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The Flight Into the Unconscious

A psychological analysis of C.G.Jung's psychology project Wolfgang Giegerich

(Steinebach near Munich) Now, at the end of the century of psychology and at the threshold to afuture that will no longer bepsychological, it is time to look backupon C.G. Jung's psychology project,not by way of paraphrasing what Jungtaught, but by way of reconstruction. I

place my talk under the motto of a logionthat Jung liked to quote: “If indeed thouknowest what thou doest, thou artblessed: but if thou knowest not, thou artcursed.” I begin with a text in which Jung as anold man described the significantmoment at the time after the publicationof his first major book, Transformationsand Symbols of the Libido (1912), and



after his separation from Freud in whichhis “psychology of the unconscious” 1

can be said to have begun. The text

reads, About this time I experienced amoment of unusual clarity in which Icould see the path I had traveled sofar. I thought, “Now you possess a

key to mythology and are in aposition to unlock all the gates to theunconscious human psyche.” Butthen something whispered within me,“Why open all gates?” And promptlythe question arose of what, after all, Ihad accomplished. I had explainedthe myths of peoples of the past; Ihad written a book about the hero,about the myth in which man hasalways lived. “But in what myth does

man live nowadays?”—“In theChristian myth,” the answer mightbe.—“Do you live in it?” something inme asked.—“To be honest, theanswer is no! It is not the myth I live



in.”—“Then we no longer have anymyth?”—“No, evidently we no longer have any myth.”—“But then what is

your myth? The myth in which youdo live?” At this point things becameuncomfortable, and I stoppedthinking. I had reached a boundary.(MDR , p. 171)2

Jung's first thought is, “Now youpossess a key to mythology and are in aposition to unlock all the gates to theunconscious human psyche.” Jung feelshimself, as it were, in the position of apsychological St. Peter. But thensomething whispered in him, “Why openall gates?” Truly a surprising question.To open all gates—is this not whatscience, what particularlypsychoanalysis, is all about? The

whispered inner voice is crucial. It callsJung to his destiny, to his very ownconception of the unconscious, and thisis probably why Jung experienced thismoment as one of “unusual clarity.”



Before, he had still tried to take refugeunder the wings of Freud's theoreticalframework. But now he was going to

have “to sew his garment himself” (cf.CW 9i § 27). His inner voice tempts Jung into givingup his power of the keys. It aims for areceding, a holding back. Instead of a

course of thinking without restraints, itsuggests leaving at least some gateunopened. The reflections initiated by the whisper from within culminate in the twofold

result, “‘No, evidently we no longer haveany myth.’—‘But then what is your myth? The myth in which you do live?’”One would normally assume that once ithas become clear that we have no myth,it would be impossible to ask, “But then

what is your myth?” We have justlearned that myth is out. However, asthe “But then” shows, the two sentencesbelong together. They are two halves of



one whole, namely of the modernexperience of the present. One moment,one now, unfolds as the double

movement of a radical negation of thepast and a longing for, indeed aninsisting on, a new future, and thus itempties itself. The present asexperienced by modern consciousness

is a dissociation. As all major thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries did in variousways, so Jung, too, sweeps away alltradition. He makes a clean break with“the myth in which man has alwayslived.” For modern consciousness, the

present (each new present) is anabsolutely exceptional situation. ThusJung states elsewhere, “Thisdistinguishes our time from all others”(CW 10 §161); “This situation is new. All

ages before us...” (GW 9/I § 50, mytransl.). The idea of the exceptionalsituation is the lever for psychologicallyheaving human existence out from itsactual embeddedness in the existing,



historically grown tradition and for splitting the now. Now we have arrivedat a zero point, we begin with a clean

slate. But the clean slate created by declaringmyth and the whole religious-metaphysical tradition reaching far backinto the past obsolete is only the foil—

and the precondition—for the insistenceon “my myth, the myth in which I live.”Here two aspects have to bedistinguished. The first is Jung'sswitching from myth as a socialphenomenon to a myth of the privateindividual. Originally Jung had askedabout the myth in which man lives or welive. After this myth has been declaredto be today non-existent, he isconcerned only about his own private

myth. The later Jung knew that myth,that is, real myth as a historicalphenomenon, “is pre-eminently a socialphenomenon: it is told by the many andheard by the many.”3 Our text definitively



dismisses this myth and at onceestablishes the idea of a personal myth. Along with the entire tradition of the

past, the sense for the public sphere asthe locus of meaning and for theindividual as an integral part of a peopleor community is dismissed, and insteadthe focus from now on is exclusively on

the atomic individual. It is obvious thatthis existentialist turn was essential for the rise of a psychology as Jungdeveloped it. The second aspect is that the word mythin “No, we no longer have any myth” andin “But then what is your myth?” is anequivocation. It refers to twofundamentally different phenomena, asalready the so-cial/public dimension of the one and the private dimension of the

other show. The one notion of myth isthe myth that man has always lived in,the myth or the religious tradition thatalways precedes one's personalexistence. One is born into it. The other,



decisively modernistic, notion of myth isthe myth that is utterly new; it is not, buthas to be sought; it is a program for the

future. And it includes within its definitionthe debunking of myth in the first sense.It is cleansed from all remnants of existing public tradition. The drivingforce behind the clean break with

tradition and the insistence on one'spersonal myth is the modernistic needfor an unmediated beginning fromscratch, with naked, abstract origins, inJung's case, e.g., with Urerfahrung (originary experience), Urbild (primordial

image) and archetype, which would later be imagined as the formerly unknowntrue origin even of the ancientphenomenon of myth. Normally an equivocation is rated as a

fallacy. But here this fallacy has method.Rather than a personal mistake on thepart of the author, it is an integralelement of the idea presented. Just asthe now is dissociated, the modernistic



idea of “myth,” too, is established as thedissociation between two extremesaround an empty middle, the extremes

of the myth of the past that is no moreand the myth sought that is not yet. The mentality prevailing here isfundamentally different from all pre-modern thinking. Alchemy, for example,

begins in the concrete middle. For it, theprima materia, the beginning, is themassa confusa at hand as it exists andresults from the history that produced it. And the origin to be sought, theMercurius, lies within the massa confusaitself, not outside at an extreme, behindor prior to it. Our text ends with the statement, “Atthis point things became uncomfortable,and I stopped thinking. I had reached a

boundary.” Now Jung had arrived wherethe whispered question from thebeginning “Why open all gates?” wantedto have him. The boundary closes the



gate to a relentless thinking that wouldgo all the way. Now it was clear that themyth or pure origin that Jung was

seeking had to be found on this side of the boundary, inasmuch as Jung'sboundary was not a Rubicon to becrossed, not a taboo to be broken by aninitiate. Throughout his life Jung

respected “the barrier across the mentalworld” and vehemently condemnedthose who he believed had gone beyondit. The boundary forced Jung to reversethe normal direction of exploration,going no longer forward but backwards:

introspection instead of thinking withoutrestraints. What was this boundary? Our text letsus know. It consisted in stopping tothink. The boundary is the objectified

image in which the subjective attitude of refraining from thinking congeals. And“the unconscious,” as Jung conceived it,is the hypostatized boundary, the reified“stopping to think.” In the beginning of a



therapy, when a patient sought helpfrom him, Jung liked to say that he didnot know the answer to the patient's

predicament either and suggested thatthey not think about it, but rather observe the patient's dreams. This movedisplays on a level of literal behavior what was also the principle constituting

the logical structure of the psychology of the unconscious: a sacrificiumintellectus. A contemporary of Jung though 16years his senior, Husserl, was able todevelop his pure phenomenology onlyby “bracketing” reality. Reality was notwhat Jung bracketed, and therefore hiscould not be a pure phenomenologyeither. Jung faced the all too realmonsters in the unconscious. What he,

with his sacrifice of the intellect ,bracketed was something else: thetranscendental ego. 4 Jung's bracketingresulted in his reducing the mind to theempirical ego, to the everyday mentality



of No. 1 personality. As empirical egoJung of course could continue to think.The transcendental ego, the only one

that might possibly have been up to thesubstantial metaphysical contents of “myth” and thus the only real addresseefor them, was banished and extraditedbeyond the never to be transgressed

boundary. Indeed, the boundary is thedivision between the empirical and thetranscendental egos. What made theunconscious fundamentally unconsciouswas that it was deprived of an adequateaddressee in consciousness. The movement described in our text hasfive moments: (1) the clean break withtradition and the actual historicalsituation, (2) the reaching out for a purebeginning, an absolute arché, (3) the

insistence on this pure origin as myth,i.e., a “higher” meaning. (As an aside, Iwant to stress that in radical contrast toFreud's instinctual unconscious of desire and, later, Lacan's linguistic



unconscious, Jung's unconscious wascognitive, epistemic, an unconscious of meaning and knowing ); (4) the rejection

of the social and public and therestriction to the abstract individual, and(5) the sacrificium intellectus. Together they make up what was to be Jung's“flight into the unconscious.” With this

phrase I am alluding to a formulation of the pre-modern thinker Hegel. About 90years before Jung, Hegel had come tothe realization that all the attempts at histime to rescue religion by rooting it, e.g.,in ethics (Kant), feeling

(Schleiermacher), art and aesthetics(Schelling, Hölderlin, and the earlyHegel himself) had failed, andnecessarily so. In view of this fact, hehad suggested that the only way left to

justify the substance of religion beforeconsciousness was that it, religion, hadto flee into, or take its refuge in,philosophy (“in die Philosophie sichflüchten”). As Jaeschke pointed out, this



“flight into the concept ” was a felix fuga,a happy flight, not an escape. It was amove forward, an advance both for the

mind and for religion, because this flightwould require careful work on thesophistication of the mind and itscapacity of conceptual thought so that,as thinking rather than imaging mind, it

might for the first time become adequateto the substantial contents that itentertained in religion; and so thatreligion, conversely, would attain to ahigher form of itself, the form of itstransparency. Jung, as a modern thinker, had to moveinto the opposite direction. He had toforce myth or meaning underground, outof conscious thought, because under theconditions of the logic prevailing in

modernity, mythic meaning could notstand up before the public waking mindand its intelligence. It had becomeillegiti-mate. 5 Thus it had to be logicallystored away deep inside the private



individual, and it had to be purified,extricated from its concrete inheritedand socially real contemporary form.

And in order to recover this sterilized“myth” from within the individual, themind had to fall asleep, both literally, inorder to get dreams, and figuratively, bydeclaring itself incompetent in all

essential matters. In essential matters,one had to wait for revelations from theunconscious. Jung believed that his dreams camefrom “the unconscious” as its purelynatural products. But were they notmuch rather his own speculative ideas,the ideas of the “whole man” asconscious-unconscious unity, only thatnow they were disowned by andexpelled from consciousness because

under the conditions of the logic of modernity they could no longer behonestly thought ? They were allowed toreappear in consciousness only after having been forced into the guise of



dream or vision. In other words, in order to allow one's having such ideas at alltoday, “man's intervention” and “the

collaboration of the” human mind “—anindispensable factor—” had to be made“invisible” (cf. CW 10 § 498). Jung criticized Albert Schweitzer for having run away to Africa as a

missionary doctor, a task that couldhave been executed equally well by anyother doctor. It would not have neededsuch a remarkably gifted theologian.Jung felt Schweitzer had deserted thespiritual or intellectual predicament of the Western mind, shrinking away fromthe consequences that his own studiesconcerning the historical Jesus wereleading him to. But structurally, toliterally escape to the dark continent of

Africa seems to be the same move vis-à-vis the spiritual, intellectualpredicament of the modern mind as tologically escape to the dark continent of “the unconscious.” For is the real



predicament really over there, in “theunconscious,” or is it not here, at home,in consciousness as the conscious-

unconscious unity of the mind? * * *

Now I want to look at how the sacrificeof the intellect, how boundary anddissociation determine the structure of

Jung's developed psychology. Jung conceived his psychology asempirical science. The mind of thepsychologist had to become exclusivelyreceptive. Ideally it had to reduce itself

to the mindlessness of a sensor, as in arobot, so as to simply observe the facts,nothing but the facts, without itself being intellect, reason, or knowing consciousness. The consciousness of the psychologist had to be innocent. It

was forbidden to take any intellectualresponsibility for the images of theunconscious. At the other end, on the side of the



object of psychology, the unconsciousfor Jung was conceived as pure nature,the dream as direct, unmediated

(unmittelbar ) expression, spontaneousproduct, unintentional event—withoutany admixture of any conscious mindactivity and untouched by reflection andcivilization. The images of the

unconscious were “archetypal.”Concerning his own fantasy productionsJung vehemently insisted, “No, it is notart! On the contrary, it is nature” (MDR p. 186). The unconscious as this virginal naturehas thus become the exclusive locus of creativity and knowing. My unconsciousis creative, my dreams know, not I. Andonly to the extent that I asconsciousness become blind (refrain

from thinking creatively of my own), canI partake of their knowledge andcreativity. We see that underlying the psychology



of the unconscious is a fundamentaldissociation: the splitting of thewholeness of the “whole man” (totus

homo), as the living conscious-unconscious, active-passive, creative-receptive, empirical-transcendental unityof consciousness. Now consciousnessis not any more in itself the unity of itself

and its other. Its one moment of unconsciousness has been ejected andpositivized or ontologized as theunconscious. The contents of the unconscious are inthemselves units of knowing andmeaning, however a knowing in theform of natural facts, not in the form of knowing , and a meaning safelypackaged in the meaninglessness of “facts”; they are ideas, images, symbols

coming as “nature.” “Archetypes” areultimately canned traditional knowledge,bottled up meanings, insights that are inthemselves blind. The notion of theunconscious as a whole is the notion of



the spirit Mercurius, but only in thebottle, bracketed, encapsulated. There was a contradictory task, (a) thetask of holding the mythic meaning inthe bottle, packaged in the form of a text or mere image or statement (Br. 3, 317)of the psyche that we only quote, and(b) the task of nevertheless allowing

consciousness to get in touch with thismeaning. This task required that theempirical ego, the only one allowed, hadto be split into two separate identities tocompensate for the expelled actualaddressee of essential knowledge, thetranscendental ego. The one identityhad the job of unmediatedlyexperiencing the dream withoutunderstanding and knowing; the other one had the task of understanding the

meaning of the image without releasingthis meaning from being merely what thedream said . If it had been released, onewould have oneself becomeaccountable for this meaning. One had



to (of course unwittingly) switch betweenthe two identities; the spark was by nomeans allowed to spring over. For this

would have meant the danger of inflation, of psychosis, a danger that for Jung had been most threateninglyembodied in the figure of Nietzsche,who had dared to open all gates. There

must never be a coniunctio, a vinculumor copula, 1. between the empiricalobserving and the emotionally affectedsubject, 2. between the image in thesoul and what it says that it is the imageof, 3. between the subject and what the

experience of the subject is. But was the coniunctio not a favoritetheme of Jung's? The thing to realize isthat the coniunctio was precisely only atheme or motif that he studied.

Semantically , the coniunctio is one of the most prominent ideas and goals for Jung. But the syntax of his theorycontradicts its own semantics. As asubject-matter of a “psychology of the



unconscious” the coniunctio had to bebottled up, it had to be no more than anin vitro coniunctio, a motif in a text, an

experience in a dream. But it was notallowed to escape the bottle and topermeate the structure of the theory or of the observer's consciousness itself. If that had occurred, “the unconscious”

would immediately have disappearedand consciousness would have had tostart to think all on its own responsibilityagain as the conscious-unconsciousunity that it is. Only through the back door, namely assemantic contents and within the bottle,could Jung allow in such essentialinsights as: the transpersonal nature of the soul; the psyche as being all aroundus; psychological theory as itself a

product of the fantasy activity of thesoul, etc. The repressed transcendentalego was also only allowed to returnprojected into the unconscious, as “theSelf.” But none of these insights was



allowed to get out of the bottle and haveany effect on the logical structure of psychology. Inside the bottle all gates

were allowed to be opened—as long asthe bottle itself stayed sealed. Psychology had to restrict itself exclusively to observing the semanticsof psychic phenomena, their image,

narrational, ideational aspect. This alsoexplains Jung's remarkable generalinsensitivity to the logical form or statusof phenomena. Indiscriminately he putFaust, Part II on the same level asimmediate expressions of anindividuation process. He was unable tosee that this work had the utterlydifferent structure of a highly reflectedsecond order text, namely a text about texts and symbols. It was not symbolic,

but a reflec-tion of symbols. By thesame token Jung believed that heshould understand Nietzsche's Dionysusarchetypally, if not in terms of the GreekDionysus then at least as a guise of the



Germanic Wotan, and he believed thatin Richard Wagner and later in the Nazimovement the same Wotan was stirring

from within, as he said, the “Germanicsoul,” as if there still were such a thingas the “Germanic soul.” Impressed bycertain semantic correspondences andignoring the utterly different historical

settings informing each of thesephenomena, he simply had no feel for the incomparability between themanifestation of a god in an ancientsociety and the modern phenomenon of an ideological mass movement. The psychology of the unconsciouswould not be complete without Jung'stransformation of the Trinity intoquaternity. The motif of the Trinity wasthe one semantic element within

psychology that threatened the syntax of the psychology of the unconscious.How? In accordance with a longtradition, Hegel stated that, “Quadratumest lex naturae, triangulum mentis” (the



square is the law of nature, the trianglethat of the mind). The Trinity posed amortal threat for the sacrificium

intellectus, for the bracketing of thetranscendental ego, for the bottling up of the spirit Mercurius. Of course Jung wasright, the Trinity was incomplete andthus restless. It was incomplete because

it aimed at our thinking, at thetranscendental ego in us, as that inwhich it would find its completion. TheTrinity as semantic content of consciousness aimed at a breakthroughthrough the level of semantics to the

level of syntax. Jung just had to pull the Trinity's teeth.Its dynamic had to be pacified. And thepacifier was the Fourth, because theFourth forced the movement aiming at

our consciousness to return into itself. Itnow was complete and satisfied withinitself. Wholeness had been successfullyreduced to a semantic content of theunconscious, be it as an archetypal



fantasy expressed in the AssumptioMariae yonder in heaven, or as an eventor image in our personal dreams and as

such an observable empirical fact, or beit as an ideal object that one might strivefor. In other words, wholeness had beensafely put inside the bottle, and theFourth, as that which provides this intra-

bottle completeness, is at the same timethe plug on the bottle, the sealprotecting “the unconscious” as theunconsciousness of consciousness or as the mindlessness of the empiricalego.

* * * The text from Jung that we started withshowed only how the fundamentalprinciple operative in the generation of the concept of “the unconscious” first

announced itself to Jung. What wediscussed afterwards referred to thebasic character of his developedpsychological thought as a whole. But



the link between these two extremes,the actual transition from the first inklingto the finished, worked out psychology,

is still missing. The sacrificium intellectus could not be amere idea of such a sacrifice, thissacrifice of the intellect had to beactually performed. But it could not be

performed as the subjective behavior of “stopping to think.” It had to becomestructural, syntactic. Only then could itbe the factually existing, objective formof whatever contents. Such a real change of the logical constitution of experience required a ritual. How could the manufacturing of theunconscious be executed? Inasmuch as“the unconscious” was by definitionessential knowledge as the opposite of

knowing, namely as the un conscious,and inasmuch as it was somethingmental as the opposite of mind, namelyas empirical-factual nature, the mind



had to within itself alienate or dissociateitself from itself. The unconscious had tobe created as a condition of the mind

itself, namely as its having gone under,consciousness intentionally resigning aswaking consciousness and as creative,thinking mind. It had to intentionallydischarge itself of any intellectual

responsibility for the contents itentertained. The mind had to within itself reduce itself to a passive, innocentreceptor and radically divorce itself fromits own, the transcendental ego's, ideas,molding these ideas in such a way that

they appeared to be natural objects vis-à-vis itself and as an independentreality, a stream of events that came to,or rather came over, consciousness allof their own accord, as if they were

aliens intruding from outside.

If the mind had to by itself bring aboutthe partial eclipse of itself, it had to dothis, of course, in such a way that itwould be absolutely unconscious



concerning its own authorship increating this eclipse as a state of itself.This self-contradiction was

indispensable. The production inactuality of the notion of theunconscious through a self-inducedeclipse had to itself be unconscious fromthe outset. The mind had to feel

absolutely innocent about itsexperiences through which the reality of the idea of the unconscious wasestablished. All awareness of acollaboration of the human mind itself inthe realization of the unconscious had to

be expunged. The moment there wouldhave been the least suspicion that therealized notion of the unconscious owedits existence to its own doing, this notionwould have collapsed. And the moment

the images in Jung's dreams and visionswould have been realized to have beenhis own ideas, merely bracketed andpushed down into unconsciousness,they would have lost their pure nature



and revelation status. This means thatthe establishment of the concept of theunconscious as real had to occur in the

form of a petitio principii . The sine quanon of the production of the unconsciouswas that this production alreadyoccurred on the very basis of and withinthe result that it was supposed to

produce. How is such a “crazy,” self-contradictorything as the mind's self-alienationpossible? There is only one real way:The ritual in which the concept of theunconscious was to be made real had tohave the form of psychosis. Now we can return to Jung. Therealization of the idea of “theunconscious” through the production of it as a natural reality occurred in the

years of crisis after Jung's separationfrom Freud. This crisis has often beenunderstood as a prolonged psychotic (or at least pre-psychotic) reaction. Such



explanations are clinical and notpsychological. They take the crisisliterally and do not see through it.

Equally as naive as the clinicalexplanation is the opposite interpretationthat sees in Jung's crisis, in analogy to a“shaman's illness,” his personal initiationinto psychic reality. Seen psychologically , Jung's crisis wasneither a psychotic reaction (to an eventsuch as the loss of Freud or to childhoodtraumas), nor was it his personal crisis.The psychotic crisis was arranged , anarrangement in the sense of Adler andJung. It was created, invented, not byJung as ego-personality, but by thepsyche as the “whole man” and for itsown purposes. This means two things: itwas logically, psychologically not a

clinical illness, and yet semantically itindeed had the form of a clinicalcondition, the form of psychosis. Alreadythe loss of orientation with which it allbegan was, as it were, “artificially”



produced in the service of “the soul's”project. It was not an event, a fact of nature—poor Jung being helplessly

overwhelmed by his sudden lonelinessafter the break with Freud that his egosimply could not cope with. No, it wasthe beginning of a ritual, an opus of “thesoul.” The other aspect of a psychological viewis that the crisis was not really his,Jung's as person, part of his initiation or individuation process, but the crisis of psychology , a necessity of psychologicaltheory , although, of course, it playeditself out in the man Jung, and this againfor a particular purpose. In this crisis“the soul” struggled to give itself a newdefinition, to house itself in a newbuilding yet to be erected, namely in the

idea of the unconscious as mythicmeaning packaged as pure nature. Before his crisis, Jung had still tried toevade his own fate by hiding under the



wings of Freud's theory, in the hope that“the soul” would accept this abode andleave him alone. This hope had proved

to be in vain. During the work on hisTransformations and Symbols of theLibido it became clear to him that “thesoul” demanded its right, demanded thatJung accept his fate to be the place in

which the new structure of “thepsychology of the unconscious” had tobe erected. This had been his calling. The traditional locus of mythic andmetaphysical knowledge had alwaysbeen the objective mind; this knowledgehad been “out there” in the proverbscontaining wisdom, in the metaphysicaldoctrines, the mythic and religious talespublicly told and in the rituals publiclyperformed; it had not been “inside.” The

personal crisis was indispensablebecause the establishment of theunconscious as nature required that thelocus of essential knowing betransplanted into the personality in its



almost biological reality. It had to be“bottled up” in the empirical person. Theidea of the “personality” was required

because the unconscious could not bemerely intellectually defined as purenature, it had to be proven to exist asnature, to be actually rooted in thenaturally existing person, as its interior;

or, put the other way around, thepersonality had to be established as theexisting “bottle” containing the spiritwithin itself. If this relocation was to bereal, an empirical, natural process in theperson was necessary: it required a self-

sacrifice. I said that Jung's crisis was not a clinicalillness and nevertheless had the form of psychosis. In medicine the wordsimulation is used in a moral sense and

refers to a kind of fraudulent pretending.In computer technology simulation has avery different, neutral meaning (cf. flightsimulator). It is in this latter sense that Isay: Jung's crisis was a simulated



psychosis, a simulated personal crisis,or, on the symbolical level, a simulated descent into the underworld; it too was

“bracketed” from the outset. It had to besimulation, because only “simulation”accomplishes the miracle of perfectlyuniting authenticity and fake, innocentreception and intentional construction,

whereby the authenticity and innocenceof reception are experiential or semantic, the other two logical or syntactical. A genuine psychosis wouldhave been an ordinary illness, a mishap,and not a ritual capable of transforming

the entire logical constitution of the ideaof soul. The “voluntary” (MDR , p. 178) or activemoment contained in the simulatedpsychosis can be pinpointed. Jung tells

us, “It was during Advent of the year 1913 ... that I resolved upon the decisivestep. I was sitting at my desk oncemore, thinking over my fears [of succumbing to psychosis]. Then I let



myself drop ...” (MDR , p. 179). This isthe sacrificium intellectus come real,however not merely negatively and

behaviorally as a conscious abstention,a conscious “stopping to think,” butpositively as Jung's self-sacrifice, as the“the whole man's” self-reduction to theempirical ego. It is important to see that

this “sinking the mind” was structural,syntactic and not semantic. It was not aparticular technique of lowering thethreshold of consciousness such aspracticed when applying the method of active imagination. The application of a

technique would still remain on thesemantic level. Rather this going under of the mind was its logical reconstitutionexclusively as the empirical ego that allof a sudden was “confronted ” with the

mind's own ideas now as “ theunconscious,” incognito. It was necessary for the purpose thatJung would acquire for his own imagesand ideas the status of “psychic



objectivity, the reality of the psyche.” Hisinner imaginal figures, especiallyPhilemon, taught him “that there are

things in the psyche which I do notproduce” (MDR , p. 183). This was theaccomplished self-alien-ation of themind that was the one point of Jung'scrisis. The other was to acquire for the

alienated images the status of anindependent truth besides public truth: psychological truth, so that they couldbe considered to be images of mythicmeaning, although they could not beheld as one's own conscious thoughts or

beliefs because they were no longer sustained by the logic prevailing inmodernity. Without psychic objectivity(i.e., dissociation from oneself) andwithout psychological truth (i.e., the

dignity of mythic meaning) those imagesand ideas would have had to be seeneither as nothing but symptoms of apsychic disorder, maybe even madness,or as idle speculation, as ideologizing. #



On the one hand, Jung's crisis was theprocess of equipping the unconsciousimages with a separate, bracketed truth

so that at a time when, e.g, in art Jung'scontemporaries painted the falling apartof the “natural” image of the world, themind might nevertheless still haveaccess to mythic meaning —even if only

in the bottled, canned form of acommodity—and so that it might delightin feeling like the “age-old son of themother,” “the son of the maternalunconsciou 6 — even if only by way of simulated immediacy. • On the other hand, his crisis had to bethe process of interiorizing the alienationqua neurotic dissociation into the logicor syntax of psychology so that itsinterest in the said mythic meaning

would not on the empirical level threatenthe mind with alienation in the sense of madness, nor make it liable to thereproach of illegitimate metaphysicizing.



• And a (simulated) psychosis wasneeded in order to equip theinauguration of the structural neurosis

as which “the psychology of theunconscious” exists with theunquestionable authority and innocenceof a nature event; only a psychoticprocess was capable of freeing the

indispensable neurotic dissociation fromappearing as a subjective behavior andof installing it as the self-evidentobjective syntax of psychology itself. It took a number of years for Jung totruly sink his thinking mind intounconsciousness and to firmly establishthe latter as his methodologicalstandpoint. But once he had succeededin solidly, i.e. logically , basing himself onthe ground of the newly acquired, newly

produced concept of “the unconscious,”he could emerge from his crisis. For nowhe was firmly secure in his standing asbeing not “the whole man,” not an artist,not a philosopher, in other words, not



the unity of empirical and transcendentalego, 7 but only the empirical observer of meaning-laden unconscious images as

pure facts of nature. 1 Unless noted otherwise, the term “theunconscious” in this paper always refersonly to the unconscious in the sense of

C.G. Jung. In order to refer to hispsychology, Jung often spoke of “themodern psychology of the unconscious.”

2 The page reference is to the VintageBooks edition. I slightly altered the

translation given there to bring it more inline with the German original inErinnerungen Träume Gedanken, pp.174f. 3 Letters 2, p. 486 (to Pastor Tanner, 12February 1959). 4 I use the term “transcendental ego” ad hoc only and do not hypostatize it, nor use it in the fixed technical sense of either Kant or Husserl. The term offers



itself in this context because Husserlintroduced it in 1913, just about the timewhen Jung went through his decisive

crisis. What I mean with the distinctionbetween the transcendental and theempirical ego can be illustrated byreference, e.g., to the experience of anytrue thinker or true artist that what

ultimately thinks or creates in him is nothe personally. Only if this internaldifference is opened up and active is awork of art truly art and of public, maybeeven universal, interest. 5 Through a fundamental revolution thelogic that once had given rise to,informed and sustained myth andmetaphysical meaning had beenreplaced by a fundamentally new anddifferent logic governing the soul of the

age. On the basis of that new logic bywhich it was determined, consciousnesscould in the best case appreciate thecontents of former myth andmetaphysics only as odd curiosities, if it



did not brush them altogether aside asabsurd or nonsense. 6 MDR , p. 225. Erinnerungen, p. 229:“der uralte Sohn der Mutter. 7 This standing of his as not “the wholeman” had of course been brought aboutby, and was an expression of, his being the whole man, his being the unity of

empirical and transcendental ego. “Thewhole man” stylizes himself exclusivelyas the empirical ego that has anunconscious vis-à-vis itself. Thesacrifice of the intellect is an

achievement by this very intellect.

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