based on an Hungarian folktale.
Two villagers were crossing a field when they came across… a strange ‘something’. Neither knew was it was. They had never seen such a thing. One prodded it with a toe. The other turned it over with a stick. Between them they gathered the courage to see if it could be lifted and decided to take it back to the village council. Let them decide.
The Council were mightily perplexed. Despite their great experience and vast knowledge, none of them had ever seen such a thing. They went and asked the Mayor, known for his great wisdom. At great length he announced that the thing must be.. an egg. The others were amazed, of course, how wise, it must be an egg.
But what kind of egg? A dragon? Or maybe a griffin? Someone cleverly remembered that here had been a horse in the field, so… it must be a horse egg! Of course! But what to do with the horse egg and how to hatch it? The local horses all seemed too stupid to know what to do. So they elected to take turns to sit on the egg and hatch it themselves.
Eventually news spread and people from the neighbouring village came to have a look. One small boy observed that the egg had a bad smell and poked fun at them all saying that their egg had gone off. The villagers were peeved at being so humiliated and decided to take revenge. They took the egg to the top of a hill, wanting to roll it down on top of their rude neighbours. But the egg went off course, breaking up in a gorse bush half way down. This frightened a rabbit who had been sleeping there. It took off at great speed. ‘Look!’ they cried, ‘there goes the baby horse.’
When we speak about the Unconscious there is a tendency to assume we all mean the same thing. Jung’s break with Freud was, at least in part, because he discovered they had very different ideas about it. Likewise, though we analysts and lay persons alike all use the term ‘the unconscious’, it seems incumbent upon us to wonder about what we actually mean. Jung’s core definition is, “The unconscious is the totality of all psychic phenomena that lack the quality of consciousness.” CW 6 (Psychological Types), ¶837
Does this make us any the wiser? Is it enough to say that night is everything that is not day, or to refine further by saying that sometimes you can see your hand in front of your face but sometimes not? Moreover, considerable disagreement exists between different Jungian groups which makes a cohesive definition all the more difficult. The more archetypally oriented have a mytho-poetic slant which feels qualitatively different from the more developmentally inclined.
Anthony Stevens says, “The unconscious is the repository of the inherited potentialities of the human psyche.” ((1994), p. 54) This feels very different from von Franz’ definition, “The unconscious is not just a repository of forgotten material but a living, autonomous reality which compensates and corrects the one-sidedness of consciousness.” ((1988), p. 9) Edinger’s definition, “The unconscious is the objective psyche, a reality independent of the personal ego.” (1972), p. 5 which seems qualitatively distinct from Neumann, ‘The unconscious is not only the source of consciousness but also its matrix and its partner.” ((1954), p. xv)
Hillman’s take, “The unconscious is not a place or a container but a perspective, a way of seeing through the imagination.” (1975), p. 23. He emphasises that it is not a hidden layer beneath consciousness but is identical with the imaginal field itself. This feels very different from the developmental perspective of it being a structured psychic system.
To add a further, more philosophically nuanced layer to an already complex conversation, there is the question of whether the term ‘unconscious’ is perhaps a mere literary device. Jung says in the Red Book, ‘the unbounded makes you anxious. Consequently you seek limits and restraints so that you do not lose yourself. You cry out for the word which has one meaning and no other so that you escape boundless ambiguity. The word becomes your God since it protects you from the countless possibilities of interpretation. The word is protective magic..'(p250)
What if we were to refrain from thinking of the unconscious as a noun. Could we dispense with the term altogether? If it is not a natural object does it even exist in any meaningfully describable way? Though this rather feels like rolling the horse egg peevishly down the hill. Are we to disenfranchise the Unconscious simply because it is not ‘a thing’, especially since it is the abundant author of things; dreams, moods, inspiration, memories.
Lao tzu begins the Tao to Ching by saying
‘The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.
The name that can be named is not the eternal name.
The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth;
the named is the mother of the ten thousand things.’
Analysts want to be taken seriously, feeling obliged by the gravity of our vocation to be rigorous and accountable. And yet it’s difficult not to find ourselves stammering at the edges of the known. In the ‘Birth of Tragedy’, Nietzsche says, “Language, as the organ and symbol of phenomena, can never by any means disclose the innermost heart of things.” We are inevitably like the blind Mullahs from Persian lore trying to describe an elephant from the limited perspective of feeling either the tail or the ear, the trunk or the foot. Concepts must falter when faced with that which transcends them. We are left rather wanting a propitious awe prepared to trade knowing for wonder. The epistemological humility of being able to embrace not knowing is, paradoxically, the precondition for the alchemical opus. Not-knowing is neither passivity nor ignorance, but rather the active psychological stance which allows transformation to occur.
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