I am re-wrapping my head around the Zeitoun case, but
here is something new.
Thank you for your patience.
What makes Hunt’s paper particularly interesting is
that his paper was based on the recently discovered Jung’s Red Book, a journal where Jung wrote his most inner thought about
various aspects of his research and therapeutic practice. This additional
confirmation that the notions of collective consciousness and collective
unconscious are closely related constitutes an important argument in support of the
parasociological project.
Most parapsychologists agree that psi-related
phenomena are somehow linked to unconscious processes. By extension, a
fundamental premise of parasociology is that social psi phenomena should be
linked to collective unconscious processes. For this reason, Jung’s research on
what he termed the “collective unconscious” is of primary interest in
parasociology. Yet, Jung was less than clear on what he meant by collective
unconscious. This was, in many ways, because he was addressing a topic that
could easily be turned into ridicule by the scientific establishment of his
time. Having now the benefit of his inner thoughts from the Red Book, many ambiguities in his
writings can be resolved.
The first ambiguities that Hunt attacks is whether the
collective unconscious is something based in our biology (genetically hard
wired) or something based in common human experience (and thus being
collectively shared through culture and language). Jung tended to propose a biological
explanation but it was mainly because biological reductionism was very much the
dominant flavor in academic circles in his days, but he could see also a
cultural version of it too. In light of modern advances in neuroscience, it
appears that it is a bit of both, and Jung’s ambivalence was actually
warranted. The human brain is hard wired to grasp the surrounding environment
by using some fundamental mental structures. As Hunt notes, “in cognitive
psychology, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) have similarly identified cross-modal
‘image schemas’ (container, path, centre, force, etc.) that not only underlie
all thought, but seem necessary as the inner form of fully adult feeling – as
differentiated senses of anger as ‘heated’, ‘streamed’, ‘boiling’, ‘exploding’
(see also Knox, 2004). These metaphors, already exteriorized in nature, will
also be broadly cross-cultural, but independent of any specifically
phylogenetic or ancestral mind” (2012, 79). And later he adds that “Jung’s
collective unconscious most directly defines a kind of symbolic cognition” (Hunt 2012, 80).
In other words, the collective unconscious is collective because, on one hand the human brain is wired to think in certain ways, while on the other hand there a number basic common human experience (hot and cold, wet and dry, male and female, etc.) that provide fundamental metaphors for our thinking. Culture, then, builds on those basic wiring and common experience to deal with the particular situation of a given community (hence explaining the great degree of variation between cultures).
As Hunt underlines, “in socio-cultural terms it is
comparable to Durkheim’s (1912) concept of ‘collective consciousness’, which he
understands as most apparent in the ‘collective representations’ of myth,
ritual, and religion. This idea of a ‘collective consciousness’ takes on a
cross-cultural component once we add in the largely unconscious roots of
archetypical imagination in Lakoff and Johnson’s ‘image schemas’ – as also
embedded within the expressive patterns of physical and animate nature, and so
continuously available as exteriorized sources of metaphor” (2012, 80).
The sociological concept of collective consciousness can
be easily re-defined as the external (or observable) dimension of the
collective unconscious. For instance, in most cultures major aspects of reality
are gendered, but not in the same way—in patriarchal societies the moon is
oftentimes construed as feminine because it is the reflection of the sun (the
male principle), yet in a few societies the moon is represented as a male
concept because it is at night that warriors get ready for battle and having
moonlight is critical. Either way, the moon is assigned a gender, as a common and deeply wired way of relating to reality.
This brings us to the Jungian notion of archetype, the fundamental building blocks of the collective unconscious, according to Jung. Archetypes
are deeply internalized in the unconscious, and they are “idea-and-feeling
forms” (i.e. ways of thinking with an emotional value)
that become strongly associated with a natural form or object; e.g. light is
good because this allows us to live; we tend to have special positive rituals about
the sun and sunlight--like going in vacation to sunny places in the middle of winter...). To put it differently, archetypes are special nodes of
the human mind that we all share in way or another, thus making the collective
unconscious that will be seen in various myths and social practices. To take another example, one well-known
archetype is the magician (also known as the wise man). It is this idea-feeling
we have when we meet someone more knowledgeable than us. It is based on our
brain wiring of quantity thinking (i.e. more or less knowledge) and on a common
childhood experience of meeting an adult who by definition is more
knowledgeable (well, one hopes so!).
One can see the direct link between archetypes and
common recurrent themes found in collective representations such as myths and
rituals (e.g. god is often represented as an older man in the Western world).
Once again, the psychologist Jung and the sociologist Durkheim are treading on
the same waters. As Hunt put it, “as with Jung, fully developed mythological
thinking is not a simple handover from childhood animism, but is itself
metacognitive. It is an expressive cognition of underlying cognitive processes,
but here on the grounds of cognitive psychology and sociology” (2012, 84). In
other words, our collective imagination and representations are the visible
expressions of our collective notions deeply buried in the unconscious.
Archetypes, even if they are lived at the individual
level, are in fact showing us that we tend to thinking and feel in very similar
ways at the unconscious level. As Hunt wrote, “in the modern West, with our
extreme individualism, inevitably shared by Jung himself, we tend to miss the
socially collective nature of ostensibly individual states of high imaginative
absorption and numinous imagery” (2012, 88). As an interesting empirical
support for this notion, Hunt (2012, 90) notes Beradt research on ordinary
German night dreams during the mid-1930, which were pointing towards impending
disasters on Nazism and the Second World War. One could go further and say that the entire field of
anthropology is based on the notion of understanding how myths are constructed,
shared, and how the regulate the life of pre-modern societies. Similarly,
research in marketing is very much based on seeking the archetype that would
support the sales of a particular product. The empirical evidence to support the
collective nature of archetypes is overwhelming, and one could say that without
the collective unconscious and archetypes, society and especially large complex
modern societies would simply not be possible.
This brings us to the interesting notion that
archetypes can be activated also at the collective level, not just at the
individual one. For Jung, when an archetype is activated (it becomes present in
our consciousness through dreams, visions, or just ideas popping-up in one’s
mind) , it means that something unconscious is bothering us and the archetype can
be used as a clue for the clinical psychologist to help the patient.
But Jung ventured a bit further, and this where his
research become particularly useful for the parasociological project, in
stating that in some situation an archetype can activated in an externalized
way through synchronicities (meaningful coincidences) or paranormal phenomena. This
essentially means that one’s unconscious is using external means to get
attention about a problem. This was explored by parapsychologists at the
individual level (and it is one of the main explanations proposed for
poltergeists events or RSPKs). With respect to the usefulness of Jung’s notions, now better understood through his
insights described in the Red Book, there
is no logical reason to reject the possibility of collectively activated archetypes
being also exteriorized through collective synchronicities and paranormal
phenomena.
One important dimension of collective archetypal
activation is the issue of time. For spontaneous paranormal (or psi) cases, the same unconscious
problem would require to bother many people at the same time. In this regard, I found
an interesting article by Tim Edensor (2006) that speaks to both deeply held
and shared beliefs (archetypes) and time. Here is a somewhat long quote that
sums up well the gist of his argument.
“Part of the way in which rituals and habits cited
above ‘enable the nation to be thinkable, inhabitable, communicable and
therefore governable’ (Mercer, 1992: 27), is through synchronization, the
simultaneous participation of millions of people in timetabled routines.
Zeruvabel (1981) asserts that synchronization is a fundamental principle of
social organization which usually eludes analysis, overlooked because of its
familiarity. Repetition is surely essential to identity, for without recurrent
experiences there would be no consistency given to experience, no temporal
framework within which to make sense of the world. As I have already mentioned,
the state synchronizes much nation-wide practices, regulating the time spent at
school, work and the release of exam results, governing drinking hours, and so
on. But in addition to this official temporal framework for everyday living,
national synchronicity is achieved through temporal customs about when and
where specific social practices should occur.” (Edensor 2006, 534)
As well, if modern societies are more complex than
pre-modern ones, this does not mean that they not have means to share myths at the
same time, and thus allow archetypes to be activated. As Edensor notes from other
researchers: “Moores describes this mediatized timetabling as the
‘domestication of national standard time (1988: 67), and Silverstone highlights
how television schedules organize household routines through which time ‘is
felt, lived and secured’, producing repetitive viewing experiences embedded in
the times of biography and the life-cycle, and in the time of institutions and
societies themselves’ (1994:20). In this way, television links ‘the national
public into the private lives of its citizens, through the creation of both
sacred and quotidian moments of national communion’ (Morley, 2000: 107)”
(Edensor 2006, 535).
Now, with the advent of the Internet and satellite
television, time is spent in a less homogeneous way, as a greater amount of
content can be viewed on a wider timeframe. But standard time routines have not
changed that much (Edensor 2006, 541-542). This idea supports my argument that the UFO phenomenon might be in declined because we are less synchronized as societies (post-modern) than during the "television era", mostly occurring in North American from the late 1940s to late 1990s.
Nevertheless, this issue of temporality of collective action,
combined with the greater similarity of thought and feeling found in what has
been termed the collective unconscious create the necessary conditions for
social psi to be possible.
References
Edensor, Tim. (2006). “Reconsidering national
temporalities: Institutional times, everyday routines, serial spaces and
synchronicities”. European Journal of
Social Theory 9(4): 525-545.
Greenwood, Susan F. (1990). “Émile Durkheim and C.G.
Jung: Structuring a transpersonal sociology of religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 29(4): 482-495.
Hunt, Harry T. (2012). “A collective unconscious
reconsidered: Jung’s archetypal imagination in the light of contemporary
psychology and social science”. Journal
of Analytical Psychology 57(1): 76-98.
Jung, Carl G. (2009). The Red Book. (Edited by S. Shamdasani). New York: W.W. Norton.
Owen, Iris M. and M. Sparrow.
(1976). Conjuring up Philip: An Adventure
In Psychokinesis. Harper & Row.
Storm, Lance. (1999). “Synchronicity, causality, and
acausality”. Journal of Parapsychology
63(3): 247-269.
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