As a preliminary remark I should say that I have undergone Jungian analysis and found it profoundly helpful. Having said that I find the reasoning behind it suspicious at best and some of actually makes me mad. Some systems are really meant to be experiential and not theoretical. That might be mostly because while the system is efficacious, the logical underpinning has the feel of something hastily devised to answer nay-sayers. Much, in fact, like Luhrmann’s subjects were prone to do.

I am reading Alchemy by Marie-Louise von Franz. It’s a very Jungian book: packed with symbolism, full of dubious reasoning, sprinkled with the “in-crowd” assurances of perceptive superiority and extraordinarily fertile ground for self understanding. In that it’s rather like any religious text.

[Ouch. I can feel my old analyst calmly staring at me with those eyes.]

You judge:

As you know, there was a famous quarrel between Max Planck and Einstein, in which Einstein claimed that, on paper, the human mind was capable of inventing mathematical models of reality. In this he generalized his own experience because that is what he did. Einstein conceived his theories more or less completely on paper, and experimental developments in physics proved that his models explained phenomena very well. So Einstein says that the fact that a model constructed by the human mind in an introverted situation fits with the outer facts is just a miracle and must be taken as such. Planck does not agree, but thinks that we conceive a model which we check by experiment, after which we revise our model, so that there is a kind dialectic friction between experiment and model by which we slowly arrive at an explanatory fact compounded of the two. Plato-Aristotle in a new form! But both have forgotten something—the unconscious. We know something more than those two men, namely that when Einstein makes a new model of realty he is helped by his unconscious, without which he would not have arrived at his theories.

But what role does the unconscious play? The unconscious seems to deliver models which can be arrived at directly from within without looking at outer facts, and which afterwords seem to fit outer reality. Is that a miracle or not? There are two possible explanations: either the unconscious knows about other realities or what we call the unconscious is a part of the same thing as outer reality, for we do not know how the unconscious is linked with matter. If a wonderful idea as to how to explain gravitation comes up from within me, can I say that it is the nonmaterial unconscious giving me a wonderful idea about material reality, or should I say that the unconscious gives me such a marvelous idea about outer reality because it is linked with matter, it is a phenomenon of matter and matter knows matter?

There we are at our wits end as to how to proceed, and have to leave the question open and say that the great X is that we do not know how to proceed. We can make two hypotheses. Dr. Jung is inclined to think—though he has never formulated the thought, or only hypothetically, because we cannot do more, we can only speculate or make a hypothesis—that probably the unconscious has a material aspect which would be why it knows about matter, because it is matter, it is matter which knows itself, as it were. If this were so, then there would be a dim or vague phenomenon of consciousness even in inorganic matter.

Gack.

So many assumptions. Did you read that post “being time“? In that I talk about a completely different potential explanatory rubric which bases reality not on matter but on time. Of course Jung and von Franz are Westerners and so naturally assume that the thing that has to be the most real, that which is fundamental to any process must be matter or related to matter in some way. Not that I necessarily disagree but it is an assumption and one which constrains the choices von Franz sees to explain the power of the apparently non-corporeal unconscious to effect the conscious and thereby reality. Sort of a re-deal of Descartes’ cards. But enough of that.

What of this idea that the unconscious has “a material aspect.” I don’t actually disagree with that since the unconscious, what ever it actually is or does, is certainly a function of the body-brain just as consciousness is. But look at where she goes with it! The idea that because the unconscious is somehow related to matter must mean that matter itself has a “vague phenomenon of consciousness” is just outlandish and most deeply mystical and religious in assumption. The thing that underlies this is the idea that matter is somehow particulate. It assumes a kind of alchemical reality where there is a solid particulate reality which is also the site of some kind of mind or soul—that these two exist and are intertwined. And I’m sorry but you can’t assume alchemical reality to prove alchemical reality and call it a real argument.

What if, for example, that it is the organization of matter, and not atoms that produce the thing we experience as the unconscious (or the conscious)? Take the wiring in my home. I have alternating current running through the walls because of the organization of the system. If I were to pull out the wires and heap them on the kitchen floor, I’d have wires but no A/C. I don’t think you could fairly say that the heap of wires had “a vague phenomenon of” alternating current within it. If I cut the main line coming into the house and leave the wires in the wall I still have wires but no A/C. It’s a matter of systematic organization and connection, not of the wire itself, although, granted, if I replaced my wiring with tubes of milk I also wouldn’t have A/C, so the nature of the wires is important to the process.

Anyway, my mini rant done, I can go back to the book for what it was really intended, as a primer on alchemy as a psychological practice. It’s sort of like Zen or witchcraft in that way. These things are for practice, for the experience of them, for the narrative mind to construct (or deconstruct) meaningful experience so that we can feel. Just feel. Really it would be better if the practice of rationalization was just left aside as not apropos to the project.