reading

Translated from the German by R. F. C. HULL

This edition is an adaptation of the 1970 printing by Hodder and Stoughton, London. It was translated from Der Mythus vom Sinn (1967), which is also available in a new edition in Daimon Verlag, Zürich, 1983.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and retrieval system without written permission from the publisher.

Front cover image: graphical adaptation of a Thracian labyrinth relief

Cover design and graphics: Joel T. Miskin

ISBN 978-3-85630-908-4

Contents

Foreword

Foreword to the Second Edition

1. The Theme

2. The Unconscious and the Archetype

Hypothesis and Model

The Archetype as Instinct and an Element of the Spirit

The Psychoid Archetype

Conscious Realisation as Discrimination

3. Jung’s Method and Style

4. The Hidden Reality

Ordering Factors in Nature

Science and Religion

The Numinosity of the Unconscious

Appearance and Reality

The Numinosity of the Self

A Kabbalistic Parallel

A Theological Parallel (Paul Tillich)

5. Inner Experience

Alchemy as an Expression of Inner Experience

The Unconscious as Inner Experience

Modern Art as an Expression of Inner Experience

Inner Experience through Mescalin and LSD

6. Individuation

Active Imagination and Life

Historical Order and Eternal Order

Freedom and Bondage

7. Good and Evil

The Human Conflict

Will and Counter-Will in the God-image

8. Answer To Job

Verbal Image and Object

The Antinomy of the Holy (Paul Tillich)

Jung’s Subjective Testament

The World’s Suffering

9. The Individuation of Mankind

The God-Image of the Holy Ghost

Reconciling the Opposites in the God-Image

10. Man in the Work of Redemption

11. The One Reality

12. The Individual

13. Meaning as the Myth of Consciousness

Creative Consciousness

The Secret of Simplicity

Synchronicity

Notes

Bibliography

Foreword

It was a radiant August day in 1940. In spite of the adversity of the times, a small group of people had gathered together in Moscia, at the Swiss end of Lago Maggiore, for a “symbolic” Eranos meeting. That morning the Basel mathematician Andreas Speiser had lectured on “The Platonic Doctrine of the Unknown God and the Christian Trinity”. It was the only lecture that had been announced and we were supposed to be satisfied with that this year. But things turned out differently. In the afternoon C.G. Jung, who was one of the guests, withdrew to a shady corner of the garden by the shore of the lake. He had fetched a Bible from the library, and sat there reading it and making notes. Next day he surprised the tensely listening audience with a reply to the disquisition of his Basel colleague. Speaking extempore, he supplemented the theme with a lecture on “The Psychology of the Trinity Idea”.1 In the way that was characteristic of him, pondering his words and at times hesitantly, he formulated thoughts he had been carrying around with him for years but had not yet put into their final shape.

The stenogram of Jung’s improvisation proved later to be practically ready for press; only extensive insertions were added. To anyone who knew Jung’s method of working there was nothing astonishing about this. He began writing only when the thoughts were mature in him and he had collected and verified the explanatory material. Often there was an interval of many years between the first creative intuition and its setting down in words; but from the moment he took up his pen he was wholly under the spell of the nascent work. He completed it in a single draft, working on it at set times daily, often even during bouts of illness. Slow and deliberate as his speech, the dear handwriting flowed across the paper. At a subsequent re-reading, it was only technical additions, “amplifications” drawn from every conceivable field of knowledge, that were pasted in the wide margins of the folio sheets on numerous small slips, some of them quite tiny. But the written text as such remained for the most part untouched.

Jung’s improvisation on the psychology of the Trinity idea concluded the meeting in Moscia. It was followed by a serious yet lively discussion on the terrace of Casa Eranos, with its wide view of the lake and the mountains beyond. Jung was relaxed and – a rare thing, especially in those years of catastrophe – satisfied with his performance. Almost apologetically, though, he distinguished his style from that of the previous speaker. “I can formulate my thoughts only as they break out of me. It is like a geyser. Those who come after me will have to put them in order.” This remark has to be taken with a grain of salt, for it gives no inkling of the thoroughness, the positively pedantic care with which the empirical material was assembled, sifted, and intellectually worked over until the final form could no longer be postponed. Even so, it does explain some of the difficulties a reading of his works presents, especially those written in old age. The very profusion of creative ideas and of the material discussed opens out endless vistas, and the spontaneity of his style leads to occasional obscurities.

It was the memory of that summer talk by Lago Maggiore that has given me the courage to single out for study one particular thematic complex in Jung’s work: how the interplay of consciousness and the unconscious yielded for him an answer to the perennial question: What is the meaning of life and of man?

My especial thanks are due to Mrs Marianne Niehus-Jung, who up to the time of her death in 1965, followed the progress of the work with interest and permitted me to quote from the forthcoming volumes of Jung’s letters.2 Dr Gerhard Adler, their editor, likewise gave his consent. A number of friends aided me by word and deed during the preparation of the manuscript. I thank them all for their co-operation and patience. Also I would like to thank Mr R. F. C. Hull for many valuable suggestions during our collaboration on the English edition.

Aniela Jaffé

Zürich, Autumn 1966

Foreword to the Second Edition

More than a decade has passed since the initial appearance of The Myth of Meaning, and today, more than ever, we are aware of the great relevance of the topics addressed by C.G. Jung. Once again it is clear that he was ahead of his time.

Jung’s answer to the question of meaning is best understood in light of the abundance of problems which so deeply concerned him; for example, the phenomena of inner experience, of a transcendence of life and consciousness, and of the borders of perception. In his view, the relationship between psychology and the natural sciences is of crucial importance, as is that between psychology and religion.

The idea of the gradual expansion of human consciousness down through the centuries – ‘the myth of meaning’ – is central to his work. It culminates in a perception of the unity of being, whereby spirit and matter, science and faith, consciousness and unconsciousness are not considered to be opposites, but rather different aspects of one and the same reality.

Recent substantiation of this comes in certain observations made by the physicist Fritjof Capra and reported in his book, The Turning Point. He discusses the many parallels between Jungian Psychology and modern science and remarks that: “Jung … used concepts that are surprisingly similar to the ones contemporary physicists use in their descriptions of subatomic phenomena.”1 Analogous to the developments in modern science, Jung’s path of perception leads beyond the one-sided, rational, mechanistic view of the world.

This book was conceived as a brief and easily understandable introduction to C.G. Jung’s world of thought, with its great richness of themes. I would like to thank the Daimon Verlag for making this new edition available.

Aniela Jaffé

Zürich, March 1984

1 Capra, Fritjof, The Turning Point, Simon and Schuster, New York, 1982, p. 361 f.

1.
The Theme

“What is the meaning of life?” The question is as old as mankind, and every answer is an interpretation of a world thick with enigmas. No answer is the final one, and none of them can answer the question completely. The answer changes as our knowledge of the world changes; meaning and unmeaning are part of the plenitude of life. “Life is crazy and meaningful at once. And when we do not laugh over the one aspect and speculate about the other, life is exceedingly drab, and everything is reduced to the littlest scale. There is then little sense and little nonsense either.”1 Jung wrote this at the age of fifty-nine. Twenty-five years later, the same thought acquires a strangely different intonation: “Whichever element we think outweighs the other, whether meaninglessness or meaning, is a matter of temperament. If meaninglessness were absolutely preponderant, the meaningfulness of life would vanish to an increasing degree with each step in our development. But that is – or seems to me – not the case. Probably, as in all metaphysical questions, both are true: Life is – or has – meaning and meaninglessness. I cherish the anxious hope that meaning will preponderate and win the battle.”2 In old age the question of meaning becomes a fateful one that decides the value or valuelessness of one’s own life. Jung was profoundly stirred by it, yet he knew that there is no final or clear-cut answer.

It is the aim of this book to show what kind of “meaning” Jung opposed to the “meaninglessness of life”. Meaning for him was born of a long life, rich in experience, and of well over half a century of research into the human psyche. He found an answer that satisfied him, that tied up with his scientific knowledge though without claiming to be scientific. There is no objectively valid answer to the question of meaning; for, besides objective thinking, subjective valuation also plays its part. Each and every formulation is a myth that man creates in order to answer the unanswerable.

For Jung the question of meaning was not a philosophical or a theoretical problem. Like most themes in his work, it sprang from the daily experiences and necessities of the consulting hour. Jung was first and foremost a doctor, and the obligation to help and to heal remained decisive right up to the end of his life. The motto of his book Answer to Job,3 “I am distressed for thee, my brother” (II Sam. 1:26), voices a powerful impetus behind his creativity and his thinking. The absence of meaning in life plays a crucial role in the aetiology of neurosis: “A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning.”4 Jung records that “about a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives.”5 They were not “sickly eccentrics” seeking from the doctor an answer to the question of meaning, “but … very often exceptionally able, courageous, and upright persons”.6 They were neurotic only because they shared what Jung called the “general neurosis of our time”, an increasingly pervasive sense of futility. In most cases it went hand in hand with a sense of religious emptiness. These people were no longer able to believe, either because they could not reconcile scientific thinking with the tenets of religion, or because the truths enshrouded in dogma had lost authority for them and all psychological justification. If they were Christians, they did not feel redeemed by Christ’s sacrificial death; if they were Jews, the Torah offered them no support. Thus they lacked the protection afforded by being rooted in a religious tradition. The man safely ensconced in religion will never entirely lose himself in the darkness and loneliness of a meaningless world, and in Jung’s experience no one is really healed, and no one finds his meaning, “who did not regain his religious outlook. This of course has nothing whatever to do with a particular creed or membership of a church.”7

As regards the question of life’s meaning, no science can take the place of religion in this inclusive sense. Biological, physical, or cosmic systems of order no more provide an answer than does the interpretation of psychic contents exclusively in terms of personal experience. Meaning is the experience of totality. Any description of it presupposes the reality lived in time as well as life’s quality of timelessness; personal and conscious experiences as well as a realm that transcends consciousness and the tangible world. If the tension between these two poles of being is lacking, man has the “feeling that he is a haphazard creature without meaning, and it is this feeling that prevents him from living his life with the intensity it demands if it is to be enjoyed to the full. Life becomes stale and is no longer the exponent of the complete man”.8 Life, for Jung, is lived only when it is “a touchstone for the truth of the spirit”.9