THE TRUTH OF OUR TIMES:
Jung’s Liber Novus and the Psychological Difference
John C. Woodcock 1
Introduction
Psychology as the discipline of interiority (PDI) of course privileges
interiority as its alpha and omega. The psychological difference is an equally
crucial concept within the discipline because this concept is a living concept, i.e.,
the underlying logical life of our modern form of consciousness and, as such, is
the psychological basis from which we can practice the discipline of psychology in
the first place.
Our modern structure of consciousness is a complex one in which the
subjective psyche has not “caught up” with the logical life of the soul, in its
historical self-transformations. There is thus a structural dissociation in place. I
do not mean by this that there is a human failing somewhere. I sometimes wish
it were that easy. No, by placing interiority at the centre, PDI is saying that the
soul’s movements are determinative in our human lives. PDI is concerned with
the background movements (negative reality) of our very existence as
psychological beings. The soul undergoes a transformation in its logical life and
we “suffer” the consequences, i.e., our existence alters accordingly, whether we
like it or not. Thus our modern dissociated structure of consciousness is an
outcome of some very complex moves within the logical life of the soul that have
become “visible” through the historical development in the West. Perhaps it is
germane here to note that such a consideration as the determining power of the
soul was not always uncomfortable or even news. It was simply taken for granted
that our ordinary existence was determined by “hidden powers” for millennia
before our modern era with its emphasis on human freedom. Now it seems that,
along with George Orwell, we must assert that restating the obvious is the first
duty of intelligent men and women.
We do have some responsibility in how we relate to the fact that our
existence is determined by soul movements “occurring” in the background
(negative reality). If PDI is a discipline that includes service to the soul in its
ethic, then our responsibility lies in simply making what is real our truth. This
human act releases the implicit background into explicitness, which, it seems,
the soul intends—the soul “wants” to manifest in the world, though us in one
form or another. This is another way of saying, “culture”!
So, in our modern times, this ethical act would mean making our
dissociated structure of consciousness explicit, which is possible only as the soul
1
John C. Woodcock is a practising Jungian Psychotherapist in Sydney Australia. He writes numerous essays and
books as well which may be found at www.lighthousedownunder.com. This essay is excerpted from his latest
book, Animal Soul (iUniverse).
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becomes self-conscious, its “self” being the living unity of its own logic of
dissociation.
To this end, if we so choose to be of service, it becomes imperative to
examine those habits of thought that perpetuate beliefs, prejudices, behaviours,
and ideologies that lock us into identification with one side of our dissociated
consciousness, thereby occluding the soul’s deeper movements altogether.
Psychological phenomenology (the methodology of PDI) demands this selfdiscipline in the practitioner and the key to psychological phenomenology is the
psychological difference!
The most obdurate ideology that permeates our beliefs and prejudices our
eye against the real (the logical life of the soul in the real) today has sprung up
as an industry around C. G. Jung’s concept of the unconscious, hereafter called
the Jungian unconscious.
This essay will examine the Jungian unconscious, highlighting the singular
importance of the psychological difference in understanding this significant habit
of thought that at present prevents us from facing the truth of our times.
Liber Novus or The Red Book
Throughout Jung’s accounts of his psychic experiences, as recorded in the
now published Liber Novus, as well as his autobiography, and other publications,
his focus lies exclusively with his “spontaneous encounters” with real fantasies,
i.e., fantasies that gained a substantial “body”, acted “autonomously”, and had a
quality of “immediacy” and “compelling presence”. Subsequent generations of
Jungian psychologists and beyond into the larger community of artists, poets,
eco-psychologists and so on, have unquestioningly accepted Jung’s own account
of his experiences as representing the true nature of the reality he was
investigating—psychic reality, or the Jungian unconscious. 2
These qualities of the unconscious psyche were discovered by, at times, a
shocked and even tormented Jung, during his confrontation of “some twenty
years” with the unconscious, as recorded by him in Liber Novus. As Shamdasani
demonstrates, there is a direct continuity between this “stream of lava” and the
work of a lifetime for Jung. 3 4 These declared qualities of the Jungian
unconscious made it possible for Jung and subsequent generations to preserve
Meaning, as recapitulated in the human psyche, i.e., the Meaning that had been
self-evidently present as the interiority of nature for millennia but which now
appeared to be lost to our modern existence. 5
So, what’s the problem? We should all be grateful that Jung managed to
make it possible for us all to find Meaning again, like our ancestors once did,
2
(Jung, 1965), (Jung, 1989), (Jung, 2009), (Tacey, 2010)
(Jung, 1965, pp. 199-200)
4
(Jung, 2009). See Introduction by Shamdasani
5
For a full discussion of this problem, called Jung’s project, see: (Giegerich, 2010c, p. 189)
3
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shouldn’t we? The only difference is that, whereas our ancestors looked outward,
finding nature’s interiority self-evidently right there, as the interiority of the
world (naturally conceived only as world by our ancestors), we moderns only
have to look within the human being to find it, as our interiority.
There apparently is no problem, as we can see with the psychological
culture that has sprung up around the Jungian unconscious for the last sixty
years. And this “no problem” will therefore continue to harden into an inveterate
habit of thought, occluding any access to the real (i.e., the real logical status of
the soul today), as I said above.
Have I claimed here that the Jungian unconscious is not real, i.e., is a
human concept that does not reflect the living reality of soul today? Well, yes and
no. To lead us into this more deeply, I want to compare Jung’s confrontation with
the unconscious with an even more famous confrontation with fictional figures.
Alice in Wonderland and the Psychological Difference
When Alice drops into Wonderland, she leaves the categories of thought that
belong to empirical reality behind and becomes fictional herself, evaluating this
new reality within its own terms (remember her long conversations with the
caterpillar and Humpty Dumpty, for example). 6 While she is inside the fiction,
i.e., as the fictional “I”, each character opens up to its own interiority and depth,
its own truth. Although Alice is amazed and perturbed by the various characters,
she does not question their reality, using empirical categories. While she is in
Wonderland, they are as real as she is, demanding that they be taken on their
own terms, which Alice does willingly. When she shrinks and grows large, she is
frightened, yes, but not doubtful or sceptical. She simply deals with each
situation, as the situation itself demands. If an opiate-smoking caterpillar talks
to her, she simply engages with it as best she can, trying to understand it
entirely from within the fiction. She refrains from making the claim that the
caterpillar, for example, could not exist because caterpillars do not smoke opium
and cannot talk.
When she does at the end finally employ an empirical category of thought, “O,
you all are just a pack of cards!” she moves out of fictional reality back into
empirical reality where she becomes a little girl once more. You could say that
Alice’s employing that empirical category of thought is the very logical means by
which she moves out of fictional reality back into empirical reality. We do the
same every morning that we wake up out of a dream-state: “Whew, what a
dream!”
Now, the question arises, how am I able to say what I just said about Alice’s
adventures in Wonderland? How am I able to speak about Alice’s fictional “I” and
her empirical “I”, and her use or non-use of empirical categories of thought from
6
Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland
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within fictional reality? Alice does not talk in these terms at all and neither does
the author, Lewis Carroll.
I am able to approach Alice this way by virtue of the psychological difference
operating in the background of my observations. Straightaway we can see that
Giegerich’s formulation of the semantic-syntax difference within a soul
phenomenon (here the text of Alice in Wonderland) comes alive through the
background presence of the psychological difference. 7
I can thus pay attention not only to the content of the story but also to the
background logical structure that forms the content in the first place. This
“syntax” cannot be perceived but only thought. Once this implicit reality is
“thought” (not thought “about” but “thought” in the sense of thinking its
thinking), it can then be made explicit, as (what then becomes) reflected thought
which communicates to others, who then may be able to “see” it too, when they
next read Alice in Wonderland.
This exercise in psychological phenomenology is only possible because the logical
life of the soul “resides” today as the “syntax” of soul phenomena, not as the
content or semantics. We have to learn how to read content as expressive of the
syntax if we want to reach the soul of the real today.
This is quite a mouthful and to arrive at such a conclusion regarding the logical
status of soul today requires much study and effort. Yet, this conclusion lies at
the heart of PDI. Everything else follows from this conclusion. It is not an article
of faith. It is a conclusion!
For now, let’s work from this conclusion for the purposes of this essay and once
again turn to Liber Novus as a document of the soul.
Liber Novus and the Psychological Difference
Jung’s confrontation with the unconscious is obviously different from Alice’s
encounters in Wonderland on the level of semantics, or content. What is not so
obvious is that it is also entirely different on the level of syntax.
The text of Alice’s adventures, when seen as a soul phenomenon, displays a
structure of consciousness in which the empirical/fictional separation is
maintained. This historically determined separation emerged with the scientific
revolution, empirical reality being privileged as reality, and imaginal reality
being downgraded to, well, fiction!
The text (when viewed as a document of the soul) of Jung’s confrontation with
the unconscious, on the other hand, shows something very strange happening—
historically unheard-of.
“Jung’s account” is the account given by an ego that from the start is logically
exterior to the fictional images and thus could call them psychic facts, a
description only possible to a consciousness for which empirical reality is the
7
(Giegerich, 2008, p. 30). This form of the psychological difference appears throughout Giegerich’s works.
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privileged reality. So far, Jung is on the same level of logical structure as Lewis
Carroll.
The difference emerges when we note how Alice enters the fictional world by
passively falling down the rabbit hole (she falls asleep), leaving the empirical
world behind. Jung, on the other hand, in a deliberate and programmatic move,
forces his way into the fictional, while leaving his categories of empirical reality
intact. 8
I devised such a boring method [i.e. tunnelling] by fantasizing that I was digging
a hole, and by accepting this fantasy as perfectly real. This is naturally
somewhat difficult to do—to believe so thoroughly in a fantasy that it leads you
into further fantasy, just as if you were digging a real hole…
And: 9
Then a most disagreeable thing happened. Salome… began to worship me. I said,
“Why do you worship me?” She replied, “You are Christ.” In spite of my
objections she maintained this. I said, “This is madness,” and became filled with
sceptical resistance.
Alice moves smoothly between empirical and fictional reality, as we do when we
fall asleep and dream. Like Alice, we normally do not need to persuade ourselves
about the reality of the dream while we are dreaming. 10 Jung’s approach to
fictional reality however requires his “having to accept it as real”, i.e., he has to
convince himself, and it is difficult to do so. There is a doubt in place throughout.
We can also see that, while Jung is engaging as one image to another, as might
happen in a dream, he at the same time is also evaluating or interpreting the
image “from the outside”, i.e., as an empirical ego would.
The unheard-of move by Jung is that he employs empirical categories of thought
while remaining, by an act of will, within the imaginal state. “Disagreeable”,
“madness”, “sceptical resistance” are all evaluations that can be made only by an
ego that has attained a form of consciousness we know as positivistic today, i.e.,
the modern empirical ego. 11
This is only one example and I recommend Giegerich’s analysis of The Red Book,
for a conclusive discussion of this complex psychology at work. 12
8
(Jung, 1989, p. 47)
Ibid: p. 96
10
I am aware of lucid dreaming having a different logic to normal dreaming. See footnote 11.
11
To gain a sustained, unremitting experience of this procedural move of Jung’s, see the movie, Inception
(2009).
12
(Giegerich, 2010b, pp. 402-403)
9
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Jung enters his fantasies with the categories of external reflection, namely with
the distinction between fantasy and reality. Inside his fantasies, he views them
from the outside and doubts the reality of their figures. It is as if a novel tried to
pull the rug out from under its characters as only imagined, or as if we, while
dreaming, turned around to the wild animal or to the murderous criminal
chasing us and said to them, “you are only symbols”.
When approaching the text of Liber Novus as a soul phenomenon, as informed by
the psychological difference, we thus get a startlingly different understanding of
the nature of the Jungian unconscious. Far from recapitulating the qualities of
soul life belonging to former times, as hoped for by subsequent generations of
“Jungians”, the Jungian unconscious has the logical structure of a return to
metaphysics under modern conditions of positivity: 13
The question emerges for us how and why the unconscious did come to be
conceived as a natural object (thereby opening up the project of rescuing god or
Meaning). The precondition was the great revolution from the metaphysical to
the positivistic, scientistic stance at the beginning of the 19th century… the
unconscious is the return… of the memory of and longing for metaphysics under
the conditions of positivity [our modern form of consciousness—my insert].
This is a very complex structure of consciousness indeed but complexity should
not lead to naive bids for simplicity. Instead, as psychologists of the soul, we
should familiarize ourselves, with it, rise up to its demands, acquire the
comprehension of it for ourselves, and learn to think its thinking.
Consciousness of our Dissociated Structure
We can see from a psychological phenomenological approach to Liber Novus that
the background logical movements of soul life had determined the entire ordeal
that Jung underwent as a sustained torture to the point of madness for many
years. We must not forget that, in any evaluation we may make “from the
armchair”, as it were, of Jung’s efforts, he was serving the interests of the soul
from start to finish. But we are now in a position to inquire more deeply about
what those soul interests were, rather than simply taking Jung’s word for it
(Jung’s project).
My own formulation of the soul movement involved in Jung’s confrontation with
the unconscious is this: In thinking the semantic-syntactical structure of Liber
Novus, we can comprehend two soul movements. One movement aims at
recovering a lost past but in such a way that it needs to convince itself, thereby
demonstrating that all along, it does not really believe in what it is doing. The
13
(Giegerich, 2004, p. 209)
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other movement is a further development in the soul movement that Giegerich
has elsewhere called the Christian moment in history. 14 This development may
also be discerned in the same fear that gave rise to a longing for the return of
metaphysics in the first place. The soul has distilled out of the reality that once
could be best articulated by metaphysics. We human beings experience this shift
as a loss of Meaning, the very Meaning that Jung, under the neurotic regressive
pull of the soul itself, sought to recover in his particular conception of the
unconscious psyche.
Giegerich comments on this shift and our reaction to it: 15
With the disappearance of the metaphysical concept and definition of the soul
the soul itself did not also disappear. It entered a different logical status. It is a
positivistic fallacy to think that the negation of the metaphysical soul led simply
to nothing at all.…
The “dissolution into thin air” of the soul is a naturalistic picture of the soul’s
transformation into a reality status that no longer is reflected in any substantial
form at all (natural object, thing, even image-as-object—all these are
metaphysical in their logic). The soul today is occluded or hidden in the very
form of consciousness that we are today. We can apprehend its movements only
“within” that form of consciousness, i.e., the realm of living thought.
When kept in consciousness, the metaphysical return to “substance”, under
conditions of positivity, along with the distillation of soul-life beyond
substantiality altogether, constitute our modern structure of consciousness, as
exemplified in the text of Liber Novus, when viewed as a document of the soul.
The semantic-syntactical formulation demonstrates a very complex concept of
modern soul-life. It takes some getting used to but it is possible to get used to it
and even to live soulfully from within the living concept of the psychological
difference. It is us, in our definition!
We may begin for example, by paying attention to those habits of thought—
conscious beliefs, ideals, etc. about ourselves and our modern age (freedom to
choose, dignity of the human self, self-directedness, human rights, etc.) while, at
the same time comprehending how they are immediately undermined by
another, dissociated logical structure, at every turn, showing their unreality (the
global economy, exploitation, oppression, surveillance, etc.)
We could also give some attention to our unthinking allegiance to the Jungian
unconscious and ask if Jung’s interpretation of his confrontation with the
unconscious is the same thing as the logical structure (living logic, as which the
14
15
(Giegerich, 2007b)
(Giegerich, 2012, p. 20)
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phenomenon exists) of the text of The Red Book, when seen as a document of the
soul.
Nietzsche’s true greatness as a mouthpiece of his and our age can be found in his
simple statement God is Dead, in which the content is undermined by the syntax
just as quickly as it is said, demonstrating in one move the complexity of our
modern consciousness and as well, the psychological difference. 16
16
See Giegerich’s essay: Saban’s Alternative: An Alternative? (2012), pp. 8-9
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Works Cited
Giegerich, W. (2004). After Shamdasani. Spring 71, 193-213.
____________ (2007b). Collected English Papers Volume II: Technology and the
Soul. New Orleans: Spring Journal Books.
____________ (2008). Collected English Papers Volume III: Soul Violence. New
Orleans: Spring Journal Inc.
____________ (2010b). Liber Novis, that is, The New Bible, A First Analysis of C.
G. Jung's Red Book. Spring 83, 361-413.
____________ (2010c). The Soul Always Thinks. New Orleans: Spring.
____________ (2012). What is Soul? New Orleans: Spring Journal Books.
Jung, C. G. (1965). Memories, Dreams, Reflections. New York: Random House.
__________ (1989). Analytical Psychology: Notes on the seminar given in 1925.
(W. McGuire, Ed.) Princeton: Princeton University Press.
__________ (2009). The Red Book. (S. Shamdasani, Ed., S. Shamdasani, M.
Kyburz, & J. Peck, Trans.) New York: W.W. and Norton & Company.
Tacey, D. (2010). Ecopsychology and the Sacred: The Psychological Basis of the
Environmental Crisis. Spring 83, 329-353.
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