The Collective Unconscious and the Media Sphere

A synthesis of Marshall McLuhan's typology of media, Carl Jung's theory of the Collective Unconscious, Teilhard de Chardin's Evolution, and Rudolf Steiner's Anthroposophy is used to explain the current crisis of Western Civilisation, as well as suggest possible responses. McLuhan described the transition from print to electronic (and now digital) media. Jung explored the collective unconscious and the power of the archetypes. Teilhard posited three evolutionary spheres; here, a further stage is added, the Psychosphere, equated with the Jungian unconscious. And Steiner referred to a threefold polarity of spiritual hierarchies that influence human consciousness and society. Conspiracism and the disinformation crisis comes about through archetypes working through the lower psychecological zones. Orientation to positive epigenetic, imaginal, and divine realities, with their high degree of holism and mythopoetic creativity, offers an alternative to both the paranoia of conspiracism and the reductionism of materialism.

Influencing the Collective Mind

A convergence of quantum-field-based scientific, philosophical, psychological, esoteric, and religious research has contributed to a better understanding of Carl Jung's collective unconscious that is generating a paradigm shift in the scientific approach to cosmic reality and human purpose. Collective humanity now faces responsibility for intentional cosmic participation to change or reprogram this collective entity that is us. Because humans have significant agency in a universal frequency scaled-sentient and stratified unified field, human responsibility for influencing evolution is becoming more apparent. Indicators suggest that humans are responsible for an impending crisis of planetary extinction, which they are now capable of consciously re-programming. In this context, the author's extreme paranormal experiences of ‘IT'—a planetary analog for the collective human unconscious mind—is uniquely relevant.

INTERNET USER’S BEHAVIOR FROM THE STANDPOINT OF THE NEURAL NETWORK THEORY OF SOCIETY: PREREQUISITES FOR THE META-EDUCATION CONCEPT FORMATION

An analysis of the behavior of Internet users from the point of view of their preferences in the choice of information sources and the effectiveness of their impact is presented. It is shown that the modern infocommunication space has undergone qualitative changes in the most recent time, and these transformations are already having a pronounced impact on higher education, mainly through the factor of competition between information sources. It is shown that these transformations can be interpreted as the evolution of the noosphere, which is considered as a global infocommunication network, in which non-trivial transpersonal information objects are formed. Their existence leads to the fact that the human intellect has a dual nature - both individual and collective principles are present in it at the same time. The latter is responsible for such phenomena as the collective unconscious, understood in the sense of Jung. It is shown that the neural network model of the noosphere makes it possible to formulate a similar concept of "professional collective unconscious", which is responsible for professional intuition, acts of creativity, etc. In turn, the existence of the professional collective unconscious forces us to radically reconsider the content of what is called training and move to the concept of meta-learning, which, among other things, involves stimulating transitions from one level of interaction with transpersonal information structures that make up the professional collective unconscious to another.

C.G. JUNG, J.J. HONEGGER, AND THE CASE OF EMIL SCHWYZER (THE ‘SOLAR PHALLUS’ MAN)

The case of Emil Schwyzer, a.k.a. the ‘Solar-Phallus Man’, was foundational in giving shape to Jung’s early reflections on the concept of the collective unconscious. In 1906 Schwyzer identified a tail of light coming off the sun as a phallus, which Jung interpreted as a particularly important example of ‘the fantasies or delusions of…patients…[being] paralleled in mythological material of which they knew nothing’ (Bennet 1985:69). This was because it represented not only a single mythological symbol or idea that Schwyzer could not have known but an entire passage from an ancient document known as the Mithras Liturgy. According to Jung, Schwyzer’s ‘vision’ also paralleled a rare theme in Medieval art. Jung’s student J.J. Honegger gave a paper on the Schwyzer case at the March 1910 Second Psychoanalytic Congress in Nuremberg. In it he again discussed Schwyzer’s description of the light tail on the sun but especially his concept of a Ptolemaic flat earth. Relying largely on archival material not previously discussed, the present article provides a history of the Schwyzer case along with a thoroughgoing evaluation of what Jung and Honegger made of it. KEYWORDS J.J. Honegger, Emil Schwyzer, ‘Solar-Phallus Man’, Mithras Liturgy, Collective unconscious, Inherited ideas, Hortus Conclusus.

Archetypen und das kollektive Unbewusste in hermann hesses Demian (1919) und in Urtrost (1924) von Áron Tamási. Ein Vergleich

The aim of the present article is to provide a comparative analysis between two important works of German and Hungarian literature on the background of the theory of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes. Both works (the novel Demian by Hermann Hesse and the drama Erstwhile Solace [Ősvigasztalás] by Áron Tamási) approach the theme of the search for identity as well as for the absolute and the divinity, with the focus on the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Motifs such as androgyny, shadow or dream, the issue of polarity and unity form common points of contact between the two analysed literary works.

Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung on Myths and Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious: Unnoticed Similarity

Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis and Carl Gustav Jung’s analytical psychology are different in many ways and some of their differences are extremely crucial. It is widely believed that one of the most obvious examples of this intellectual confrontation is the difference between Freud’s and Jung’s views on mythology. Proponents of this view believe that Jung was much more interested in mythological issues and his theory of myth became much deeper and more developed than Freud’s one. In particular, it is believed that Freud focused exclusively on the individual’s psyche, while Jung allegedly reached the true origins of mythmaking in the collective unconscious, which is the sediment of the vast historical experience of mankind. The article shows that such statements do not reflect the real situation but just the point of view, which Jung began to spread after his break-up with Freud. In fact, the founder of psychoanalysis had a steady and deep interest in mythology. The manifestation of this interest was the formation of “psycho-analytics” of myth – a specific area of research, which in the early years of the psychoanalytic movement was joined by several first psychoanalysts, including Franz Riklin, Karl Abraham, Otto Rank, Ernest Jones, and Jung himself. It is essential that both Freud and Jung, before and after the break-up in 1913, have been and remain the supporters of the consideration of a man and culture through the prism of certain biological concepts of that time. Those are the principle of inheritance of acquired properties (Lamarckism) and the idea that ontogenesis recapitulates phylogeny (“biogenetic law”). Based on Lamarckian-biogenetic assumptions, both Freud and Jung saw the origins of mythology in the collective historical experience of mankind. The article demonstrates that the image of Oedipus and the associated motives of incest and parricide play almost the same role in Freud’s (and Freudian) model of mythmaking as the archetypes of the collective unconscious in Jung’s (and Jungian) concept of myth.

Evil Chronotopes Ion Creanga’s work

The article focuses on the notions of structural elements of the chronotope developed by M. Bakhtin and applied in the stories of the Romanian writer Ion Creanga from the perspective of the imaginary, namely: challenge, chance, nature, landscape, heroes' pilgrimage, road, threshold. Overpassing evil places such as the forest, places haunted by devils, the pond, the pub are clues in the rounding of the character. The idea of good and evil spaces is strongly anchored in the collective unconscious according to the principle of splitting and differentiation between opposites. The evil spaces in Ion Creanga's stories are places of voluntary or involuntary challenge in which the initiation and rounding of the characters takes place.

The Appearance and Resonance of Apocalyptic Archetypes in Contemporary Disaster Films

The COVID-19 pandemic has roused the apocalyptic fear that was foreseen in religious prophecies. This research will focus on the post-9/11 and pre-COVID-19 disaster films, in an attempt to understand the representation and pre-presentation of the collective disaster psychology. Aligned with Jungian film studies, this essay regards films as a convergence of generations’ collective unconscious. It aims to construe the ways that apocalyptic archetypes appear and are elaborated in contemporary films, in hope of recognizing the new apocalyptic aesthetics formed in the interval between the two disastrous events. Consistent with the meaning in classic doomsday narratives—the revelation of Christianity, the cycle of Buddhism, the purification in Mesoamerican myths, etc.—the archetypes in these films are found to have carried a dual connotation of destruction and rebirth. Through empirical cinematographic style, these archetypal images are revealed in an immersive way. Disaster films from this time place emphasis on death itself, fiercely protesting against the stagnation of life, and in turn triggering a transcendental transformation of the psyche. Unlike those in the late 1990s, viewing the doomsday crisis through the lens of spectacularity, disaster in these films is seen as a state of body and mind, and death a thought-provoking life experience.

A few words on Olga Tokarczuk’s The Land of Metaxy

In her volume of essays The Tender Narrator, Olga Tokarczuk devotes one of them to The Land of Metaxy, which she calls – following Plato – a place between the world of humans and the world of gods. The status of this place is peculiar: it mediates between the worlds, and yet does not belong to either. It is from that place that characters come to the writer. An attempt to explain the actual meaning of Metaxy and who its inhabitants are boils down to four possible interpretations. We can analyse Metaxy in accordance with contemporary quantum physics and cosmology (parallel worlds), from the perspective of religious models created by the civilization of the West, according to the astrology of astral planes, and finally as a domain of collective unconscious, in accordance with Carl Gustav Jung’s analytic psychology and Stanislav Grof’s transpersonal psychology.