. A good deal of neurosis is indeed a fixation/regression to prerational states, states that are not to be glorified. On the other hand, mystical states do indeed exist, beyond (not beneath) rationality, and those states are not to be reduced.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5

"Jung and his followers… are forced to read a deeply transpersonal and spiritual status into states that are merely indissociated"

Jung and his followers, of course, often take this route, and are forced to read a deeply transpersonal and spiritual status into states that are merely indissociated and undifferentiated and actually lacking any sort of integration at all.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 5

"Freud was in complete agreement with Jung about the existence of this archaic heritage"

This directly brings us… to the work of Carl Jung and his conclusion that the essential forms and motifs of the world's great mythologies—the "archaic forms" or "archetypes"—are collectively inherited in the individual psyche of each of us. It is not often realized that Freud was in complete agreement with Jung about the existence of this archaic heritage.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

"As for these 'archetypes,' they lie in the direction of downward, not upward"

But as for the images and symbols and early concepts themselves, as for these "archetypes," they lie in the direction of downward, not upward (shallower, not deeper). This is why, I believe, however Jung variously defined the archetypes, he always maintained they were "next to the instincts," or the "instincts' image of themselves."

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

"The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness" (Jung, quoted)

Jung: "The deeper layers of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness. 'Lower down' they become increasingly extinguished in the body's materiality, i.e., in chemical substances."

— Jung, quoted in Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

"It is altogether necessary to contact and befriend them, but it is finally necessary to differentiate and individuate from them"

And this, I believe, is behind Jung's dual stance toward the archetypes: it is altogether necessary to contact and befriend them, but it is finally necessary to differentiate and individuate from them, break them of their power over us. In other words, befriend the images, rob them of their worldview.

— Sex, Ecology, Spirituality, ch. 6

See Also

• freud — agreed archetypes are collectively inherited, split sharply over whether they carry genuine spiritual wisdom
• campbell — extends Jung's "myth carries spiritual wisdom" position and, on Wilber's account, inherits the same pre/trans confusion
• piaget — sided with Freud rather than Jung on the function of mythic archetypes
• pre-trans-fallacy — the general diagnosis Wilber applies to Jung's "elevationism"