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Jung's Metaphysics

Article in International Journal of Jungian Studies · January 2012

DOI: 10.1080/19409052.2012.671182

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 International Journal of Jungian Studies
2012, 1
25, iFirst article

Jung’s metaphysics
Jon Mills*

Adler Graduate Professional School, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

(Received 6 April 2011; final version received 27 November 2011)
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Despite it being the focal point of his theoretical system, I argue that Jung’s
notion of the archetypes is one of his least understood concepts because it
was nebulous to Jung himself. Jung vacillated between viewing archetypes as
analogous to primordial images and ideas inherited from our ancestral past,
formal a priori categories of mind, cosmic projections, emotional and valuational
agencies, and numinous mystical experience, but the question remains whether
a ‘suprapersonal’ or ‘transubjective’ psyche exists. In what follows, I will be pre-
occupied with tracing the theoretical development of Jung’s thesis on
the collective unconscious, with a special emphasis on the archetypes, and hence
pointing out the metaphysical implications of his thought. It is not possible
to critique his entire body of work in the context of this abbreviated article;
therefore, the reader should be aware that I am limiting myself to a narrow scope
of interest in explicating and analyzing the philosophical viability of his major
concepts. The greater question is whether the archetypes adequately answer to the
question of origins, of an omnipresent and eternal dimension to the nature and
structure of psychic reality.
Keywords: Jung; metaphysics; collective unconscious; archetypes; transcendence

C.G. Jung is one of the most controversial figures in the history of psychoanalysis.
He was a brilliant scholar tenaciously engaged in the human sciences, comparative
religion, philosophy, cultural anthropology, mythology, theosophy, and the mystical
traditions of East and West. He was also purported to suffer from mental illness,
engaged in sexual transgressions with patients, and lived an unorthodox lifestyle for
his era. Despite having achieved notable world fame in his lifetime for his novel
theories and clinical method, including receiving eight honorary doctorates, his most
radical metaphysical theses on the nature of the transpersonal psyche still remain
murky and unsystematized.
Throughout this essay, I attempt to clarify the main theoretical postulates that
constitute Jung’s metaphysics and address to what degree they are philosophically
plausible. In so doing, I shall forgo the typical academic custom of reviewing all the
secondary literature on the subject matter and instead remain focused on what Jung
actually said in his primary texts. In this way, I will spare the reader the redundancy
of offering a banal literature review and approach Jung’s texts in a fresh manner
unencumbered by the imposition of previous interpretations that may color my
analysis of his thought.

*Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1940-9052 print/ISSN 1940-9060 online

# 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19409052.2012.671182
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 2 Jon Mills

At the heart of his metaphysical system of inquiry lies the premise that all
psychological processes are necessarily conditioned on innate universal structures of
subjectivity that allow for human experience to transpire, and that these processes
participate of a greater cosmic organizing principle that transcends all levels of
particularity or individuality. This is not necessarily an illegitimate claim, for many
philosophical schools have attempted to achieve coherence and explanatory breadth
in forming a conceptual unity between religion, science, and cosmology. What makes
Jung peculiar in the history of metaphysical thought is that he elevates this nexus
or coniunctio to a psychological factor that conditions all metaphysical speculations
on the nature of the universe. For Jung, the nature of reality is psychic process con-
stituted as an impersonal animating force that is superimposed on human experience
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and transgenerationally transmitted throughout the ages. This is the doctrine of

archetypes.
Implicit throughout Jung’s theoretical corpus is the notion that there is another
dimension to reality that structures and colors our internal experiences and per-
ception of the world. There is something very appealing yet eerie to this view, at once
accommodating but uncanny, sublime yet horrific. Perhaps this annulling duality
signifies the dialectical tension of opposites Jung himself emphasizes in his quest
for wholeness, a mysterium tremendum that becomes intuitively problematic when
examined under the microscope of reason. But intuition is also recalcitrant to reason,
hence revealing a deeply felt gnosis that resonates within the interiority of our being.
Can we remain on a rational plane when discussing inner felt experience that speaks
to us personally, and with bona fide self-certainty, while at the same time being
neutered by the inhospitable hands of logos?
Jung champions a metaphysics of experience that is guided by an internalized
yet originally inherited collective consciousness, which has been unconsciously
transmuted and memorialized within spacetime, and laid down within the structural
configurations of human imagination. The question becomes whether this imagina-
tion emanates from an equiprimordial wellspring that conditions the production
of all contents of imagination, or whether images and psychic artefacts can be suf-
ficiently explained without appealing to earlier archaic elements that predate the
birth of the concretely existing human subject. In other words, do we need to appeal
to an ancestral past in order to explain present experience? Do we currently occupy a
spirit(ual) world emanating from a central ubiquitous Source that is responsible for
the collective development of the human race? In order to broach these questions
respectfully, we must understand what Jung meant by the collective unconscious.

The collective unconscious as a metaphysical category

The collective unconscious is a term Jung uses almost interchangeably and synony-
mously with the archetypes and is in essence a spacing, container, or receptacle that
symbolizes world human experience. Despite the fact that the collective unconscious
may symbolize universal culture, namely, the anthropological images, practices,
mores, edicts, and values that embody a particular society and its mythos, which
become the structural invariants of subjectivity, it may be argued that Jung assigns
a certain ontology to the collective unconscious, for anything that has being
or presence is professed to exist. Whether or not the ontology of the collective
unconscious is a hypostatization or anthropomorphism is another issue, one that will
be explored later on. For the time being, however, Jung certainly did not mean to
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 3

imply that the collective unconscious was merely a metaphor, social construction, or
linguistic signifier determined by grammatical relativism. On the contrary, he wanted
to delineate its presence as real and elevate it to the proper stature of a metaphysical
category that was operative within all human beings regardless of history, gender,
race, geography, or time. In this sense, Jung was first and foremost an ontologist
interested in defending a universal theory of mind.1
The collective unconscious, what Jung also refers to as the ‘transpersonal un-
conscious’ or ‘objective psyche’ (Jung, 1917, p. 66, fn.4), lies ‘beyond everyday reality,’
yet we are simultaneously ‘in touch with that other reality’ at all times (Kirsh, 2000,
p. 256). Joseph Henderson (1964), one of Jung’s early ‘patrons’ of the C.G. Jung
Institute in Zurich, describes the collective unconscious as ‘the part of the psyche that
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retains and transmits the common psychological inheritance of mankind’ (p. 107).
In his translation of Jung’s ‘Psychological Commentary’ on the Bardo Thödol, or The
Tibetan Book of the Dead (1957), R.F.C. Hull characterizes the collective unconscious
as ‘the matrix of everything’ (p. xxxvi), hence lending a cosmic animating principle to
the collective psyche, what we may even compare to Plato’s chora, the womb of all
becoming. For Jung, the collective unconscious is the Encompassing, the condition
and ground of existence, the World Soul (anima mundi).2
Jung’s philosophy of the collective unconscious presupposes a psychologism
at the heart of all metaphysical processes, for, in his words, ‘metaphysical as-
sertions . . . are statements of the psyche’ (1957, p. xxxvii) ultimately rooted in the
soul’s (Seele) projections. For Jung, psychic reality and metaphysical reality are
identical:

It is the soul which, by the divine creative power inherent in it, makes the metaphysical
assertion; it posits the distinctions between metaphysical entities. Not only is it the
condition of all metaphysical reality, it is that reality. (ibid., p. xxxviii)

Here Jung joins the ranks of the great German Idealists who view reality as the
product of mind. But he could also be accused of espousing a crass idealism, where
the psyche is believed to think the world into existence. I do not believe Jung makes
this explicit statement anywhere in his Collected Works; however, he does not want to
bifurcate nature from psyche, namely, that which is given, thrown, or predetermined,
and hence psyche and reality are ontologically conjoined.
Throughout his body of writings, Jung refers to the collective unconscious as
comprising both the drives or instincts (Triebe) and the archetypes or primordial
images (1919, pp. 133
134, 138), which he equates with a ‘supra-individual psychic
activity’ (1927, p. 148) conditioned by our ancestral heritage and belonging to ‘a
timeless and universal psyche’ (ibid., p. 152). Jung goes so far to say that ‘the whole
of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious’
(ibid., p. 152), raising the question and problematic of whether it is an agency in its
own right, what the editors of his Collected Works attribute to an ‘unconscious
entity’ (1919, p. 133, fn.7). This conclusion imports many philosophical conundrums
including: how could separate agencies interact; how could different psychic org-
anizations and productions participate of one another when by definition they would
have incompatible essences; and what or who is the agent or process responsible
for orchestrating psychic activity to begin with? Jung’s whole thesis could be easily
(mis)interpreted to mean that there is an absolute mind, primary source, principle of
the ultimate, or cosmic deity underlying all facets of the universe.
 4 Jon Mills

Although Jung’s implicit supernaturalism has been a major criticism of his

theory, it becomes less problematic once viewed from the standpoint of evolution. He
uses the example of how early man would have been exposed to the daily physical
occurrences of nature, such as the cycle of day and night, which were imprinted on
the primitive psyche as primordial images and preserved unconsciously, which we
still reproduce today in some transmuted yet similar fashion. This is why all cultures
have symbolisms of the sun that evoke a form of natural divinity as Life (e.g. Mother
Nature). What this logically means is that such early primordial experiences would
have been laid down within the nucleotide sequence of DNA and evolutionarily
undergone genetic transmogrifications over the millennia that now predispose and
influence our dreams, fantasies, imagination, and the specific imagos each individual
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produces within their specific familial and cultural contexts.

In much of his early writing, when he is first introducing the notions of the
collective unconscious and the archetypes, Jung wants to impress upon us that
his theories are based on empirical facts, even though he also relies on speculative
metaphysics. Extending a natural explanandum to the collective, he postulates a
dynamic imaginal life prefaced on previous archaic experiences genetically encoded
and memorialized within the human psyche, only then to be transmitted transgener-
ationally and transculturally, hence explaining why such universal images are
reproduced and why the human mind is attracted to seek these experiences and
imbibe them with emotional meaning. Is it far-fetched to assume that the psychic
apparatus is drawn to various colors, forms and images over others because they
serve the evolutionary purpose of providing symbolic meaning imbued with aesthetic
and spiritual properties?
Jung is very clear when he tells us that the collective psyche is ‘impersonal’ (1917,
p. 66; 1947, p. 204) and ‘identical’ in all people (1952, p. 436). Here, any notion that
the collective is a personal agency is displaced for a generic universality that
comprises the psychological processes operative within human experience. However,
Jung complicates matters when he says this unconscious universality ‘constitutes a
common psychic substrate of a suprapersonal nature which is present in every one of
us’ (1954, p. 4). Is he implying that the collective unconscious is earlier than, hence
merely beyond, the personal, viz. that it cannot be reduced to individual experience
simply because these are universal structures of mind? Or is he suggesting that such a
‘suprapersonal’ element is indeed simultaneously above, over, greater than, and
transcendent (Lat.B supra above, beyond, earlier)? Jung’s imposition of multiple
meanings is also compounded by the fact that he changes his mind about the
essential characteristics of the collective psyche over time. Here is a passage from his
later writings:

I must content myself with the hypothesis of an omnipresent, but differentiated, psychic
structure which is inherited and which necessarily gives a certain form and direction to
all experience . . . . The archetypes, as organs of the psyche, are dynamic, instinctual
complexes which determine psychic life to an extraordinary degree. That is why I also
call them dominants of the unconscious. The layer of unconscious psyche which is made
up of these universal dynamic forms I have termed the collective unconscious. (Jung,
1957, p. xlv)

Jung returns to equating the collective unconscious with a ubiquitous container or

psychic spacing that houses the archetypes. Here he emphasizes their dominion over
psychic life and that their dynamism implies they are alive, powerful, and causal.
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 5

This emphasis on psychic determinism further resonates throughout his thought

from the moment he first introduced the term:

The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back
to the earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence
it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest
degree (1912, p. 112).

Jung reiterates the notion that the collective psyche is ‘the deposit of all human
experience right back to its remotest beginnings . . . a living system of reactions and
aptitudes that determine the individual’s life in invisible ways’ (1927, p. 157). Here
the collective unconscious is not just confined to primordial images, which are
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‘involuntary spontaneous manifestations’ (1964, p. 55), rather it is a ‘living system’

that animates mind. He continues to say that it is not merely the product of our
ancestral history, but a ‘creative impulse’ that ‘contains the whole spiritual heritage
of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual’ (1927,
p. 158). Once again, this statement could avail itself to an evolutionary explanation.
Our capacity to experience life in any manner is conditioned on our animal past.
Despite the fact that Jung attributes many aspects to the archaic mind, where
various emendations, re-directing shifts in emphasis and conceptual modifications
made their way into his mature theorizing, we can conclude that the collective
unconscious has the following characteristics. It may be viewed as:

(1) A metaphysical orienting principle underlying all aspects of mental life;

(2) A process system instituting its own dynamic determinants, thus lending
structure and ontological order to human experience;
(3) An innate receptacle, repository, or psychic spacing where the archaic past is
inherited, retained, and preserved;
(4) The sum total amalgamation of ancestral forms of human experience that
date back to the prehistory of mankind;
(5) A highly adaptive organic, biological system subject to the natural laws of
evolution; and
(6) A cosmic template, matrix, or unifying web which all psychic experiences
emanate from, intermingle with, and ultimately return to, for no human
experience may be said to exist independent from the collective source.

This assessment is not without inherent difficulty, for it leads to several corollary
problems. For one, we need to explain how these processes or mechanisms actually
operate. Even if we come to an agreement about what constitutes human experi-
ence, we need to explicate how a primordial phenomenon was originally retained
within the primitive mind and why it manifests now. How is archaic experience
memorialized? How is it transmitted? It is not enough simply to offer a hypothesis
that these things just happened that way and are currently operative on our present-
day psyches, for we need to theoretically work out all the details in order to avoid an
unsophisticated folk psychology. Perhaps we can justify in some rudimentary fashion
how the earliest experiences of primitive man were genetically encoded and modified
through biological transmutations over time, as this would apply to any organic
developmental, evolutionary process effective within other species. Along these
lines, do we wish to equate prehistoric experience with phylogenetic memories? If
 6 Jon Mills

predispositions or proclivities toward experiential occurrences are conditioned on the

primordial past, including images, thoughts, feelings, behavioral patterns, aptitudes,
fantasies, and ideation, then the penumbra and assortment of these collective
experiences would have to be memorialized within the psyche and transferred (as
information) over our maturation as a human species. Jung is not likely to have
approved of the notion that représentations collectives are memories because this
implies specific experiential content within a subjective context; yet, with qualifica-
tions, he does refer to the archetypes as inherited ideas, although he prefers to
emphasize the imagistic. But toward the end of his life he does specifically refer to
‘archetypal memory’ from the ‘prehistoric past’ that ‘we have entirely forgotten’
(1961, p. 246). This seems more than just suggestive of phylogenetic memories
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populating the deep substratum of the unconscious. Regardless of the conventional

meaning of memory or recollection, the term ‘memorialization’ signifies the
preservative element of retaining certain psychic events, here extended to a collective
psyche.
For Jung, there is a causal efficacy to the past that attempts to pull the present
back to the archē, a metaphysical principle that is salient throughout his entire
philosophy. I have explained this phenomenon under the rubric of what I refer to
as the ‘principle of archaic primacy’ (Mills, 2010, pp. 54
56). The past must be
ontologically preserved and operative within the present, which further influences
how we approach the future, a metaphysical destiny that is diachronically super-
imposed on all experience. Archaic primacy holds a privileged causal status in the
psyche, for mind presupposes a historicity that informs its present operations and is
conditioned on all previous shapes of unconscious experience. This means that every
mental form and its derivatives draw on the internalized and dialectically preserved
past ensconced within an unconscious abyss, for psychic processes and their contents
cannot simply pop up ex nihilio. Following the principle of sufficient reason, there
must be a ground or origin to every mental event that stands in relation to every
mental object. In principle, this is not incompatible with a collective unconscious
insofar as these generic processes are universal a priori dynamic structures that
compose the substratum of mind.
What becomes a most vociferous yet vexing question is whether there is a
transpersonal or suprapersonal mind. What do we mean by this exactly? If we
are merely saying that mind transcends or reaches beyond the actual limits of
our subjective elements through imagination, fantasy, or phenomenal experiences,
then that is not controversial (Lat. trans beyond, through). If the transpersonal is
merely universal, formal, and not subject to personal life events, then Jung can
readily defend his theoretical position. If we mean that mind is transcendental (Lat.
transcendere: trans over scandereto climb), that is, surpasses itself in various
forms, this is also philosophically defensible given that the a priorists devised very
elaborate justifications for postulating faculties of mind that do not merely rely on
sense experience for knowledge claims. Even mystical experience may (in principle)
be metaphysically and psychoanalytically justified, especially when emotional,
intuitive and aesthetic supplements complement the spiritual dimension of personal
experience that reason is quick to prejudicially disregard. Yet, if we import a trans-
cendent realm that is independent of the material universe, where space and time
are suspended for an unembodied supernatural or cosmic paranormal order, then we
must be prepared to leave the language of metaphysics and adopt another dis-
course. For example, Dan Merkur (1999) argues for a relocation of mysticism from
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 7

supernatural ontology to natural psychology in order to obviate these problematics.

Whether or not Jung falls within this categorical realignment is not transparent.
He certainly oscillates in his thinking, and the metaphysical reverberations of his
ambivalence are felt.
How could there be a Cosmic Mind, a suprapersonal agency or entity that exists
‘out there,’ as if it is a Creator force or Source of everything we typically call God?
If there is an independent agency, power, energy, or entity operating in the extant
world outside of the living subject, which a fortiori animates the universe, then are
we not treading into religiosity, panpsychism, anthroposophy, or some form of
shamanistic folklore? Although the collective unconscious may have a certain appeal
to theologians, theosophists and mystics of all types
and perhaps even for process
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philosophers, cosmologists and physicists
we must readily admit the difficulty that
lies before us when positing a suprapersonal entity or Cosmic Being responsible for
all aspects of our mental life.
Here I am concerned with delineating the problem. Of course I cannot offer a
definitive answer of my own, for I am unable to resolve it. But we must attempt to
offer some modicum of an explanation despite it being inherently delinquent or
unsatisfactory. Can we escape the intrinsic mystery of these paradoxes? Can we
broach a plausible hypothesis that lends some sensibility to our dilemma? I am
doubtful, but with a trickle of hope.
If the via mystica leads us to the conclusion that there is a suprapersonal cosmic
mind underlying all productions of psychic life, then Jung’s theories will always
generate incredulity. However, if we ground the transpersonal within a model of
natural psychology, the metaphysical quandaries I am highlighting become less
problematic because they are relegated to the domain of phenomenology rather than
ontology.3 Jung concedes to the limits of reason alone, and hence must resort to the
life of experience, and particularly affect. If the collective unconscious answers to
spiritual questions based on unitive thinking, then they have metaphorical and
phenomenal value. But if mystical moments lead to ontological claims independent
of scientific evidence or logical reason, then they open themselves up to being judged
based on wish fulfillment, emotional prejudice, or subjective intuition imbued with
idiosyncratic meaning. While subjective and objective elements of lived psychic
reality exist simultaneously, we cannot escape the indubitable psychologism that
ultimately grounds Jung’s metaphysics. Whether this psychologism can be extra-
polated to a supernatural metaphysical entity that governs the psyche of all living
individuals is yet another issue.

The mystical nature of archetypes

Jung’s theory of archetypes is the fulcrum of his entire metaphysics and is modeled
after two tensions in his thinking. The first involves his predilection for the spiritual,
while the second involves his pursuit of scientific rationalism. This tension can be
observed in his choosing to adopt the term archetype, which derives from the
ancients, particularly Plato, is echoed in the medievalists, and is further taken up
by Kant in attempting to close the divide between appearance and reality. In fact,
Jung frequently makes reference to these philosophers for their attempts to describe
the ‘universal dispositions of the mind’ which characterizes the archetype, which he
argues should
 8 Jon Mills

be understood as analogous to Plato’s forms (eidola), in accordance with which the

mind organizes its contents. One could also describe these forms as categories analogous
to the logical categories which are always and everywhere present as the basic postulates
of reason. Only in the case of our ‘forms,’ we are not dealing with categories of reason
but with categories of imagination. As the products of imagination are always in essence
visual, their forms must, from the outset, have the character of images and moreover of
typical images, which is why, following St. Augustine, I call them ‘archetypes’. (Jung,
1957, p. xliv)

Here Jung emphasizes imagination and imago and, with his reference to Augustine,
relocates the image within the original form in which it emanates. His lifelong
preoccupation with the medievalists also finds its origin in Plato, where spirit and
imago participate. Jung was attracted to Plato’s notion of forms and Kant’s logical
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categories, which condition our experiences of both the sensible world and our
conceptual capacity for understanding, because each model serves as a conceptual
scheme on which all experience is based and constructed. In other words, the forms
and the categories become the a priori ground that conditions all experience.
Therefore, form becomes the basic constituent of an archetype.
Jung’s first usage of the term archetype (Archetypus) appears in ‘Instinct and
the Unconscious’ (1919). His previous references to the ‘primordial image’ (Urbild)
are now used almost interchangeably with the word archetype, which the editors of
his Collected Works refer to as ‘an essentially unconscious entity’ (ibid., p. 133, fn.7).
But Jung does not make this claim here explicitly, so it is misleading to refer to the
archetypes as entities, because this implies they have an ontological status apart from
the experiential person. What Jung does say is the following:

We also find in the unconscious qualities that are not individually acquired but are
inherited, e.g., instincts as impulses to carry out actions from necessity, without
conscious motivation. In this ‘deeper’ stratum we also find the a priori, inborn forms of
‘intuition,’ namely the archetypes of perception and apprehension, which are the
necessary a priori determinants of all psychic processes. (ibid., p. 133)

Here Jung refers almost verbatim to Kant’s (1781) intuitive forms of sensibility
(that inform the perceptual apparatus) and the categories for understanding the
sensible world as outlined in his Critique of Pure Reason.4 Jung says they
are necessary, universal and underlie all psychic activity of the mind. Furthermore,
the archetypes ‘force’ themselves on human perception and ‘into specifically human
patterns’ ibid., p.133). He continues to delineate that the instincts and archetypes are
distinct, but together they form the content of the collective unconscious.
Drawing on his historical precursors, from the ancients to scholasticism, modern
philosophy and German idealism, Jung emphasizes how archetypes are ‘natural
images engraved’ on the human psyche that took the form of ‘ideas’ in a Platonic
sense (1947, p. 136). He also equates them with the most ancient of universal
‘‘‘thought-forms’’ of humanity’ which have their own ‘independent life’ (1917, p. 66).
These primordial images are essentially autonomous mental templates that ‘deter-
mine the form and direction of instinct’ (1919, p. 137). Here Jung introduces a causal
impetus as archetype determines how drives will be enacted. He furthermore implies
in this original essay (‘Instinct and the Unconscious’) that archetypes are a type
of perceiving agency, like an ego. In his words: ‘Archetypes are typical modes of
apprehension, and whenever we meet with uniform and regularly recurring modes of
apprehension we are dealing with an archetype’ (ibid., pp. 137
138, italics in original).
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 9

This suggests that archetypes have an organizational and agentic structure all of
their own. I will return to this notion shortly, but for now, let us continue to examine
the chronological nature of Jung’s thought.

From image and form to affect and fantasy

The instincts and archetypes, Jung explains, are universal and common collec-
tive phenomena, yet he tends to equivocate on their relation to each other, stating
that they ‘determine one another’ (ibid., p. 134). Yet the two are not the same.
A primordial image is not an impersonal biological drive. As Jung’s thinking
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matures, he goes in other developmental directions, whereby the properties of an

archetype evolve in definitional character.
By 1927 Jung’s views on the archetype have expanded. Here the archetypes
generate ‘myth-motifs’ that arise from ‘affect-laden fantasies’ (1927, p. 155). Here
fantasy becomes the experiential link to ancient imagos. Now the collective un-
conscious is described as ‘a kind of supra-individual psychic activity’ distinct from
personal experience (ibid., p. 148), yet it harbors ‘the ancestral heritage of pos-
sibilities of representation,’ which become ‘the true basis of the individual psyche’
(ibid., p. 152). Here Jung may be accused of confounding universal forms
or faculties that make cognition possible with the collective unconscious, which is
a category mistake. Drives, for example, are not faculties of cognition; they are
psychophysical urges that impel a sentient organism to act. Faculties as a priori
forms of cognition allow for experience to arise and be presented to consciousness,
just as perception requires the re-presentation of objects to be retrieved from memory,
which necessarily mediates experience. Although Jung does not directly say here that
images are recovered representations from the collective, he certainly does so
elsewhere when he refers to archetypical figures, dream symbols, and mythological
motifs as représentations collectives (1936/1942, p. 122; 1954, p. 41).
While the collective unconscious is the cosmic receptacle and issuance of form,
the archetypes are the content of the collective without themselves having content.
Yet Jung introduces content into this formless archetype when he claims that image,
affect, fantasy, motifs and patterns constitute this formless property of the collective.
He furthermore equivocates drive with archetype when he says that ‘the archetypes
are simply the forms which the instincts assume’ (1927, p. 157). Here instincts
transmogrify into archetypes, which Jung says are ‘the very source of the creative
pulse’ ibid., p.157). Presumably Jung wants to locate the creative wellspring within
instinct, while creative expression flows through the archetype. But this is not clear.
He does speak of the ‘creative instinct’ as a psychical impulse, but he does not want
to make them identical (see 1917, p. 118). Elsewhere he locates creativity within
fantasy as a unifying function, which he makes the ‘creative matrix of everything’
(1928, p. 290) ultimately having its source within the archetypal collective. But it may
be argued, as does Freud, that fantasy is the modification of drive. Jung concludes
that the collective is the ‘source’ of ‘instinctual forces,’ while the forms or categories
‘that regulate them’ are the archetypes (1927, p. 158). Here Jung defers to his earlier
position that the archetypes are merely formal.
He also affirms this position in Memories, Dreams, Reflections, when he tells us
unambiguously that
 10 Jon Mills

the archetypes, which are pre-existent to consciousness and condition it, appear in the
part they actually play in reality . . . As an attribute of instinct they partake of its
dynamic nature, and consequently possess a specific energy which causes or compels
definite modes of behavior or impulses. (1961, p. 347)

Notice that Jung posits the archetypes to be ‘pre-existent to consciousness’. This

is an ontological commitment to realism. They predate the existence of the living
human subject and causally condition how the individual experiences and acts. But
once again Jung interjects a contradictory statement by making the archetype ‘an
attribute of instinct’. It is important to raise this issue, because if the archetype
emanates from instinct, such as acquiring modified attributes and properties, then
drive or instinct would be the ground of all psychic activity. What would follow
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would be that archetypes would become differentiated mental productions that

appear as psychic objects derived from an original natural drive. But this is not what
Jung ultimately postulates, which, I suggest, needs this added corrective. Archetypes
are the ontological ground of all psychic productions since they procreate images,
fantasies, and so forth, which dominate mental life. We may say they are instinctually
innate, but they are not instincts in themselves. Here it would be more correct to
preserve the distinction between instinct as embodied drive that belongs to the
corporeality of the living subject, while archetypes retain their special status and
consistent character as the ‘primordial’ ground of the psyche, which is the hallmark
of Jung’s philosophy.
What this implies is that, emanating from within the collective, there is a
particular form of unconscious recognition with an image that we are drawn to as a
numinous phenomenon
presumably having its origins in the minds of primitive
man
such as certain shapes or colors associated with sense impressions, which is
genetically encoded and transmitted over the ages. Problems arise, however, when
Jung attributes ‘emotional fantasies’ (1927, p. 154) to archetypes in addition to
powers for the ‘possibilities of representations’. Here he moves from formal
properties of universality to contents that have specific images and fantasies that
are thematic or generic in form. Jung delineates them as patterns or motifs, so they
still maintain their formal structure, but the pattern or motif itself conveys a specific
content (e.g. the anima mundi), which may be revealed in countless ways in the
personal unconscious. But Jung advances his thesis to include additional properties:
form and image now acquire affect and fantasy. The ‘possibilities’ to represent the
innumerable archetypes are unbounded. However, representations do not necessarily
mean the retrieval of an idea or image that once belonged to a caveman. Although
Jungians are sensitive to this issue, and are quick to defend Jung, as he did himself, it
does not mean that this inference cannot be implied. Jung would say that it is not the
specific image or idea itself, but the formalism that allows for these ideas and images
to emerge in the subjective mind. Here he is no different than Kant. But Kant counts
on conscious presentations of sense impressions occuring, what he calls the manifold
world of sensible objects presented to ‘intuition’, before the unconscious mind can
represent those images to subjective consciousness. Jung inverts this process. He
requires the collective unconscious to supply the form and the properties which the
conscious mind takes up. Here we cannot separate the two domains because instinct,
imago, affect, fantasy and form are interdependent.
To summarize this progression: archetypes are originally devoid of content, hence
they are merely formal. Despite having specific contents that vary from person to
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 11

person, themes or motifs represented in the subject’s consciousness still reveal basic
patterns. Jung refers to these as aboriginal shapes or patterns of mind that are both
biological and transpersonal, belonging to the ‘prehistoric and unconscious de-
velopment of the mind in archaic man, whose psyche was still close to that of the
animal . . . . This immensely old psyche forms the basis of our mind’ (Jung, 1964,
p. 67). This is an ontological assertion, but he draws on an evolutionary argument
to support the primacy of archetypes by claiming they are instinctive processes
analogous to those of birds which are hardwired to build nests. Put laconically,
we have evolutionarily developed our minds in this fashion, and have a mental
apparatus that perceives phenomena and structures our personal experience of
reality in this manner.
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Patterns of Behavior
If instinct, form, image, affect and fantasy are not enough defining attributes, Jung
includes ‘patterns of behavior’ (1947, p. 200) as another characteristic inhering in an
archetype. Here instinct and archetype are conjoined, hence deviating from his
original conception that the collective contained both the instincts and the
archetypes. He states:

There are, in fact, no amorphous instincts, as every instinct bears in itself the pattern of
its situation. Always it fulfills an image, and the image has fixed qualities: . . . it cannot
exist without its total pattern, without its image. Such an image is an a priori type . . . .
We may say that the image represents the meaning of the instinct. (1947, p. 201)

Jung speaks from a position of ex cathedra; however, his arguments are convoluted.
Here he deviates radically from Freud’s (1915) definition of Trieb. Jung makes
instinct formless (viz. ‘amorphous’) yet patterned
itself a contradiction
and
furthermore with the properties of images with ‘fixed qualities’ that are given a
priori, namely, as innate or inborn. This is a radical proposition. Archetypes now
have fixed qualities of images that are instinctually reproduced through patterned
forms of thought, feeling, fantasy, and behavior. What this logically entails is that
we are programmed to reproduce images and behavioral acts that were originally
conditioned by early man and inherited through gradual evolution. That claim is not
necessarily controversial in itself; but what is controversial is the notion that ‘images’
are reproduced from a fund of archaic re-presentations belonging to the ‘collective’.
This intimates a Lamarckian view of a fund of inherent phylogenetic memories
within mind. Moreover, they are ‘fixed’ not malleable; hence they are predetermined
rather than determinate. Here the collective is portrayed as more of a supernatural
mysterium.
Jung furthermore says that the image conveys ‘the meaning of the instinct.’ This
statement can be interpreted as meaning that drives have intentional states expressed
through imagos, but I believe Jung is referring to the notion that they have a purpose
or function for the psyche. He equivocates in separating instinct from archetype,
equating behavior to instinct and image to archetype, yet he also says that the
archetypes ‘act like the instincts’; and he would not ‘refute this possibility’ of their
‘identical’ nature (1947, p. 205).
Jung is attempting to use the hypothesis of archetypes as a heuristic connection
to explain and mediate all aspects of psychic life. By incorporating instinct within
 12 Jon Mills

archetypal structure, he seeks a unitive synthesis. All aspects of human psychology

must be accounted for in his theoretical system in order to have a monistic theory of
mind, what Jung refers to as the unus mundus
one unitary order that structures the
universe. The doctrine of archetypes fulfills this mediating role. And behavior is no
exception. The archetype postulate serves a unitary function of binding thought,
image, affect and behavior within the instinctual substrate that conditions human
psychology. But we may not inappropriately ask: Why do we need the archetype
concept when the notion of drive may potentially explain the same thing?
Human behavior cannot be divorced from the archetypal world because primitive
imagos form the basis of human motivation, which drives human action. Jung tells
us: ‘Archetypes are typical forms of behavior which, once they become conscious,
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naturally present themselves as ideas and images’ (ibid., p. 227). Like Freudian drive
theory, in principle, the archetype cannot be directly known, for it appears as
modified content and is ‘irrepresentable’ in itself (ibid., p. 214). In this case, only
images, ideas, and so forth are known or experienced as the transmogrification of its
emanating source. But Jung goes on to refute this identity thesis between instinct
and archetype, for he says that: ‘Archetype and instinct are the most polar opposites
imaginable’ because archetype is tantamount to ‘spirit’ or the psychical, while
instinct is tantamount to bodily urge or impulse; yet they have ‘so close a bond’ they
are dialectically inseparable (ibid., p. 206). This is Jung’s attempt to explain the mind/
body problem, yet it reveals the pole of his tacit dualism. Archetype becomes the
ontological bridge to mind and body. But as we will shortly see, he ultimately makes
that bridge a purely psychic process.
Now that Jung has captured the breadth of human psychology within his
metaphysical system, he seeks to offer an integrative paradigm that amplifies his pre-
vious emphasis on imago, fantasy, and affect. He does this by evoking the spiritual
within the aesthetic and emotional life of the collective human subject. Here enters
the numinous.

Archetype as Numinosity
By the time Jung wrote ‘On the Nature of the Psyche’ (1947), the concept of
the archetype had undergone more emendations. This is when Jung introduces
the notion of the archetype as numen. Drawing on medieval astrology and the
alchemists, particularly Paracelsus, he compares the collective archetypes ‘in all their
luminosity and numinosity’ to ‘cosmic projection’ (ibid., p. 195) reflective of a World
Soul: ‘The world-soul is a natural force which is responsible for all the phenomena of
life and the psyche’ (ibid., p. 196). Although Jung is only making comparisons, he is
suggesting that his notion of the archetypes signifies the same phenomena.
Merkur (1996), interpreting Rudolf Otto (1932), describes the sensus numinous as
a category of values that inspires majestic awe and splendor, which at the same time
is clouded in mystery imbued with an emotional sense of urgency. This phenomen-
ological amalgamation of psychic experience nicely captures Jung’s notion of an
archetype. But Jung also takes some supernatural leaps of faith in attributing
spiritual and magical properties to the archetypes:

The archetypes have, when they appear, a distinctly numinous character which can only
be described as ‘spiritual,’ if ‘magical’ is too strong a word . . . . It not infrequently
happens that the archetype appears in the form of a spirit in dreams or fantasy-
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 13

products, or even comports itself like a ghost. There is a mystical aura about its
numinosity, and it has a corresponding effect upon the emotions. (1947, pp. 205
206)

Although Jung is not technically making a metaphysical assertion about a super-

natural world, instead focusing on the phenomenal appearances that appeal to the
emotional and valuational processes of the experiential subject, he is nevertheless
presupposing that archetypes ‘appear’ from behind the Kantian veil of the noumena,
what we may attribute to the transcendent world of things in themselves as
something supersensible. There is little doubt that the term numinosity is derived
from this historical philosophical context, and particularly given that Kant’s (1790)
major work on aesthetics, Critique of Judgment, was preoccupied with the question of
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the sublime and the teleology of nature.

Jung wants to capture the qualitative unitive sense of emotional experience that is
simultaneously wondrous, affectively intense and spiritually meaningful yet shrouded
in a transcendent ontology. This is why he emphasizes the ‘feeling-value of the
archetype’ that ‘determines’ how it will experientially unfold (1947, p. 209). This
probably has a certain eschatological significance for Jung, but it should be pointed
out that this is the same language Whitehead (1929), himself an atheist, uses when he
describes the emotional and value-laden aspects of the unitive processes involved
in ‘prehension’ and ‘concrescence’, which he argues are the building blocks of all
cosmological reality. The archetype could be viewed almost synonymously with
‘actual entities’ or, in Jung’s language, ‘psychic entities’ (1947, p. 231). For Jung, the
numinous element of an archetypal image produces a dynamism and fascinans to
lived experience that resonates as unconscious qualia.
Jung elevates the numinous character of an archetype to a ‘psychoid factor that
belongs, as it were, to the invisible, ultraviolet end of the psychic spectrum. It does
not appear, in itself, to be capable of reaching consciousness’ (ibid., p. 213). What
exactly does Jung mean by ‘psychoid’? This is the same term posed by his first
mentor and supervisor, Eugen Bleuler, at the Burghölzli psychiatric clinic, where
Jung was a staff psychiatrist in his early days, before his relationship with Freud
commenced (see ibid., pp. 176
177). And, parenthetically, it also might be useful to
point out that the psychoid factor Jung refers to is no different in function than
Freud’s notion of Trieb: a drive can never be known directly, only through its
derivative manifestations.5
Jung adopts the term psychoid to designate a purely unconscious process as
‘elements’ incapable of being represented in consciousness (ibid., p. 184), but it is not
to be equated with the unconscious itself, which is composed of many different
elements, processes, contents, and so forth. However, like the archetype, he equates
psychoid processes with the ‘transcendent’ (ibid., p. 213). The psychoid function is
the liaison between mind and body, yet it is unclear how this function operates, let
alone the specifics, and whether the psychoid is independent from the archetype or
inheres within it. We must assume it is an organizing principle operative within the
archetype because Jung locates the archetype ‘beyond the psychic sphere’ and says
that ‘with its psychoid nature, [it] forms the bridge to matter in general’ (ibid.,
p. 216). But Jung is also inconsistent in his usage and at times equates ‘the psychoid’
with ‘factors I call archetypes’ (1952, 8: p. 515). In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, he
states that archetypal configurations ‘may be founded upon a psychoid base, that
is, upon an only partially psychic and possibly altogether different form of being’
(1961, p. 351). Notice his tentative language here, as well as his allusion to an
 14 Jon Mills

ethereal realm. Yet it is only poetically suggestive. But when Jung uses language
such as ‘beyond the psychic sphere’, he is clearly evoking transpersonalism.
More specifically, he is referring to the Transcendent, that which lies beyond the
faculties of mind.
The psychoid function is also intimately connected to Jung’s thesis on
synchronicity, which is a highly transpersonal phenomenon. Synchronized moments
suspend the phenomenology of spacetime, hence producing numinous affects that
raise the conscious experience of objects to a ‘supernormal degree of luminosity’
(1952, p. 436) due to the intervening elements of the psychoid function. The
synchronicity principle allows for the experiential relativity of ‘causeless order’,
which is marked by simultaneity and meaningful correspondence of events, what
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Jung concludes is ‘transcendental’ (ibid., p. 506). If synchronicity is diachronic,

relative to personal perspective, and displaces natural causal laws for an acausal
orderliness or connecting principle that transcends our current understanding of
natural science, then not only is this numinous, it also arouses the uncanny mystique
of imagination, fear, and wonder.

Jung’s Mature Hypothesis

In his mature theory, Jung reiterates his earlier views on the archetypal collective in
an integrative but somewhat less pedantic manner. In Symbols of Transformation
(1911
12), he privileges collective images as inborn ideas, while later in his works he
articulates the instinctual, behavioral and numinous character of the archetypes,
which express themselves as affects and fantasies. Late in his life, Jung (1957) defined
the archetypes as ‘eternally inherited forms and ideas which have at first no specific
content. Their specific content only appears in the course of the individual’s life,
when personal experience is taken up in precisely these forms’ (p. xliv). Here he
emphasizes forms and ideas. But notice that form and idea are the Greek equivalent
of , as ‘to form in’, taken from idein, to see. This is why Jung equates form with
image as an idea.
In his final writing project, Man and his Symbols, Jung (1964) defines the
archetypes in the following fashion:

They are, at the same time, as both images and emotions. One can speak of an archetype
only when these two aspects are simultaneous. When there is merely the image, then
there is simply a word-picture of little consequence. But by being charged with emotion,
the image gains numinosity (or psychic energy); it becomes dynamic, and consequences
of some kind must flow from it. (p. 96)

Here Jung emphasizes a synthetic relation or trinity between imago, emotionality,

and numinosity that lead to an interactive dynamism. This represents Jung’s final
word on the matter given that it was completed ten days before he died. The
archetype is composed of imagos and emotions that have ‘a special feeling tone’
(ibid., p. 96) or affective-energetic structure; hence they give a certain subjective
phenomenal intensity and personal meaning to experience. As he continues to state,
‘it is essential to insist that they are not mere [linguistic] names, or even philosophical
concepts. They are pieces of life itself
images that are integrally connected to
the living individual by the bridge of the emotions’ (ibid., p. 97). Here affect is
emphasized over imago as both a mediating factor producing a numinous quality
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 15

and a unitive psychological (transcendent) function; yet it is more accurate to say

that image, affect and thought form a dynamic synthetic unity. The numinous
becomes the sacred symbolic that unites the emotional, aesthetic and spiritual
dimension within the qualia of the concretely lived experience. This unitive ex-
perience further loses its distinctive clarity in its declension to this felt union or
fusion, which may be properly attributed to the mysterium tremendum.
Jung also confesses to the nebulous nature of the archetypes because words
cannot adequately capture their true essence. In Jung’s words, he is attempting
‘to describe something whose very nature makes it incapable of precise definition’
(ibid., p. 97). This preserves the via mystica of an archetype, which also makes it
incapable of being either proven or refuted. Just like the psychoid factor, which lacks
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explication or definitional precision in how it is structured or actually works on

a functional, mechanical, or operational level, the epistemological problem of the
archetype becomes displaced by the inherent valuation attributed to lived phenom-
enology. Is it sufficient for Jung to claim that any experience the subject has is
reality
in other words, a psychic fact
and that is all that matters? This Gnostic
opaqueness is what leads to charges of mysticism, folk psychology lacking scientific
verity and that the so-called archetypes are merely personal mythologies, illusions,
or fantasies one wishes to believe in.

Integration and critique

Jung was a deeply spiritual man captivated by the marvel of the universal. The
ancients called it wonder. The numinous nature of the archetype signifies that marvel
united in a concrete symbolic function where all fundamental psychological char-
acteristics and qualitative facets of human experience can participate in some
semblance of harmony, even if this symbolic factor devolves into mystical abs-
traction. Even though he did not classify his theories this way, instead insisting they
were scientific and empirical, Jung wanted to capture and potentially explain all
aspects of human psychology under the rubric of his metaphysics, which ultimately
rests on the doctrine of archetypes. In the end, what are we to make of his major
theoretical contributions and the philosophical implications of his analytical
psychology?
The archetypal collective may be viewed as residues of archaic mind grafted onto
our present-day psyche with psychophysical correlates that fuse mind and body, yet
the numinous nature of the archetypes ultimately commits Jung to a transcendent-
alism that is non-corporeal. Jung is first and foremost concerned with the quest for
explicating universality, which he attributes to an a priorism of form. Idea, image,
emotionality and behavioral manifestations coalesce into a single psychological
category that serves as the ontological fabric of all mental structures. Archetypes are
formal but they are comprised of inherited imagos as ideation, hence they are
purported to be primordial perceptual content that is mediated by psychic faculties
responsible for conceptual reason, affect and behavioral propensities. Although
archetypes are irrepresentable in themselves, because they are only ‘basic form’, they
nevertheless appear as images, motifs, mythologems and the like (1947, p. 213). Jung
seems to be teetering on a fine line between universal form (a priori categories) and
content (images as inborn ideas) on the one hand, and past (collective unconscious)
and present (personal experience) on the other.
 16 Jon Mills

Although there is a fair amount of debate among Jungians and post-Jungians, we

do not see many critiques of Jung by Jungians because, I suggest, it offends a group
identification, which is taboo within that professional culture. However, I wish to
open a permissible space to question Jung’s major concepts not as a polemic, but as a
genuine search for meaning in his philosophy and with respect for his textual word.
When Jung speaks of the ‘suprapersonal nature’ of the collective unconscious (1954,
p. 4), is this merely metaphor or ontology? Is Jung making claims about ultimate
reality, or are his ‘hypotheses’ of the collective psyche and the archetypes simply
chalked up to poetic literary aesthetics? If the latter is the case, would this not
cheapen the unique value of his philosophical contributions to human psychology
and the pursuit of the spiritual? Jungian apologists may warn us not to read Jung
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through a Jungian lens that translates the language of psychology into ontology;
however, we must take him at face value. Jung makes psychic processes the founda-
tion of all human experience, possessing a transpersonal character, and this by
definition is a metaphysical treatise of mind. It is untenable to separate phe-
nomenological psychology from metaphysics because in making any inquiry or
assertion about experience and reality, the two are ontologically conjoined and
mutually infer each other. Drawing on what he actually says in his written texts, my
conclusion is that Jung believed that the Collective Psyche is real and exists
independently of any individual. This is an ontological claim that surpasses any
methodological agnosticism, phenomenology, or naturalized psychology.
Jung makes contradictory statements throughout his theoretical corpus, at times
averring scientific empiricism, philosophical rationalism and dialectical logic, yet at
the same time he differentiates mind from matter, only then to suggest that matter
is an emergent property of spirit, thus pointing toward a transubjective reality.
Vacillating between viewing an archetype as an inborn idea and the possibility or
potentiality for ideation wed with personal experience, his obscurantism is further
evinced when he says on the one hand that the archetype is ‘pure, unvitiated nature’
(1947, p. 210), but on the other that it is also suprapersonal, transcendent, and
beyond the sensible world. By envisioning the collective psyche as a reservoir of
abstract objects inherent to cosmic process, Jung theoretically evokes a super-
naturalism and aligns with disciplines sympathetic to mysticism, shamanism and
theology.
Jung is very clear in stating that archetypes have a ‘nonpsychic aspect’ or
counterpart to the cosmos connected through synchronicity, or the transcendent
‘psychoid’ function that supposedly mediates the ‘space-time continuum.’ Here he
implies that the collective unconscious is a ‘supernatural faculty’ (ibid., p. 231) full of
psychic dispositions. But how can this be? How does such a faculty exist? How are
psychic forms and contents dispersed into the singular minds of individuals? Why do
they materialize to begin with? How can they be omnipresent and eternal if they
are only capable of being apprehended by finite subjectivity?
Are these aporiai adequately resolved if we translate Jung’s language into the
present-day equivalent of biological heredity, such as genetic attributes inscribed
within DNA? Yet how could images and ideas be encoded and transmitted geneti-
cally when you need to have conscious experience and perception in order to
internalize, memorialize and re-present those images in the mind? Jung wants to fall
back on a priori formalism to explain this conundrum, and in this sense he is no
different from the idealists to certain linguists who endeavor to delineate the formal
structural origins of subjectivity that make conscious experience possible. But when
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 17

he evokes the spectre of transpersonalism, he is getting away from the evolutionary

implications of his earlier commitments and is hinting toward supernatural
emanationism. And given Jung’s affinity for Plotinus and the medievalists, it is no
wonder he generates contradiction and paradox. This is particularly evident when he
says that the archetypes have the ‘functional significance of a world-constituting
factor’ (1952, p. 515). If archetypes constitute the world, then we are espousing a
form of creationism. And Jung is not apologetic about this speculation since he
posits that synchronicity flows from ‘creative acts, as the continuous creation of a
pattern that exists from all eternity.’ This statement is followed by a reference to God
(ibid., p. 518, fn.17). Although Jung was enamored with universals and makes
repeated metaphysical claims that they have existed from all eternity, we are now
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headed toward some form of panpsychism or cosmic theosophy.

James Hillman (1975) and the archetypal school emphasize the centrality of the
phenomenology of imagos and fantasy images as the main locus of analytic work,
and for this reason they largely jettison many of the metaphysical presupposi-
tions that burden the classical Jungian corpus, including the Kantian noumena
(Adams, 1997). Although further divergences exist between the classical school,
the archetypalists and the developmentalists, giving rise to an often polemical and
competitive exchange of ideas in Jungian circles (Samuels, 1997), the textual fact
remains that Jung was committed to many transpersonal hypotheses that carried
metaphysical ramifications.
Sherry Salman (1997) alerts us to Jung’s monism, derived from the medieval
concept of a unus mundus or ‘one world’, which is the original undifferentiated unity
that binds everything
from matter to psychic energy
within the universe. It should
be noted that this philosophy derives from Plotinus’ emanationism. His neo-
Platonism became quite attractive to Christianity, which later formed the bedrock
of more sophisticated theosophies during the middle ages. In his work on alchemy,
culminating in his Mysterium Coniunctionis, Jung (1955) shows such breadth of
scholarship that most classicists would likely applaud his synthetic ambition. In this
work, Jung seeks to integrate his views on the collective unconscious and archetypal
psychology with the medieval tradition. He specifically champions a process view of
the many within the one, and diversity within unity, yet he draws on a creationism
argument extrapolated from Plotinus:

In the beginning God created one world (unus mundus), . . . the original non-
differentiated unity of the world or of Being, . . . the primordial unconsciousness. While
the concept of the unus mundus is a metaphysical speculation, the unconscious can be
indirectly experienced via its manifestations. (ibid., p. 462)

Jung goes on to support a monistic ontological view where everything is inter-

connected; and although this generates paradoxes, despite the fact that there is a
multitude of manifestations, ‘they are at bottom a unity’ (ibid., p. 463). If Jung is to
be criticized for espousing this view, then he would be in good company with many
philosophers over the centuries up to contemporary modes of process thought.
Criticisms of metaphysical monism where diversity, plurality and differentiation are
still dialectically tied to an interpenetrating unification system or principle of unity
should not be directed toward Jung per se, for this thesis preoccupies many diverse
philosophical systems from East to West, criticisms I will not entertain here. What
Jung is more concerned with is how his psychology fits within the mysterious
 18 Jon Mills

conjunctions that are generated from this form of philosophy. For example, the
mandala symbolizes the One, which he attributes to ‘the ultimate unity of all
archetypes as well as of the multiplicity of the phenomenal world, and is therefore the
empirical equivalent of the metaphysical concept of a unus mundus’ (ibid., p. 463),
with synchronicity being its ‘parapsychological equivalent’.
What I believe Jung wants to secure is an empirical basis for a justified psycho-
analytic metaphysics grounded through phenomenological psychology. For example,
he explains that ‘insofar as the archetypes act upon me, they are real and actual
to me, even though I do not know what their real nature is’ (1961, p. 352). Here he
uses his subjective felt experience to avouch an ontological commitment despite
conceding to the epistemological limits of his capacities to know. By focusing on the
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phenomenology of experience, he attempts to sidestep the pitfalls associated with

speculative metaphysics; yet no matter how phenomenology is positioned, one can
never escape the implicit ontological assumptions that underlie our experience of
experience. This is why Jung ultimately proffers a metaphysics of experience that is
conditioned by the archetypal collective. For Jung, the archetypes are a necessary
condition of experience, without which the human mind would not exist as we
presently understand it. This archaic cosmic or suprastructural condition of the
collective psyche must have an origin or source, and this is justified by the meta-
physical argument for one unitary world. All actual and possible experience must be
accounted for within the psychic universe Jung calls the transpersonal unconscious,
which is the original union or latent unity of the world. This theoretical conviction
clearly mirrors Jung’s quest for holism.
The ‘contemplation of the transcendental unus mundus, the potential world
outside time’ (1955, p. 505), was clearly a pivotal notion underlying Jung’s meta-
physics of the archetype. What creates more scepticism is his scattered references to
the archetype as a ‘transcendental entity’ in which the empirical world emerges from
this ‘transcendental psychophysical background’ (ibid., pp. 536
538). The word
‘entity’ is used here not to denote a thing or object in the empirical world, but rather,
I suggest, an agent or subject. Earlier conceived as ‘psychic entities’ (1947, p. 231),
archetypes are now viewed as supernatural or transpersonal, hence they are not
merely psychic; or in Jung’s words, they ‘have a nature that cannot with certainty be
designated as psychic’ (ibid., p. 230, italics in original). Between his caveats, discursive
qualifications and scholarly elucidations of others’ points of view, with interspersed
slippery slopes, it is hard to pin him down on the theoretical minutia of his
philosophical commitments. But we must pursue our line of inquiry further. This
brings us to the nature and question of agency.
Jung tells us that archetypes ‘manifest themselves only through their ability to
organize images and ideas’ (ibid., p. 231). This implies agency. Elsewhere he says that
it is not the individual person organizing such activity, but rather the archetype itself
‘speaking through him’ as a transcendental agent (1961, p. 352). Whom or what is
organizing these experiences? Here Jung does not speak of the ego, self or subject;
rather, he refers to the archetypes themselves organizing the subject’s experience as if
they are autonomous agents within the mind. In fact, earlier he says that ‘they are
experienced as spontaneous agencies’; their very ‘nature’ is derived from ‘spirit’
(1947, p. 216). Although he says they are ‘experienced’ as independent ‘forces’ or
‘energies’, hence invoking phenomenology, he attributes their essence to an
ontological substrate, ‘a solidity underlying all existence’ (1961, p. 358). This is a
very Hegelian idea, yet Jung surprisingly held Hegel in contempt for supposedly
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 19

espousing a grandiose theory of mind similar to that of a megalomaniac or

schizophrenic (see 1947, p. 170; 1926, p. 320). But spirit (Geist) and psyche are
conceivably two interchangeable constructs that refer to a ‘psychic category’ (1936/
1942, p. 120) as well as the coming into being of the collective unconscious.6
In contrast, Jung describes how an archetype ‘can break with shattering force
into an individual human life and into the life of a nation. It is therefore not
surprising that it is called ‘‘God’’’ (1955, p. 552). Jung is not equating the archetype
with God, only the corresponding linking-experience of the numinous that it
semiotically and affectively evokes, which appears as an autonomous presence that
takes possession of the mind. However, Jung may be said to covertly espouse his own
grandiosity by elevating the archetype to the status of a deified agency responsible
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for the numinous phenomena that the experiential subject encounters. He further-
more attributes this numinosity to the ‘psychoid aura that surrounds conscious-
ness’ (1955, p. 551), a concept that remains nebulous and ill-defined, something of a
mysterium coniunctionis in itself. But what Jung is clear about is that ‘when we talk of
God or gods we are speaking of debatable images from the psychoid realm. The
existence of a transcendental reality is indeed evident in itself’ (ibid., p. 551). Here I
interpret Jung as first acknowledging the agnosticism of the origin of the image,
which is dubious, yet it is mediated through some unarticulated transcendental
faculty that gives it organizational clarity, order, and meaning. At best we can
attribute this function to fantasy. But Jung makes this a ‘transcendental reality.’ He
goes on to say:

That the world inside and outside ourselves rests on a transcendental background is as
certain as our own existence, but it is equally certain that the direct perception of the
archetypal world inside us is just as doubtfully correct as that of the physical world
outside us’ (ibid., p. 551).

Is it so certain that a ‘transcendental background’ is needed to explain these phe-

nomena, let alone that they exist in the first place? And would not the explanation
of fantasy answer to the psychological need to posit certainty to begin with?
My interpretation of these statements is that Jung has officially abandoned the
notion that the archetypal collective is only formal, hence comprised of universal
structures of subjectivity that condition our conscious experience of the world, for
the idea that they are extant suprapersonal realms of cosmic process responsible for
all psychic productions the human mind manufactures. Therefore, they are causally
determined by this transcendent reality, for, following this logic, there would be no
mental productions without the archetypal world. This makes human experience
necessarily dependent on the transpersonal netherworld, what could easily be
equated with some form of supernatural intelligence that orbits and/or suffuses the
natural world. We must question whether it is legitimate to attribute agency to
archetypes. How could they pre-exist as entirely extra-psychic agencies in the mind?
How could they have any agency at all? Just exactly how could such agentic processes
function? How could they have ego-functions of processing and unifying information
or performing synthetic activity, let alone possess meaning-making signifying powers
and properties?
If we sustain this line of thinking further, the concept of the collective un-
conscious collapses into a macroanthropos. Here archetypes take on a hypostatized
quality, to the point that they may be viewed as supernatural structures inherent in
 20 Jon Mills

the cosmos rather than a psychic faculty that allows for experience to materialize,
such as Kant’s categories, Fichte’s principles (Grundsät) as transcendental acts of
mind, or Hegel’s dialectic (Aufhebung). In this way, Jung deviates from primordial
form and gives archetypes a transpersonal organizational ontology that conditions
the quality of experience for individuals and cultures, and hence he elevates the
archetype to a majestic or divine provenance.
Is Jung committing a genetic fallacy? Does he presuppose that all internal
experiences and contents can be traced back to their most basal roots, which are
held to be the causal determinants of all present experiences that furthermore retain
their original attributes and properties, constituted long ago? Is he drawing an
inappropriate conclusion that the reconstructed trace or path back to origins
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presumes that present experience contains the same properties as it may have held at
one time in the archaic past? When Jung says that psychic energy ‘follows its own
gradient down into the depths of the unconscious, and there activates what has lain
slumbering from the beginning’ (1917, pp. 66
67), he is presuming that prehistoric
mind would be preserved in its original manner. This assumes that psychic contents
would not undergo transmogrification and, like an artefact, can be unearthed and
discovered as they once existed. But this notion is highly suspicious. Because we
do not have direct access to things in themselves, especially the mental contents
of primitive man; we can only speculate, interpret and creatively construct meaning
based on our plausible inferences. We make reasonable comparisons between
particulars and universals, but are we philosophically justified to equate the concrete
present with the abstract past as being identical in composition? To assume that these
ancient forces and contents would be perfectly preserved within an archaic
transpersonal psyche and transmitted in any form seems to imply that everything
is a reproduction from an antecedent stage in the history of the human race rather
than the cognitive modification of one’s own personal life history that is mistaken for
prehistory.
Critics pose the question: Do we need the collective unconscious hypothesis
to explain archetypal phenomena? For example, it may be argued that human
experience becomes memorialized as communal knowledge that gives rise to social
practices, symbols, rituals and linguistic orders that inform cultural anthropology,
and that these historical remembrances become transgenerationally and transcultu-
rally transmitted over the millennia. You do not need to appeal to a collective
transcendent psyche to explain these universal phenomena save only in the formal
sense that there must be a collection of individual subjects that form the greater
collective consciousness that is part of our objective social existence. Appealing to
a supernatural entity that becomes the ontological ground for human experience is
unnecessary and introduces a whole host of philosophical conundrums.
As Dan Merkur points out,7 one could object to the use of my term ‘super-
natural’ because this presupposes an inherent duality between nature and spirit or
psyche. Jung’s unique brand of Naturphilosophie is indeed an attempt to dialectically
bridge that dichotomy; however, he does not conceptualize the natural as meta-
physical. Rather, he makes the archetypal collective something that stands above or
beyond the mere natural as Transcendent; hence he reinstates oppositionality and
difference despite their underlying monistic order. Although psyche is naturalized, it
is Something More than its corporeal embodiment. When Jung introduces the notion
of synchronicity, the archetype now fully acquires the status of an independent being
that simultaneously is experienced within the psyche, but it still lies beyond
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 21

individual agency. Although archetypes are the locus classicus, synchronicty becomes
the causus belli. For example, Jung wants to reclaim the spiritual function of what
religion has typically addressed under the guise of the supernatural by making it
an aspect of the psyche. Here religion itself becomes transformed into ontological
psychology as a naturalized psychic system, but this system is ultimately informed by
a suprapersonal netherworld.
Jung would likely challenge this by replying that although images, symbols,
ritualistic behaviors and so forth developed throughout the slow progression of
human civilization, they could not have been simply transmitted cross-generationally
or transculturally because they happen everywhere in every society. Cultures that
were geographically and temporally segregated from one another, and hence had no
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communication with each other whatsoever on the human history timeline, never-
theless experienced psychic phenomena that were universal to all people at all times
and places, personified by primordial images. But images are ubiquitous and
empirical. There is nothing supernatural or mystical about them in themselves, for
they are common to all of us. This is part of our natural thrownness, namely, that
which is given. There is no magic to them, because this is how we perceive and think
as human beings. They are simply part of our a priori nature, not a supernatural
agency. Common experiences happen throughout the world regardless of culture,
time and history. An emotion is a specific affective experience regardless of who is
having it, or when and where. Could it be plausible that instead of summoning a
magical sea of transcendent objects derived from an anthropic psyche, we may more
humbly conceive of archetypes as psychic contents derived from internalized
personal experience of images embedded within our culture and the environs that
penetrate our minds from birth onward?
Jung’s doctrine of the archetypes becomes an all-encompassing psychic category
that potentially explains every facet of human psychology. Whether Jung is suc-
cessful in achieving this goal is disputable. Jung has been accused of espousing
and living his life based on a psychomythology as a substitute for religion (Wehr,
1985). Is the belief in an archetypal collective merely a fiction or illusion, an exalted
anthropomorphic projection, or perhaps a deposit from omnipotent infantile fanta-
sies still clamouring for wish fulfillment? We have good reason to suspect that Jung’s
longing for wholeness is the passion behind his philosophy, and that the sober logic
of reason or antiseptic science could not answer or fulfill the greater metaphysical
questions and spiritual quandaries we perennially face. Jung found some consolation
in the via mystica. This is his answer to the question of complexification. I think a
more generous reading of Jung, and in the spirit of his life project, is that the pursuit
of the numinosum is what brings a qualitative exuberance and existential purpose to
life that grounds our own personally created metaphysics of experience. Whether this
applies to an objectivist epistemology or to social or scientific consensus is not the
issue. We define our reality through our experience of the world mediated through
mind. In this way, Jung’s metaphysics shares intimate affinities with the Idealist
tradition of philosophy.8
One conundrum Jung perpetually faces is that he is begging the question of
human spirituality as a transcendent eternity, when it can be persuasively argued that
one does not need a transpersonal psyche or metaphysical divinity to explain the
numinous. This conclusion, of course, meets with little emotional satisfaction, for
man is a wishing animal. It is all too human to attempt to find a rational system that
fulfills our wishes, but in the end, we cannot simply dismiss our fundamental desires
 22 Jon Mills

as illegitimate or conclude that psychological dynamics are irrelevant to metaphysical

speculations or theological hope. Our appetition, longing, or spiritual pining does
not eradicate the fact that it originally comes from somewhere. Whether we call this
archetype, instinct, evolution, intuition, mysticism, or faith, it may very well
sufficiently justify a belief in the transcendental. Whether such belief is an illusion
reflective of a complex psychological dynamic is yet another issue. The point is we
experience its call. The human spirit knows no negation.
The conclusion that we cannot help but draw is that Jung, like most of us, is
chasing after God9
and we all want the comfort of a divine provenance where our
anxieties are ameliorated and we can finally participate of solace and deep peace free
of suffering, where bountiful pleasure, contentment, ultimate meaning, or any
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descriptor we call bliss is guaranteed to be our granting salivation. And for Jung,
God is synonymous with the unconscious.10 The truth of our pathos is that we can
never know what lies beyond.11 But what we do know is that we are all headed for a
pine box. Here our Being-toward-death becomes the primal ground (Bythos)
underlying our spiritual anxieties, perhaps even the impetus fueling our unitive
wish to return to a collective origin, what we might call home.

Notes
1. Because the term ‘metaphysics’ was such an explosive issue for Jung, and remains so today
for his apologists, it becomes important to offer an adumbrated explanation of its
philosophical usage. Metaphysics signifies Being, existence and reality, that which is. It is
often contrasted with empiricism as a scientific endeavor and phenomenology as an
experiential factor, when metaphysics subsumes these categories within a unifying
perspective that accounts for all facets of human subjectivity including the nature of
the psychological or spiritual, as well as religion as a naturalized human inquiry.
Therefore, when we speak of metaphysics, we do not need to bifurcate the empirical from
the phenomenological, for speculative propositions about psychic reality are simulta-
neously metaphysical phenomena.
2. In many ways the collective unconscious is anticipated by Hegel’s conception of Absolute
Spirit (Geist) as the sum totality or self-articulated complex holism that defines psychic
process (see Kelly, 1993; Mills, 2002). Specifically, refer to Hegel’s (1807) discussion of
‘unconscious universality’ within the context of collective spirit in the Phenomenology of
Spirit (PS §§ 460
462, 474).
3. Although ontologists from Heidegger to Sartre wish to make phenomenology the ground
of Being, here I wish to retain their categorical distinction, for Jung was attempting to
highlight lived experience while privileging the greater metaphysical conditions that make
experience possible.
4. Particularly see I. Part 1, Sec. 1
2; Part 2, Bk 1, Sec. 3.
5. Freud’s notion of Trieb is usually interpreted as a ‘borderline concept’ between the
somatic and the psychical, which, it could be argued, Jung substituted for archetype, with
the psychoid further being an intervening animating principle that straddles the two
spheres and institutes a unifying function. This is particularly relevant to the nature of
synchronicity, where the psychoid function gathers the material world into the psychic
domain and forms a meaningful unity.
6. Hegel (1807) is concerned not only about explaining individual psychology, but also about
providing a universal, anthropological account of humankind. For Hegel, individuality is
ultimately subordinated to higher social orders constituted in society by participating in
the ethical life (Sittlichkeit) of a collective community. This participation rests on the
development of a continuous psychosocial matrix of relations that has its origin in the
family. The communal spirit and the ethical law embodied within the family of communal
consciousness arises from ‘the power of the nether world’ (PS § 462)
what one might not
inappropriately call the collective unconscious. For Hegel, collective spirit ‘binds all into
 International Journal of Jungian Studies 23

one, solely in the mute unconscious substance of all’ (PS § 474). This ‘unconscious
universality’ contains the ethical order as divine law as well as the ‘pathos’ of humanity,
the ‘darkness’ of the ‘underworld’ (PS § 474).
7. Personal communication (2010).
8. In his memoir, Jung (1961) expresses the idealist pole of his thinking this way: ‘Human
consciousness created objective existence and meaning, and man found his indispensable
place in the great process of being’ (p. 256).
9. John Freeman, the BBC reporter and deputy editor of the New Statesman, recorded an
interview with Jung in March 1959 that was first broadcast on the radio later that year and
afterwards as a film. Jung’s biographer, Gerhard Wehr (1985), tells us:
The interview contained the remarkable passage in which the reporter swung from
Jung’s childhood experiences and religious upbringing in the Jung family parsonage to
the present, posing the direct question of whether he believed in God now. ‘Now?’
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Jung replied, and paused for a moment like a subject in one of his association
experiments on the hot seat. Then he admitted that it was really quite a difficult
question. And to the surprise of his listeners he added very definitely: ‘I know. I don’t
need to believe. I know.’ (p. 440)
This sentiment echoes Jung’s earlier view in ‘Spirit and Life’ where he says that ‘God is a
psychic fact of immediate experience, otherwise there would never have been any talk of
God’ (1926, p. 328).
10. ‘I prefer the term ‘‘the unconscious’’, knowing that I might equally well speak of ‘‘God’’ or
‘‘daimon’’ if I wished to express myself in mythic language. When I do use such mythic
language, I am aware that ‘‘mana’’, ‘‘daimon’’ and ‘‘God’’ are synonyms for the
unconscious’ (Jung, 1961, pp. 336
337).
11. Contra Kant, who believed that there was always a firm epistemological limit to pure
reason or absolute knowing, Hegel believed that mind readily grasps the Ding un sich by
virtue of the fact that we posit it. In the act of positing, we have already breached the limit.
Here he employs an argument similar to Anselm’s ontological proof for the existence of
God; however, just because we can conceive of an idea does not mean that we can think
something into existence.

Notes on contributor
Jon Mills, Psy.D., Ph.D., is a philosopher, psychologist, and psychoanalyst. He is Professor of
Psychology & Psychoanalysis at the Adler Graduate Professional School in Toronto and runs
a mental health corporation in Ontario. He is the author of numerous works in philosophy
and psychoanalysis including Conundrums: A Critique of Contemporary Psychoanalysis;
Origins: On the Genesis of Psychic Reality; Treating Attachment Pathology; The Unconscious
Abyss: Hegel’s Anticipation of Psychoanalysis; and an existential novel, When God Wept. He
received a Gradiva Award in 2006 and 2011 for his scholarship.

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