Jung for Occultists: The Personal and Relative vs. The Abstract and Absolute
When discussing the difference between his own methods of dream interpretation, and how they differ from Sigmund Freud’s, Carl Jung makes the following distinction that, I think, raises a number of very important questions. How do we relate to our complexes? Do we gain power over them by identifying them and “naming” them, so to speak? Or do we assert our Will over theirs by understanding our particular relation to them?
“Freud is seeking the complexes, I am not. That is just the difference. I am looking for what the unconscious is doing with the complexes, because that interests me very much more than the fact that people have complexes. We all have complexes. It is a highly banal and uninteresting fact. Even the incest complex, which you can find everywhere if you look for it, is highly banal and uninteresting. It is only interesting to know what people do with their complexes; that is the practical question that matters.”
-C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology in Theory and Practice, p. 93-94
As soon as I read these words, I thought of the following quotation:
“How restore faith in the Gods? There is only one way; we must get to know them personally. And that, of course, is one of the principal tasks of the Magician.”
-Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Cap. LXXVI
Although I do not believe that we can dismiss Freud’s work on dream symbolism as “impractical” so quickly, it is impossible to deny the validity of Jung’s point. We may all possess various complexes brought about by the universal nature of human development, but how we relate to them as individuals really determines how they impact our lives, and whether or not they pose a threat or obstacle to doing our True Wills. I would argue that having a working knowledge of the abstract nature of a complex (we could make the analogy to finding a spirit’s attribution in Liber 777 in order to determine the means to control it) is crucial to scientifically documenting the process of resolving it, but it seems reasonable to assert that although this is necessary for a magician or yogi, it is not for a mere psychiatric patient (conflate these at your own risk).
What must be understood is that the mere existence of the Gods indicates a division of the Will. This is a point that cannot be avoided. This is why Crowley tells us, time and again, that the only way to really accomplish the Great Work, on the personal scale or in light of human development as a whole, is to “make contact with higher intelligences.” The force that these intelligences exert upon us divides the Will, because they act on the psychological complexes inherent in the human mind giving them ‘a Will of their own,’ which they use to manifest their separate agendas through spontaneous unconscious actions. This is most obvious in a schizophrenic personality type, but I think that the phenomena is far more universal than Jung suggests here:
“Because complexes have a certain will-power, a sort of ego, we find that in a schizophrenic condition they emancipate themselves from conscious control to such an extent that they become visible and audible. They appear as visions, they speak in voices which are like the voices of definite people. This personification of complexes is not in itself necessarily a pathological condition. In dreams, for instance, our complexes often appear as in a personified form. And one can train oneself to the extent that they become visible and audible in a waking condition. It is part of a certain yoga to split up consciousness into its components, each of which appears as a specific personality.”
-Jung, ibid. p. 81
The attainment of Pratyahara is the technical name for this. When a person attains to this state, it becomes very clear that certain thoughts, visual impressions, and imagined conversations which one previously supposed to be having with oneself actually have their source in various psychological complexes/ Gods and spirits which are imposing their agenda on the individual’s consciousness. To reduce this to “splitting up the personality” is typical of Jung, and comfort to all those academic pseudo-magicians who prefer to believe that “it’s all in your head.” Nevertheless, the point holds. One can banish or subdue an intruding intelligence, but that intelligence was able to intrude on the consciousness because it found fertile ground to take root there. If an exorcism takes place, it must also be accompanied by a “salting of the earth,” so to speak, or in other words, bringing the hidden (occult) psychological complexes that served to nourish that intruding intelligence to light. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the complex goes away, but when one becomes conscious of these things it is no longer such an easy task for outside influences to turn them against a person.
But in what sense are these complexes resolved? Are they just simplified out of existence? Is there a final showdown? It seems foolish to assert that they simply disappear. Crowley makes no such suggestion. In fact, as many of us are aware, trying to ‘kill’ a complex or make it disappear triggers its defensive mechanisms. It WILL fight to preserve its independent Will and existence. Is this really what we’re trying to do? Or are we just trying to disentangle our complexes from the mandate handed to the intellect and ego by the True Will, and use that force to put them to work for us?
“If I have ten and sixpence in the world and but a half-guinea cigar, I have no money left to buy a box of matches. To "snap out of it" and recover my normal serenity requires only a minute effort, and the whole of my magical energy is earmarked for the Great Work. I have none left to make that effort. Of course, if the worry is enough to interfere with that Work, I must detail a corporal's file to abate the nuisance.
…
The new Master is "cast out" into the sphere appropriate to the nature of his own particular Great Work. And it is proper for him to act in true accordance with the nature of the man as he was when he passed through that Sphere (or Grade) on his upward journey. Thus, if he be cast out into 3° = 8°, it is no part of his work to aim at the virtues of a 4° = 7°; all that has been done long before. It is no business of his to be bothering his head about anything at all but his Work; so he must react to events as they occur in the way natural to him without trying to "improve himself." (This, of course, applies not only to worry, but to all his funny little ways.)”
-Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Cap. XXXIII “How Can a Yogi be Worried?”
I think what Crowley is trying to say here is that, just because a complex has been overcome by the True Will, (as, to attain to the Grade he describes, all complexes must have been overcome) it does not mean that it “goes away,” or ceases to cause anxiety. One can do one’s True Will while being tormented by all manner of disturbances, so long as they do not interfere with actually doing the work. If a magician’s Great Work requires him to go to Paris at once, he can go there in sublime satisfaction, in timorous anxiety, in hopeful expectation, or in resigned annoyance. He can go to Paris healthy and robust, drunk and disorderly, bejeweled and in silk, or sick with cholera and wrapped in a bed sheet. It doesn’t matter. The salient factor is his going to Paris. So long as this is accomplished, the Secret Chiefs really don’t care how the magician feels about it, or how he manages to do it.
(The only exception to this is when the task involves the Act of Truth, where attitude is paramount, which is a totally separate matter for discussion.)
So if Crowley insists that we personally get to know the Gods, these (as Jung calls them) despotic and inescapable forces at work in our lives, does this coincide with Jung’s method of observing a person’s relation to their complexes, and giving that priority over analysis of the complex itself?
In a sense, I think Jung is presenting a false dichotomy of value. He describes the analysis of the complex qua complex as “uninteresting.” I’m not precisely sure what he gains by that, other than to score a rather unbecoming political point off of Freud. This reminds me of, to keep to our analogy, people in the occult community who don’t want to memorize tables or study abstract philosophical concepts, because they consider these to be “boring,” and who would rather focus on developing their “personal mythologies.” While there’s no doubt that this is an important task to one who would “know thyself,” making this information intelligible demands that it be brought into conformity with a coherent set of ideas, principles, and formulae. There must be an alphabet and a grammar if there is to be a language.
Crowley tells us definitely that we must get to know the Gods personally, but that doesn’t mean that we simply dismiss the notion that all Gods of a Mercurial nature, for example, are of an analogous type. We look at the things Mercurial Gods have in common in their abstract sense, and we balance that data against our personal experience with the divinity in question. The armchair magician who reads books and never does magick has no personal experience with the Gods, and as such commands only academic authority (poor creature!), while the campsite magician may have had some intense personal encounters with the divine, but lacks the language and intellectual understanding to rationally articulate or understand their experiences in an intelligible way, and as such is likely to be lead down all manner of fanatical garden paths. In neither case does the would-be magician really KNOW the things they study or encounter, as the case may be.
It is tempting to assert a dichotomy between the work of Freud and Jung. Both men had students that devoted themselves entirely to making that distinction. To me, this is like asserting a dichotomy between history and literature. Not only is it absurd, as both categories of study deal with different questions and assumptions entirely, but it is also damaging to the interpretation of history as literature (which is crucial to understanding history) AND to the interpretation of literature as history (which is crucial to understanding literature). Psychology is a relatively new field, and suffers a great deal from the desire to create “schools” of one kind of thought or the other. I think that is we look at the evolution of its companion, Philosophy, we can see the way in which this kind of thinking scuttles the boat before it reaches the harbor, denying what is on the basis of what should be.
I hope I have made clear the way in which I see Freud holding the tail, Jung the ear, of this particular elephant…
“Freud is seeking the complexes, I am not. That is just the difference. I am looking for what the unconscious is doing with the complexes, because that interests me very much more than the fact that people have complexes. We all have complexes. It is a highly banal and uninteresting fact. Even the incest complex, which you can find everywhere if you look for it, is highly banal and uninteresting. It is only interesting to know what people do with their complexes; that is the practical question that matters.”
-C.G. Jung, Analytical Psychology in Theory and Practice, p. 93-94
As soon as I read these words, I thought of the following quotation:
“How restore faith in the Gods? There is only one way; we must get to know them personally. And that, of course, is one of the principal tasks of the Magician.”
-Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Cap. LXXVI
Although I do not believe that we can dismiss Freud’s work on dream symbolism as “impractical” so quickly, it is impossible to deny the validity of Jung’s point. We may all possess various complexes brought about by the universal nature of human development, but how we relate to them as individuals really determines how they impact our lives, and whether or not they pose a threat or obstacle to doing our True Wills. I would argue that having a working knowledge of the abstract nature of a complex (we could make the analogy to finding a spirit’s attribution in Liber 777 in order to determine the means to control it) is crucial to scientifically documenting the process of resolving it, but it seems reasonable to assert that although this is necessary for a magician or yogi, it is not for a mere psychiatric patient (conflate these at your own risk).
What must be understood is that the mere existence of the Gods indicates a division of the Will. This is a point that cannot be avoided. This is why Crowley tells us, time and again, that the only way to really accomplish the Great Work, on the personal scale or in light of human development as a whole, is to “make contact with higher intelligences.” The force that these intelligences exert upon us divides the Will, because they act on the psychological complexes inherent in the human mind giving them ‘a Will of their own,’ which they use to manifest their separate agendas through spontaneous unconscious actions. This is most obvious in a schizophrenic personality type, but I think that the phenomena is far more universal than Jung suggests here:
“Because complexes have a certain will-power, a sort of ego, we find that in a schizophrenic condition they emancipate themselves from conscious control to such an extent that they become visible and audible. They appear as visions, they speak in voices which are like the voices of definite people. This personification of complexes is not in itself necessarily a pathological condition. In dreams, for instance, our complexes often appear as in a personified form. And one can train oneself to the extent that they become visible and audible in a waking condition. It is part of a certain yoga to split up consciousness into its components, each of which appears as a specific personality.”
-Jung, ibid. p. 81
The attainment of Pratyahara is the technical name for this. When a person attains to this state, it becomes very clear that certain thoughts, visual impressions, and imagined conversations which one previously supposed to be having with oneself actually have their source in various psychological complexes/ Gods and spirits which are imposing their agenda on the individual’s consciousness. To reduce this to “splitting up the personality” is typical of Jung, and comfort to all those academic pseudo-magicians who prefer to believe that “it’s all in your head.” Nevertheless, the point holds. One can banish or subdue an intruding intelligence, but that intelligence was able to intrude on the consciousness because it found fertile ground to take root there. If an exorcism takes place, it must also be accompanied by a “salting of the earth,” so to speak, or in other words, bringing the hidden (occult) psychological complexes that served to nourish that intruding intelligence to light. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the complex goes away, but when one becomes conscious of these things it is no longer such an easy task for outside influences to turn them against a person.
But in what sense are these complexes resolved? Are they just simplified out of existence? Is there a final showdown? It seems foolish to assert that they simply disappear. Crowley makes no such suggestion. In fact, as many of us are aware, trying to ‘kill’ a complex or make it disappear triggers its defensive mechanisms. It WILL fight to preserve its independent Will and existence. Is this really what we’re trying to do? Or are we just trying to disentangle our complexes from the mandate handed to the intellect and ego by the True Will, and use that force to put them to work for us?
“If I have ten and sixpence in the world and but a half-guinea cigar, I have no money left to buy a box of matches. To "snap out of it" and recover my normal serenity requires only a minute effort, and the whole of my magical energy is earmarked for the Great Work. I have none left to make that effort. Of course, if the worry is enough to interfere with that Work, I must detail a corporal's file to abate the nuisance.
…
The new Master is "cast out" into the sphere appropriate to the nature of his own particular Great Work. And it is proper for him to act in true accordance with the nature of the man as he was when he passed through that Sphere (or Grade) on his upward journey. Thus, if he be cast out into 3° = 8°, it is no part of his work to aim at the virtues of a 4° = 7°; all that has been done long before. It is no business of his to be bothering his head about anything at all but his Work; so he must react to events as they occur in the way natural to him without trying to "improve himself." (This, of course, applies not only to worry, but to all his funny little ways.)”
-Aleister Crowley, Magick Without Tears, Cap. XXXIII “How Can a Yogi be Worried?”
I think what Crowley is trying to say here is that, just because a complex has been overcome by the True Will, (as, to attain to the Grade he describes, all complexes must have been overcome) it does not mean that it “goes away,” or ceases to cause anxiety. One can do one’s True Will while being tormented by all manner of disturbances, so long as they do not interfere with actually doing the work. If a magician’s Great Work requires him to go to Paris at once, he can go there in sublime satisfaction, in timorous anxiety, in hopeful expectation, or in resigned annoyance. He can go to Paris healthy and robust, drunk and disorderly, bejeweled and in silk, or sick with cholera and wrapped in a bed sheet. It doesn’t matter. The salient factor is his going to Paris. So long as this is accomplished, the Secret Chiefs really don’t care how the magician feels about it, or how he manages to do it.
(The only exception to this is when the task involves the Act of Truth, where attitude is paramount, which is a totally separate matter for discussion.)
So if Crowley insists that we personally get to know the Gods, these (as Jung calls them) despotic and inescapable forces at work in our lives, does this coincide with Jung’s method of observing a person’s relation to their complexes, and giving that priority over analysis of the complex itself?
In a sense, I think Jung is presenting a false dichotomy of value. He describes the analysis of the complex qua complex as “uninteresting.” I’m not precisely sure what he gains by that, other than to score a rather unbecoming political point off of Freud. This reminds me of, to keep to our analogy, people in the occult community who don’t want to memorize tables or study abstract philosophical concepts, because they consider these to be “boring,” and who would rather focus on developing their “personal mythologies.” While there’s no doubt that this is an important task to one who would “know thyself,” making this information intelligible demands that it be brought into conformity with a coherent set of ideas, principles, and formulae. There must be an alphabet and a grammar if there is to be a language.
Crowley tells us definitely that we must get to know the Gods personally, but that doesn’t mean that we simply dismiss the notion that all Gods of a Mercurial nature, for example, are of an analogous type. We look at the things Mercurial Gods have in common in their abstract sense, and we balance that data against our personal experience with the divinity in question. The armchair magician who reads books and never does magick has no personal experience with the Gods, and as such commands only academic authority (poor creature!), while the campsite magician may have had some intense personal encounters with the divine, but lacks the language and intellectual understanding to rationally articulate or understand their experiences in an intelligible way, and as such is likely to be lead down all manner of fanatical garden paths. In neither case does the would-be magician really KNOW the things they study or encounter, as the case may be.
It is tempting to assert a dichotomy between the work of Freud and Jung. Both men had students that devoted themselves entirely to making that distinction. To me, this is like asserting a dichotomy between history and literature. Not only is it absurd, as both categories of study deal with different questions and assumptions entirely, but it is also damaging to the interpretation of history as literature (which is crucial to understanding history) AND to the interpretation of literature as history (which is crucial to understanding literature). Psychology is a relatively new field, and suffers a great deal from the desire to create “schools” of one kind of thought or the other. I think that is we look at the evolution of its companion, Philosophy, we can see the way in which this kind of thinking scuttles the boat before it reaches the harbor, denying what is on the basis of what should be.
I hope I have made clear the way in which I see Freud holding the tail, Jung the ear, of this particular elephant…