50 Psychology Classics (34 page)

That said,
The Principles of Psychology
is no easy read, with the good parts lying amid many long passages that either are quite technical (involving the physiology of the brain and nervous system) or mull over difficult concepts. James himself suggested that readers skip around and read what interested them, rather than going through the whole work—from someone who helped establish a science, a typically humble suggestion.

Born in New York City in 1842, the oldest son of Henry and Mary James, William James enjoyed a comfortable and cosmopolitan upbringing in a family of five children. His well-off father was deeply interested in theology and mysticism, particularly the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. In 1855 the family moved to Europe, where James attended schools in France, Germany, and Switzerland; he learnt several languages and visited many of Europe's museums
.

Returning to the United States in 1860, James spent a year and a half trying to become a painter under William Morris Hunt, but decided to enrol at Harvard University. He began studying chemistry but later changed to medicine. In 1865 he was offered the chance to go on a scientific expedition with the well-known naturalist Louis Agassiz, but suffered an array of health problems plus, away from his family for the first time, terrible homesickness and depression. In 1867 he went to Germany and studied physiology under Hermann von Helmholtz, and was exposed to thinkers and ideas in the new field of psychology. Two years later James returned to Harvard, where at 27 he finally received his medical degree
.

Over the next three years he experienced an emotional breakdown, and was unable to study or work properly. In 1872, at the age of 30, he began his first job teaching physiology at Harvard. In 1875 he started giving courses in psychology, and also established the first experimental psychology laboratory in America. In the year he began work on
The Principles of Psychology,
1878, he also married Alice Howe Gibbons, a Boston school teacher. They had five children
.

On their visits to America, James met both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. Among his famous students were educationalist John Dewey and psychologist Edward Thorndike. Landmark writings include
The Will to Believe
(1897),
The Varieties of Religious Experience
(1902), and
Pragmatism
(1907)
.

James died in 1910 at his summer home in New Hampshire
.

“With the archetype of the anima we enter the realm of the gods… Everything the anima touches becomes numinous—unconditional, dangerous, taboo, magical. She is the serpent in the paradise of the harmless man with good resolutions and still better intentions. She affords the most convincing reason for not prying into the unconscious, an occupation that would break down our moral inhibitions and unleash forces that had better been left unconscious and undisturbed.”

“Whether he understands them or not, man must remain conscious of the world of the archetypes, because in it he is still a part of Nature and is connected with his own roots. A view of the world or a social order that cuts him off from the primordial images of life not only is no culture at all but, in increasing degree, is a prison or a stable.”

In a nutshell

Our minds are connected to a deeper layer of consciousness that speaks in terms of imagery and myth.

In a similar vein
Isabel Briggs Myers
Gifts Differing
(p 46)
Anna Freud
The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence
(p 104)
Sigmund Freud
The Interpretation of Dreams
(p 110)

Why did primitive humans go to such lengths to describe and interpret happenings in the natural world, for example the rising and setting of the sun, the phases of the moon, the seasons? Carl Jung believed that the events of nature were not simply put into fairytales and myths as a way of explaining them physically. Rather, the outer world was used to make sense of the inner.

By his time, Jung noted, this rich well of symbols—art, religion, mythology—which for thousands of years helped people understand the mysteries of life, had been filled in and replaced by the science of psychology. What psychology lacked, ironically given its borrowing of the ancient Greek term, was an understanding of the
psyche
, or the self in its broadest terms.

For Jung, the goal of life was the “individuation” of this self, a sort of uniting of a person's conscious and unconscious minds so that their original unique promise might be fulfilled. This larger conception of the self was also based on the idea that humans are expressions of a deeper layer of
universal
consciousness. To grasp the uniqueness of each person, paradoxically we had to go beyond the personal self to understand the workings of this deeper collective wisdom.

Jung admitted that the idea of the collective unconscious “belongs to the class of ideas that people at first find strange but soon come to possess and use as familiar conceptions.” He had to defend it against the charge of mysticism. Yet he also noted that the idea of the unconscious on its own was thought fanciful until Freud pointed to its existence, and it then became part of our understanding of why people think and act the way they do. Freud had assumed the unconscious to be a personal thing contained within an individual. Jung, on the other hand, saw the personal unconscious mind as sitting atop the
collective
unconscious—the inherited part of the human psyche that was not developed from personal experience.

The collective unconscious was expressed through “archetypes,” universal thought forms or mental images that influenced an individual's feelings and action. The experience of archetypes often paid little heed to tradition or cultural rules, which suggests that they are innate projections. A newborn baby is not a blank slate but comes wired ready to perceive certain archetypal patterns and symbols. This is why children fantasize so much, Jung believed: They have not experienced enough of reality to cancel out their mind's enjoyment of archetypal imagery.

Archetypes have been expressed as myths and fairytales, and at a personal level in dreams and visions. In mythology they are called “motifs,” in anthropology
représentations collectives
. German ethnologist Adolf Bastian referred to them as “elementary” or “primordial” thoughts that he saw expressed again and again in the cultures of tribal and folk peoples. But they are not simply of anthropological interest; usually without knowing it, archetypes shape the relationships that matter in our lives.

Jung highlighted a number of archetypes, including the anima, the mother, the shadow, the child, the wise old man, the spirits of fairytales, and the trickster figure found in myths and history. We look at two of these below.

Anima
means soul with a female form. In mythology it is expressed as a siren, a mermaid, a wood-nymph, or any form that “infatuates young men and sucks the life out of them.” In ancient times, the anima was represented either as a goddess or a witch; that is, aspects of the female that were out of men's control.

When a man “projects” the feminine aspect within his psyche onto an actual woman, that woman takes on magnified importance. The archetype makes itself present in a man's life either by infatuation, idealization, or fascination with women. The woman herself does not really justify these reactions, but acts as the target to which his anima is transferred. This is why the loss of a relationship can be so devastating to a man. It is the loss of a side of himself that he has kept external.

Every time there is an extreme love or fantasy or entanglement, the anima is at work in both sexes. She does not care for an orderly life, but wants intensity of experience—
life
, in whatever form. The anima, like all archetypes, may come upon us like fate. She can enter our life either as something wonderful or as something terrible—either way her aim is to wake us up. To recognize the anima means throwing away our rational ideas of how life should be lived, and instead admitting, as Jung puts it, that “Life is crazy and meaningful at once.”

The mother archetype takes the form of a personal mother, grandmother, stepmother, mother in law, nurse, or governess. It can be fulfilled in figurative mothers such as Mary Mother of God, Sophia, or the mother who becomes a maiden again in the myth of Demeter and Kore. Other mother symbols include the Church, a country, the Earth, the woods, the sea, a garden, a plowed field, a spring, or a well. The positive aspect of the archetype is motherly love and warmth, so celebrated in art and poetry, which gives us our first identity in the world. Yet it can have negative meaning—it can be the loving mother or the terrible mother or goddess of fate. Jung considered the mother the most important archetype because it seemed to contain everything else.

When there is an imbalance of this archetype in someone, we see a mother “complex.” In men, the complex may give rise to “Don Juanism,” which can make a man fixated on pleasing all women. Yet a man with a mother complex may also have a revolutionary spirit: tough, persevering, extremely ambitious. In women, the complex can result in an exaggeration of the maternal instinct, with a woman living for her children, sacrificing her individuality. Her husband becomes just part of the furniture. Men may be initially attracted to women with a mother complex because they are the picture of femininity and innocence. Yet they are also screens onto which a man can project or externalize his anima, and he only later discovers the real woman he has married.

In other forms of the archetype, a woman will go to any lengths so that she is not like her biological mother. She may carve out a sphere of her own, for example becoming an intellectual to show up her mother's lack of education. A choice of marriage partner may be in order to antagonize and move away from the mother. Other women in the hold of the archetype may have an unconscious incestuous relationship with their biological father and jealousy of their mother. They may become interested in married men or in having romantic adventures.

Why is psychology as a science so young? Jung suggests that it is because for most of human history it simply wasn't necessary. The wonderful imagery and mythology of religions was able to express the eternal archetypes perfectly. People felt a need to dwell on ideas and images relating to rebirth and transformation, and religions supplied these in abundance for every aspect of the psyche. The Catholic Church's strange ideas of the virgin birth and the Trinity are not fanciful images but packed with meaning, Jung wrote, archetypes of protection and healing that administered to any ruptures in the minds of the faithful.

The Protestant Reformation reacted against all this. The rich Catholic imagery and dogma became nothing but “superstition,” and in Jung's view
this attitude made way for the barrenness of contemporary life. Genuine spirituality must engage both the unconscious and the conscious mind, he believed, the depths as well as the heights.

All humans have a religious instinct, whether it is a belief in God or in some secular faith like communism or atheism. “No one can escape the prejudice of being human,” Jung observed.

“Individuation” was Jung's term for the point at which someone is finally able to integrate the opposites within them—their conscious and unconscious minds. Individuation simply means becoming what you always were
in potentia
, fulfilling your unique promise. The result is an individual in the real sense of the word, a whole and indestructible self that can no longer be hijacked by splintered aspects or complexes.

But this reintegration does not happen by thinking about it rationally. It is a journey with unexpected twists and turns. Many myths show how we need to follow a path that transcends reason in order to fulfill ourselves in life.

Jung went to some lengths to define the self. He understood it to be something different from the ego; in fact the self incorporated the ego, “just as a large circle encloses a smaller one.” While the ego relates to the conscious mind, the
self
belongs to the personal and collective unconscious.

Jung included in
The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious
many reproductions of mandalas, abstract patterned images whose name in Sanskrit means “circle.” He believed that when a person draws or paints a mandala, unconscious leanings or wants are expressed in its patterns, symbols, and shapes.

In his therapeutic practice, Jung found mandalas to have a “magical” effect, reducing confusion in the psyche to order, and often affecting a person in ways that only became apparent later. They worked because the unconscious is allowed free reign; what has been swept under comes to the surface. Motifs such as egg shapes, a lotus flower, a star or sun, a snake, castles, cities, eyes, and so on are produced for no obvious reason, yet reflect or draw out processes that are going on deep below that person's conscious thinking. When someone became able to make a meaningful interpretation of the images, Jung observed that it was usually the beginning of psychological healing. It was one step taken in the individuation process.

We think we are modern and civilized with all our technology and knowledge, but inside, Jung says, we are still “primitives.” In Switzerland he once
observed a local witch-doctor remove a spell from a stable—in the shadow of a railway line on which several trans-European expresses roared by.