The Undiscovered Self C.G. Jung

It's a long time since I read this. I'm a great fan of Jung and I've just re-read Flying Saucers - A Modern Myth .... which was written at about the same time as The Undiscovered self. Fan is the wrong word really - he scratches one of my deepest itches in understanding what it's all about from a subjective viewpoint. I'm just as much fascinated by objective science, particularly in the physics of reality, the roots of our objective existence. Jung gives a wonderful insight into what it means to be a human being - and not just as we experience it consciously, but as we are in total. I think it's important to see that Jung is to our understanding of our own psyches what someone like Galileo is to modern physics - we have moved well past that level of insight in physics, but Jung himself recognised that we were all at a much earlier stage in understanding ourselves.

I like that he is a magus - both scientific and magical. That's pure gold.

Have you got the actual book, or are you using a reader? This is mine - I love the mirror cover which is dead right for this work:




The first few pages seem so relevant to the situation in the USA over the last few years - and not just in the USA either, but all over the world. People who have become squashed into emotional collectives for which there is no reasoning, and no sense of the utter eternal value of the individual. The internet has been a terrible agent in acting as a facilitating tool for this.

 

And welcome to the forum by the way. Are you a new member or someone who's been here before coming back with a new name? I ask because of what you call yourself . If you are new here it's well worth introducing yourself in this part of the forum so that people know who you are and you can start to build relationships.

https://www.infjs.com/forums/introductions.7/

 

The social struggles seem to echo those of each of us as individuals don’t they? It seems to be important for each generation to have its own struggle which frees it from its history. Without that conflict no generation would become emancipated from its predecessors. This isn’t just a game though - the stakes are very high every time, and for each generation the same risk is there of choosing what dehumanises. All too often that is the choice of the people. It’s like a drug that gives an immediate high, but destroys eventually.

 

Oh I didn’t mean to do that! I’m just thinking out loud. I share your hopes for the younger generations too. They have to deal with their own dragons though like every other generation. I was born a few years after WW2 so the times are very different now. It seems to me that the greatest threat comes from the concentrated divisiveness in perspective inherent in the social media of the Internet. It polarises thinking and stops people from seeing truly anyone who thinks differently from themselves. I’d love to see what Jung made of it. I have a feeling there is a rich base of young folks who have a healthy rejection of all that nonsense though.

 

It can be quite a journey of self discovery, trying to find which MBTI type is the closest match for you. It only took me 20 years lol - mind you I only came back to look at it occasionally in all that time.

You haven't stirred or rattled me .... except stirring my interest I've not read The Undiscovered Self for a long while so you've prompted me to get it off the shelf and give it another read. Have you read it through yourself yet, or are you somewhere in the middle? What do you make of it in relation to the perplexity you described? It probably won't help you directly in establishing your MBTI type, by the way, because it's really more focused on Jung's concept of individuation and freedom from the tyranny of collective thinking from what I remember.

Are you feeling that you are rattling people here? You don't come across like that to me in the least bit so don't worry about it. On the contrary, I hope I haven't charged in here with too much enthusiasm and shifted it away from what you intended.