Intermission

I feel I need to tie up some loose ends from the previous post.

There are two phenomena that I seem to have kind of mashed up (at least that’s what I think). Both of these are from my very novice understand ing of C.G. Jung’s ideas.

On the one hand there is instinct, and on the other is unconscious. I am not sure if I mashed up these ideas, or whether C.G. Jung did that — but I want to take them apart (because I think it’s important to keep them separate).

Instinct is rather plain and simple: it’s like a hard-wired program — there’s no changing it (and I also believe there’s no denying it’s existence). When we are born, we begin to breathe — instinctively. We also searched for our mother’s breast — instinctively. Our mother’s breast gave us milk — again: instinctively.

Denying this is perhaps possible, but I also feel it’s ridiculous.

On the other hand, I am not so certain about the “unconscious” … and even less so about a “collective unconscious” being in everyone’s psyche as an instinctive hardware configuration.  As I said in the previous post, I feel that a large part of these more-or-less nebulous ideas are written into the human record — and that could involve many different kinds of writing, including a vast mythological oeuvre handed down from one generation to the next, or “actual” writing (e.g. literary works), or writing in the form of buildings or other artefacts with specific purposes (e.g. a hospital, an ambulance, a courthouse, a judge’s hammer, a church, an altar, etc.). Much of my thinking along these lines is indebted to a book called “The Social Construction of Reality” (cf. this wikipedia.org page)