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    The Collective Unconscious and The Leontocephalus

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    1) The document critiques Richard Noll's argument that Jung's concept of the collective unconscious was influenced by his personal studies and experiences. It argues that while Jung's specific imaginings were influenced by his readings, the numinous power and transformative experience of initiation he underwent were archetypal in nature. 2) It claims that outdated scholarship can still access archetypes, and that facts are less important than fantasies in understanding archetypes. The archetypal order transcends time. 3) While one patient Jung cited may have been influenced by his readings, the document argues Jung had other evidence for the collective unconscious, like children's dreams predicting death.

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    The Collective Unconscious and The Leontocephalus

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    Viviana Puebla
    201 views4 pages
    1) The document critiques Richard Noll's argument that Jung's concept of the collective unconscious was influenced by his personal studies and experiences. It argues that while Jung's specific imaginings were influenced by his readings, the numinous power and transformative experience of initiation he underwent were archetypal in nature. 2) It claims that outdated scholarship can still access archetypes, and that facts are less important than fantasies in understanding archetypes. The archetypal order transcends time. 3) While one patient Jung cited may have been influenced by his readings, the document argues Jung had other evidence for the collective unconscious, like children's dreams predicting death.

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    1) The document critiques Richard Noll's argument that Jung's concept of the collective unconscious was influenced by his personal studies and experiences. It argues that while Jung's specific imaginings were influenced by his readings, the numinous power and transformative experience of initiation he underwent were archetypal in nature. 2) It claims that outdated scholarship can still access archetypes, and that facts are less important than fantasies in understanding archetypes. The archetypal order transcends time. 3) While one patient Jung cited may have been influenced by his readings, the document argues Jung had other evidence for the collective unconscious, like children's dreams predicting death.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as DOC, PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as doc, pdf, or txt
    201 views4 pages

    The Collective Unconscious and The Leontocephalus

    Uploaded by

    Viviana Puebla
    1) The document critiques Richard Noll's argument that Jung's concept of the collective unconscious was influenced by his personal studies and experiences. It argues that while Jung's specific imaginings were influenced by his readings, the numinous power and transformative experience of initiation he underwent were archetypal in nature. 2) It claims that outdated scholarship can still access archetypes, and that facts are less important than fantasies in understanding archetypes. The archetypal order transcends time. 3) While one patient Jung cited may have been influenced by his readings, the document argues Jung had other evidence for the collective unconscious, like children's dreams predicting death.

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    The Collective Unconscious and the Leontocephalus:

    A Rejoinder to Noll
    Greg Mogenson
    Letter to the Editor: Spring 56: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, Fall 1994, pp.
    132-137. Slightly revised, 2002. All rights reserved

    In

    his paper, "Jung the Leontocephalus," 1 Richard Noll examines


    several of Jung's key inner experiences, experiences which, according to
    Noll, confirmed in Jung his conviction of the existence of a collective
    unconscious. By comparing these experiences with recent scholarly
    accounts of the Mithraic mysteries to which Jung felt his experiences to
    correspond, Noll demonstrates how overdetermined Jung's imagery was by
    the once definitive, but now out-dated, scholarly accounts of his day. This,
    for Noll, plus the fact that Jung may well have erred in his assertion that the
    vision of the "Solar Phallus Man" could not possibly have been influenced by
    scholarly accounts of the text of an ancient magical papyrus of remarkably
    similar content, suggests that the collective unconscious may exist "only on
    the shelves of Jung's personal library."
    In what follows, we will take issue with Noll on a number of points.
    1) As Noll points out, Jung acknowledged to the audience of his 1925
    seminar that the material he was putting before them from his active
    imaginations was strongly influenced by his reading of scholarly works on
    mythology, the details of his imaginings being a "condensation" of it. If he
    erred in his assumption that the "Solar Phallus Man" could not possibly have
    been influenced by material he had once known consciously, Jung was not
    making that error with regard to himself in this seminar. Jung knew that the
    high correlation between the specific details of his fantasy images and the
    details, such as they were then known, of Mithraic mysteries pointed, not to
    the collective unconscious, but to his own erudition. It was not the
    parrellism of the imagery that was of archetypal significance, but his living
    experience of its numinous power. It was the fact that he experienced an
    initiation and felt himself to be transformed that was important, not his
    having been transfigured into the Lion-headed deity, Leontocephalus.
    Archetypes, as Jung repeatedly stressed, are not "inherited ideas but
    inherited possibilities [to form] ideas" (CW 9i:136) and, as such, they "have
    at first no specific content[,] their specific content only appear[ing] in the
    course of the individual's life, when personal experience is taken up in
    precisely these forms"(CW 11:845). The knowledge of Mythraic initiation
    that Jung had gained from his mythological studies provided the "specific
    content" of his experience, not the formal possibility of the experience itself.
    Presumably the specific content could have been different had he been as
    preoccupied with other mysteries or had he read, as Noll has, the most
    recent scholarship on Mithraism, without thereby altering that his
    experience was an archetypal experience of initiation. Jung was immersed
    in mythology and Mithraism in the same way that Einstein was immersed in
    mathematical equations and Kekule in the mystery of the carbon molecule.
    Just as their dreams and fantasies played a creative role in conceptualizing
    solutions to their respective dilemmas, so Jung's active imagination was
    decisive, not as an occult contribution to the archaeology of actual

    Mithraism, but to our understanding of the transformative power of the


    initiatory archetype.
    2) It is a fallacy to suppose, as Noll seems to, that out-dated
    scholarshipeven if patently erroneous from a historical point of view, is
    any less archetypal than contemporary researchno matter how correct.
    Freud, in Larmarckian fashion, may have seen archaic vestiges in modern
    dreams as being derived from the literal events in the primordial family;
    Jung's notion of the archetype, however, is not so literal. The archetypal
    order is ahistorical, "above" time, in illo tempore as Wolfgang Giegerich has
    reminded us.2 Even if we had a definitive picture of the Mithraic mysteries
    this picture would only reflect the grappling of the initiates of that time with
    the archetype to which their mysteries were transparent. The scholarship of
    Jung's day and today, likewise, enact the same archetype. In fact, the work
    of Cumont which Jung followed, standing in a similar relation to the facts of
    actual Mithraism as alchemy stands to modern chemistry, may have been
    just as deeply in touch with the archetypes that structured those mysteries
    despite the fact that they got the mysteries wrong. Facts are not the bottom
    line, fantasies are. And it is in this sense that Jung can claim to have
    experienced the Mithraic transformation. As Plutarch put it, " the highest
    of our initiations here below is only the dream of that true vision and
    initiation; and the discourses [scl., delivered in the mysteries] have been
    carefully devised to awaken the memory of the sublime things above, or
    else no purpose."
    3) After demonstrating that the vision of the schizophrenic patient
    which Jung often cited as independent evidence of the collective
    unconscious could have been derived from scholarly writings available at the
    time, Noll inflates the significance of this finding by quoting Sonu
    Shamadansi's view that this patient "carries on his shoulders the weight and
    burden of proof of the Collective Unconscious." While Noll certainly makes a
    contribution in establishing the possibility that the patient may have had
    previous conscious knowledge of the material in his vision, and while this
    patient's back may be broken by the cumulative weight of Noll's and
    Shamadansi's findings, Jung did have other evidence of a collective
    unconscious. One thinks most immediately of the evidential value he felt
    children's dreams provided. In "Approaching the Unconscious," Jung
    presents the archetypal dreams of a young girl whose pending death he was
    able to predict on the basis of eschatological images contained in her
    dreams (CW 18: 525-539).
    4) Noll writes that "cryptomnesia has always been the "shadow" of
    the collective unconscious, and this was a fact that haunted Jung." While
    Jung's writings on cryptomnesia, especially his later ones, do seem to be
    written defensively, in anticipation of a potential source of criticism, I think
    that we must also consider that a sincere interest in cryptomnesia on Jung's
    part played an important part in the development of the archetype concept.
    Again, as I discussed above, inasmuch as the definition of the archetype
    stresses form, not content, the concept of a collective unconscious does not
    depend on a one to one correspondence between individually generatedfantasy material and archaeological data. Contrary to Noll, I would argue
    that it was precisely Jung's acknowledgement of the role of cryptomnesia

    that prevented him from literally identifying himself with the Lion-headed
    God of the Mithraic mysteries who he became in active imagination. Jung's
    interest was in the experience, its form and transformative significance, not
    in its Mithraic content per se.
    5) It is unfortunate that Jung cited the spectacular example of the
    Solar Phallus Man so frequently, for in doing so he may have unwittingly
    seemed to set a precedent of evidence which was too stringent and too
    literal to reflect the finer points of archetypal theory. To my mind, Jung's
    amplification of the young man's dreams and visions in "Individual Dream
    Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy" provides stronger evidence of the
    archetypes of the collective unconscious because Jung is here more subtlety
    focused on form, rather than content. The young man's dreams and visions
    do not literally correspond to alchemy in the manner in which Jung's
    fantasies corresponded to his Mithraic studies. The juxtaposition of the two
    merely throws the common pattern playing through both into relief. In
    reading this work we realize that although alchemy provides a particularly
    rich source of amplifications, other amplificatory material could also have
    been used. Surely "Individual Dream Symbolism in Relation to Alchemy" as
    well as other works such as "The Visions Seminars," "A Study in the Process
    of Individuation" etc., lighten the burden which Noll and Shamadansi would
    have Solar Phallus Man bear.
    6) Noll describes his paper as partaking of a new current in Jungian
    scholarship, a current that moves from "idealization to humanization or
    from hagiography to critical history." While such an effort can only be
    welcomed as long overdue, I believe Noll oversteps his mandate when
    applying his very interesting findings to Jung's theories. Just as the poet as
    poet cannot be reduced to the banalities of the man as a man, so too for a
    psychological theorist. The validity of a theory is not a function of its
    author's history, but of its applicability to the phenomena that it seeks to
    explain. This applicability, especially with regard to a hypothesis such as the
    collective unconscious, can never be evaluated by personalistic historical
    analysis, Jung's statement that all psychological theories, his own included,
    have the character of a subjective confession notwithstanding. On this last
    point, let us recall that Jung defined his psychology as a subjective
    confession long before his confessional memoirs were conceived. Just as he
    argued that it was not Goethe who created Faust, but Faust who created
    Goethe, so we may argue that Jung was created by the ideas and theories
    which we attribute to him and that if this is not appreciated both the man
    and the work with be misperceived.
    7) Noll makes much of the fact that Jung "followed the standard
    position of his day and interpreted Mithra as a "solar deity," while recent
    scholarship "suggests and even greater role for Mithras: that of
    kosmokrater, ruler of the entire cosmos (p. 28). While Noll is doubtless
    correct in his analysis of the influence of Jung's reading on his fantasies, I
    think that Jung's Mithras was also something more than a solar deity. As an
    archetypal image, the figure of Jung's imaginings pointed beyond itself to a
    conceptual kosmokrater, the concept of the collective unconscious. This
    concept, not the Mithra Leontocephalus, was Jung's God-term. This, I
    believe, is an important point. The concept of the collective unconscious,

    inasmuch as it is also a God-term or God-image, contains, as it were, the


    evidence of its own validity. We don't need Solar Phallus Men and Magical
    Papyrus. We don't need to rule out cryptomnesia and furnish proof. The
    concept of the collective unconscious is itself an archetypal fantasy. All
    peoples in all times and place have imagined gods. As Jung pointed out this
    is just as true in our own day of "isms."
    As for myself, I like to link all this to narcissism, for I believe that
    narcissism, or as Jung called it, the self, has a predisposing essence and
    suprapersonal reach which mankind has always represented to himself as
    God(s). Put less reductively, narcissism mythologizes itself in terms of
    God(s) because it is, to quote Shelley, "the interpenetration of a diviner
    nature through our own." Of course, in ascribing this meaning to narcissism
    I am merely introducing yet another psychologistic God-term.
    One grounds upon which the concept of the collective unconscious
    may nevertheless by criticized is that it is an abstract God or "God of Gods"
    and, as such, an impossibly higher order concept, illegitimately ontologized
    to be the realm of the others. On this point, and in conclusion, let us recall
    Nietzsche's account of how the gods laughed themselves to death when
    they heard the monotheistic pretensions of one of their number:
    For the old gods, after all, things came to an end long ago;
    and verily, they had a good gay godlike end. They did not end
    in a "twilight, though this lie is told. Instead: one day they
    laughed themselves to death. That happened when the most
    godless word issued from one of the gods themselvesthe
    world: "There is one god. Thou shalt have no other god
    before me!" An old grimbeard of a god, a jealous one, thus
    forgot himself. And then all the gods laughed and rocked on
    their chairs and cried, "Is not just this godlike that there are
    gods but no God?"3
    Notes
    Richard Noll, "Jung the Leontocephalus," Spring 53: A Journal of
    Archetype and Culture (Putnam, CT: Spring Journal, 1992), pp. 12-60.
    1

    Wolfgang Giegerich, "Ontogeny = Phylogeny: A Fundamental


    Critique of Erich Neumann's Analytical Psychology," Spring 1975: An Annual
    of Archetypal Psychology and Jungian Thought (Dallas: Spring Publications,
    1975).
    2

    Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra,


    Kaufmann (New York: Viking Press, 1966), p. 182.
    3

    trans.

    Walter

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