t h r e e
You may be asking, what is this depth psychology? Is psychology not sufficiently deep in and of itself?
Sigmund Freud did not quote unquote “discover” the unconscious, but his curiousity and pioneering brilliance brought it into the zeitgeist. His insight was quite simple and yet revolutionary – there is more to us that we presume to know; there are parts of ourselves of which we are completely, totally, and persistently unaware.
The “depth” in depth psychology refers to this idea that we are inevitably unable to see the whole picture, our conscious awareness is string of islands, an archipelago of the known amongst the vast ocean of the unknown. To oversimplify, Freud theorized the unconscious as a rug under which we sweep all of the traumas and unpleasantries we would rather not be consciously aware of.
In the early years of the 20th century, the young psychiatrist Carl Jung came within Freud’s orbit and the two became extremely close . Their remarkable connection is exemplified by their first meeting, a high octane conversation in 1906 that lasted some 13 hours.
The eventual break between Jung and Freud might be viewed as such: Freud penetrated the depths. Jung kept excavating, and in so doing he inadvertently awoke the balrogs, so to speak.
In the charged, tectonic months bracketing the outset of the first world war, Jung experienced a torrent of visions and indelible dreams, and he was inexorably drawn into what he would later call his confrontation with the unconscious. He feared for a time that he was losing his mind. Tending to his patients by day, Jung retired to his study each evening, employing what he termed active imagination to engage with the flood of imagery and dreams on their own terms.
This journey to the depths, what Jung called his night sea journey, was the seminal experience of Jung’s life and the basis for all of his subsequent contributions to the still young field of psychology. Jung theorized that there was another strata below our personal unconscious, a collective unconscious that was common to the psyches of all humans, regardless of their personal experiences or cultural influences. At these psychic depths, archetypal patterns lay in potentia, without form, like the hidden, dormant buds of a tree.
Many of these archetypes that Jung described are now well known to us, and we recognize them, despite their ingenious and inexhaustible costume changes, throughout the stories and myths of all cultures: On one occasion, the hero archetype will pick up Herakles’ club, on another Luke Skywalker’s light sabre; the wise old man dons the robes Lao Tzu as readily as those of Albus Dumbledore. The Trickster is equally at home in the guise of coyote and Hermes, Loki and Br'er Rabbit. But archetypes are more ubiquitous and less rarefied than this short list would suggest. “There are as many archetypes as there are typical situations in life.” Jung once wrote, “Endless repetition has engraved these experiences into our psychic constitution.” There is nothing particularly mystical about archetypes – they are simply patterns and tendencies that trace their roots into the mists of time.
We can think of this archetypal realm like magma beneath the earth’s crust: fluid and unformed, largely dormant yet immensely powerful. When archetypal energy bursts forth, it eventually cools and takes a distinct form, but it may leave a swath of destruction in its wake. Individuals, groups, even whole nations can be seized by an archetypal pattern, as Jung felt had transpired with Hitler and the rise of Nazi Germany. As W.H. Auden expressed so succinctly, “we are lived by powers we pretend to understand”.
