Existentialism and Jungian Psychology

'In Our Time' on Thursday 22 October on BBC Radio 4 discussed the Existentialist Simone de Beauvoir.  To quote something said about one of the principles of Existentialism "You can never get off the treadmill of choosing, making choices, you can never stop - - -  You can never go with a quiet conscience, you can never think "Oh well, that's it and I've ticked it and I've done it."

In this respect Jungian psychology resonates with Existentialism.  Jungian psychology is about having a good relationship with the unconscious.  Jung writes

""No mortal can plumb the depths of nature" - nor even the depths of the unconscious.  We do know however that the unconscious never rests.  It seems to be always at work, for even when we sleep we dream.  There are many people who declare that they never dream, but the probability is that they simply do not remember their dreams.  Not a day passes but we make some slip of the tongue, or something slips our memory, which at other times we know perfectly well, or we are seized by a mood whose cause we cannot trace, etc.  These things are all symptoms of some consistent unconscious activity - - "

And so it is that developing our relationship with the unconscious never ends, right up to death.  In Jungian jargon, we are never 'individuate', are never completely and totally all we have the potential to be as our individual unique selves.  All we can do is take the individuation journey right up until we die.

Plant Soul

In the Radio 4 Extra play ‘Family Tree’ (9.15-10.00pm Tuesday 20 October) a boy turns into a plant, his mother tends him until he is 30 years old and gets too big to be indoors and is dying.  Experts tell her the plant is being killed with kindness, needs to be cut back and planted outside.  She plants him in the botalnical gardens.  She has become frail and uses up all her energy doing this.  She lies down beside him to rest, he drop all hi leaves carefully on her.  She would have died without their protection and is found by a gardener.  The chief gardener thinks the boy-plant is dead, but the one who found the mother does not, moves it to his shed, tends it with great care and it grows a shoot.  He leaves his mobile by the plant and the shoot touches it to phone home.  The gardenr sees the number and rings it.  The house is on the market (the mother has been put in a home) and the estate agent answers.  The gardener goes round, sees the damp mark on the carpet where the plant pot stood, the marks on the branches were and realised this was the plant’s home.  The chief gardener burns the plant, which still looks mainly dead.  The gardener rescues seeds from the burnt shoot, one survives, he grows it until it is a small pot plant and gives it to the mother. It is her grandchild.  The voice over in the play is that plant, now old and a large tree, having cast its seeds far and wide.  It comments on people finding looking at trees and feeling a connection, reminds us how we die, are buried, become part of the earth and then part of the plants “We are not as distinct as we think” is the finale. 

This is resonant with Jungian psychology which speaks of the ‘One World’, that everything is connected to everything.   There was a C G Jung Club London – Guild of Pastoral Psychology seminar on 17^th of October with Thomas Moore speaking about ‘Care of the Soul and Spirit in a Secular World’.   He spoke of Thomas Aquinas writing that we have a human soul, an animal soul and a vegetable soul. How we need to be in touch with all of these aspects of soul.  To quote Thomas Moore from the seminar “Why do we have plants in our house? - - Feeling the need to vegetate.  - -  We grow out of this earth, we are not on it, we came out of it. - - That is our partciipation, that is not another species somewhere, but we can participate, we can trust our vegetable instincts.  If we don’t do that  we live only from our mind level of soul, which is extremely valuable but not the whole story. - -  Going down into our roots.”

Radio 4 Extra Familly Tree drama about our vegetable soul resonates with C G Jung Club London seminar 17 October speaker Thomas Moore