Thread: Jungian Archetypes and the Unconscious

How many of you oneironauts are into Jungian psychology and work towards self-integration via lucid dreaming? I've been reading up on it lately and it is frightening what you might uncover buried in your unconscious.

Here is a horrifying example of accessing the personal unconscious by a psychiatrist and Jungian psychoanalyst where, at the moment of traumatic impact, the psyche dissociatively splits : Dr Donald Kalsched, author of Inner World of Trauma, had a patient who had been sexually abused by her father when she was a child. Every Sunday when the analysand's mother went to church, the girl was raped by her father. During the course of her therapy as an adult, she reveals that in those moments she would have an out-of-body experience and see herself from above—an indication of a mind trying to cope with the horror of the occurrence and attempting to gain distance from the physical trauma. When the doctor asks her where she went in those moments, she breaks down and reveals that she was in the arms of 'The Mother'—where during those traumatic moments the physical mother couldn't be there for her, the analysand would enter into a fantasy of being held by a larger and greater mother. For Jung, this would be an instance of the manifestation of the Mother archetype.

How do bees know how to make a hive? For Jung, this was not learned behaviour, it is instinctual. Humans function in a similar way in that there are imprints of human experience that we inherit from our ancestors. Every archetypal pattern was, at some point, an event that impacted humanity in the course of its history and which we actually inherit in the collective unconscious. We are predisposed to certain instincts imprinted on our psyches.

We also know that the unconscious is somehow connected to matter but don't know exactly how and how much this pertains to synchronous events. Jung's co-worker Marie-Louise von Franz provides an example of synchronicity in her book Alchemy: An Introduction to the Symbolism and the Psychology, where a scientist tries to produce a vitamin in a chemical form but seemed to wait forever for the product to crystallise. He got his helper to keep an eye on the liquid substance while he went home to sleep. In a dream, a voice told him to return to the lab and see that crystallisation had occurred—it was as if the man's unconscious informed him about the chemical process taking place in the retort for it had indeed happened in the real world around that time.

Who in here buys into Rupert Sheldrake's morphogenetic fields or Michael Persinger's quantum entanglement of minds within the geomagnetic field?