Topic: "Brain and Belief"

[Matt Koeske]

I've started reading the book Brain and Belief: An Exploration of the Human Soul by John McGraw.  The first half is devoted to a survey of the concept of the human soul/spirit throughout history.  McGraw traces the concept (of a separate, non-material, and "superior" selfhood) back to shamanism originally and the mystical "out-of-body", trance experiences of the shamans.  From there he darts through ancient Egyptian afterlife ideas and Zoroastrian dualism and into ancient Greek Platonism, where the soul or mind/body split was doctrinized and became the staple crop feeding the rest of Western history.

McGraw felt that Plato may have derived the concept of a superior and disconnected, immaterial soul from the Orphic cult religions of the time (that McGraw feels may have retained a kind of shamanic, ecstasy tradition).

The remainder of the book deals with neuroscience and various data dealing with how the brain is affected by chemicals, diseases, and injuries (i.e., demonstrating some connections between the brain's materiality and our conscious perception and experience of that materiality).  I haven't finished this section of the book yet (and will comment more when I have), but I doubt most Jungians will find McGraw's materialism up their more spiritualistic alleys.

For now, I'd like to comment a bit on McGraw's construction of the history of soul.  By placing the origin of the notion of soul in shamanism, I feel that McGraw might be erring in the assumption that soul is fundamentally a human concept (perhaps something like a meme, although I don't recall McGraw using that term).  I think it is more likely that the idea of soul is a logical byproduct of our brains' evolution and structure.  We don't choose, whether through mystical experience or logical deduction, to believe in the soul.  We are naturally inclined to believe in the soul and must, in order to disbelieve in it, develop a kind of rationalistic perspective from which we can look upon ourselves objectively, not as godlings, but as animals that are not significantly different than any other animals.  In a more objective comparison of ourselves and our behaviors with animals and their behaviors, we may come to see ourselves as rather less divine than we intuitively imagined . . . therefore concluding that the notion of an immaterial and transcendent soul was some kind of illusion of the way our minds work.

Why, then, do our brains create the illusion of soul?  I've written about this elsewhere, so I won't go into a great deal of detail, but essentially, I see this as part of our projective consciousness or "theory of mind".  That is, we (perhaps differently and certainly more conceptually than other animals) construct realities in conceptual space.  We construct other people in our conceptual space in a way that combines our (primarily unconscious) perceptions of them filled in with "guesses" based on what we (again unconsciously) imagine we would be thinking if we were in the other person's position with the other person's personality and set of experiences.  We project what is familiar to us (or equally, what is within us that we do not recognize as part of our sense of self; i.e., the shadow) into our constructions of others in order to construct them with minds, intentionality, agency, will. 

These constructs occupy psychic space within us, an organized space that resembles a kind of collective or natural ecosystem or modern/diverse human society.  This space may resemble the complex interconnectivity of our brain's neurons, but I would never propose anything like a one-to-one mapping of constructs onto neurons.  What I mean to suggest is that we carry within us all of our constructions of otherness and of things both from the world and from our confabulating psyches.  I suspect that to the material psyche, constructions do not consist merely of the wholes that we consciously perceive them as (say, Uncle Barney or your next door neighbor, Sue).  As egos, we are fixated on this kind of agent-sized construct or identity/personality (especially where we perceive sentience).  But the unconscious psyche stores its constructs as complexes of their quantum elements.  The construct of Uncle Barney is composed of tens or hundreds of thousands (or more) of subtle (largely unconscious) quantum observations and deductions based on the experience and imagination of Barney (especially, I think, as these data relate to similar/associable data).

This allows for a great deal of economy and efficiency in our memories, because these memory quanta can be used in many different constructs.  We don't have to store (remember/construct/know) "red hat" and "red pants" as two entirely different, whole constructs.  We can use "red" as one quantum applied to both (and many other) quanta.  This organization of memory would function as enormous (and enormously complex) webs of interconnected quanta.  And we cannot fail to observe that the structure and behavior of our 100 billion neurons (each linked to roughly 10,000 other neurons) does in fact seem to resemble the structure of memory quanta mentioned above.  But again, "seems" is not in itself satisfactory for science.  Still, the coincidence is definitely worth keeping in mind.

Our psyches (and brains) allow us to carry around within ourselves a huge number of "real" and "created" beings in constructed form.  What we commonly see in our dreams are personages that have conglomerate personalities . . . perhaps a little bit of Uncle Barney, a little bit of a famous actor, a little bit of someone unknown.  Personages in dreams consist as constructions of traits and qualities (which, again, supports the theory of memory quanta).  The constructions of those others most familiar to us have a chance of being more detailed and accurate . . . which we would perceive as more "real", fixed, consistent.  When these people are parted from us either temporarily or permanently (e.g., through their deaths), they do not leave our psyches (although some of the quanta used in their constructions may fade or find stronger "synaptic" connections to other quanta unrelated to the person in question).

To have these Others constructed inside our minds, would undoubtedly facilitate some kind of "haunting", maybe even episodes of possession.  This could become especially powerful (and "Other") when the construct of an "ancestor" was projectively filled out (confabulated) with archetypal or instinctual phenomena that compelled adaptive behavior.  In animistic tribalism, this projective theory of mind could be applied to any significant fixture in or affecting the tribe . . . especially anything that moves, grows, or lives, i.e., displays something resembling agency.  It could be the sun, moon, and stars.  It could be the weather, the trees, the rivers, the mountains, the wildlife, etc.

In other words, it doesn't require shamanic experience to invent the idea of soul or spirit.  It only requires the architecture of the human brain and the experience of living.  That isn't to say that shamanism (or whatever drives shamanism) might not have had an impact on the developing notion of the human soul.  I think the most likely connection between the two would be related to the concept of shaman as token individuant for a tribe.  The shaman's ego is individuated/separated from the tribe more than the egos of the other members are.  S/he serves the health of the tribe by providing a perspective outside the tribal Eros somewhat.  This allows the shaman to be a bridge between the tribe's mind and Otherness.  This Otherness bridging could serve to facilitate innovative thinking and strategizing (about, for instance, hunting or migration strategies) or it could be a way of bringing archetypal instinct (the instinctual unconscious) effectively into the tribe to stimulate its adaptation.  The shaman would help facilitate this through organized ceremonies and rites so that the destructive (dismembering/dissolving) burden of confrontation between the individual ego and the Instinctual Self could be mediated by a token individuant who has undergone this shamanic dismemberment for the sake of the tribe and can then conduct others through a less severe version of the dismemberment/initiation via organized rites.

In the shamanic separation of ego from (unconscious) affiliation with the tribal Eros, we can see an intentional precursor of the modern ego's comparatively undesired fracturing of tribal affiliations.  That is, the modern ego cannot be fully affiliated with any one tribe (as in our environment of evolutionary adaptedness).  Instead we must negotiate and individually valuate dozens if not hundreds of minor affiliations to tribalistic groups, doctrines, and mindsets.  But there is one designated navigator and liaison for all of these affiliations: the modern ego.  It's the ego that decides how many eggs to place in each basket . . . even if this is not always done with complete consciousness.  Our senses of identity are largely constructed by the way we organize and valuate our many tribal affiliations.

We don't necessarily undertake a mystical journey of initiation to cleave ourselves from the affiliations we are born into in the same way the shaman does or did, but we must still suffer the kind of separation from unconscious Eros (if only semi-consciously as something like "ennui") that the Shaman cultivated as part of her or his initiation.


This is perhaps too much time spent on a minor point, but the point needs to be addressed in McGraw's construction of the soul's history.  The body/soul or spirit/matter split McGraw documents reaches pathological proportions with the institution of Platonism.  In his study of Orphic-influenced Plato and on into the early Christians and Gnostics, McGraw continues to look for shamanic elements behind the religion or philosophy . . . and these are easy to find.  But do these findings really demonstrate the inheritance of soul/body dualism or mightn't they alternatively be a product of the instinct for individuation (originally shamanism) residing at core of all human spirituality?  That is, the common archetypal factor might be initiation (death/rebirth experience of ego reconstruction), not the "meme" or the cognitive architecture behind soul/body dualism (which I don't think is essential to initiation).

Instead of flagging shamanism as the culprit behind soul/body separation, I would prefer to point my finger at the environment.  In this case, the environmental shift brought on by the transition from tribalism to modernism (to mark only the largest and most distant cities on this complex, multistage route).  It seems to me that a division between soul and body was inevitable as soon as the ego became more necessary as the arbiter of tribal affiliations (in proto modern society).  It would make perfect sense, then, that this dualistic notion would reach its ideological emergence in a proto-modern city-state like Athens that had already moved toward social and governmental organizations (like democracy) aimed at navigating through problems inherent to modernism and population diversity.

It isn't very difficult to trace the ideology of soul/body dualism from Plato all the way to its expression in the totalitarian institutionalization of Christianity in Rome.  Under Christianity we see a deeply ruthless war between the two poles . . . and the utter subjugation of body to soul or matter to spirit.  I don't intend to go into it here, but it is definitely worth seriously contemplating whether such a split was truly beneficial (or perhaps even necessary) for human "social development".  It will come as no surprise to those familiar with my critiques of Christianity that I tend to see this as perhaps the Great Tragedy of the Western Mind.  It seems to me that the severing of soul from body and the subsequent denigration of the body is ultimately the triumph of dissociative human hubris . . . massive, widespread ego-inflation.  This inflation gradually banished more and more of the instincts originally projected into Nature (and engaged with) through animism . . . until Nature and Matter were so negatively empowered that some kind of enantiodromia began (probably around the Enlightenment).  Since then, materialism has been ascending, spirit/soul being depotentiated.

I can't help but look at this situation as two sides of the same coin.  Whether we get heads-materialism or tails-spiritualism, we are still locked into a dualistic and dissociated mindset.  We could say that today's scientific materialism (i.e., its driving mindset) is still reacting against the millennia of anti-materialistic spiritualism.  Christianity (or its forefather, Platonism) is not as much the opponent of modern materialistic rationalism as its progenitor, its fertile soil.  That is, the war between spiritualism and materialism is a kind of "illusion of the Opposites", a spinning of Maya that only acquires its energy from the wound of dissociation between two things that are at their original root, the same.

We can see the continued reaction against spiritualism in the so-called "new atheism" popular today and exemplified by writers like Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennet, and Sam Harris.  They are (in my opinion) just as limited by the blinders of Platonic dualism as their supposed spiritual fundamentalist opponents.

But what if this most important of philosophical issues (mind/body dualism) has merely been the product of living increasingly in an environment in which the human ego is hyper-emphasized, inflated, and elevated (through environmental selection and innate disposition) into a kind of unbalanced peacock's tail?  Both the materialists and spiritualists see great arrogance in one another . . . and perhaps they are both correct.  I tend to see fundamentalism and tribalism in both mindsets . . . while seeking to find some (as yet inadequately constructed) balance between the two.  To spiritualists I am a raging materialist (and I do tend to see no reason for the proposal of a spirit or soul . . . the brain accomplishes everything just fine, in my opinion), while to "real" materialists I would seem a romantic and mystical Jungian, throwing around archaic terms like "Self" and "archetype" and maybe even "ego" as I do and talking about the value of mysticism and individuation and esoteric rigmarole like alchemy.

From my relatively non-partisan perspective on this issue, it seems that advocates of both tribes fail miserably to think outside their favored boxes and cannot differentiate between someone who half agrees/half disagrees with them from a full-blown Opponent.  That failure to differentiate is always a sure sign of fundamentalism or severe polarization.  What I mean to point out is that we are all living in the chains of our unreflected-upon tribal allegiances.  This dissociation, this great mental wound is something we all inherit today.  No one is immune.  We are trying to think while a steel bear trap crushes our skulls.

My interest in finding some kind of equilibrium or synthesis here, some kind of spirit-matter coniunctio is an advocacy for the slipping out of this trap that our modern socialization imposes on us.  My hope is that we've reached the crest of the materialistic enantiodromia, and that we will (instead of swinging back to spiritualistic fundamentalism) move intelligently toward synthesis and healing of our collective wound.  Regrettably, I've encountered so few people (in the Jungian world) so far who are ready and willing to start imagining such a synthesis.  I continue to hope this is just due to Useless Science's low profile and not a matter of the Jungian community as a whole being dissociated beyond any hope of synthesis.


I will comment on the rest of McGraw's book after I finish it.

[Matt Koeske]

The remainder of Brain and Belief deals very little with the brain.  Turns out it was more of a philosophical treatise on materialism.  The author's basic argument is that (what I call) "spiritualistic" beliefs represent an "immature" philosophy that is somewhat dissociated from the realness of reality.  He recommends a more (material) reality-oriented philosophy resembling Epicureanism.  He's also partial to the Buddhist notion of seeing-through Maya, deconstructing illusion, following the "Middle Path" between unconscious indulgence in either blind belief or pleasure-seeking and asceticism.  The simple life.

I'm not sure if this is either easy or practical to do today.  Of course the dream of the Simple Life is attractive to many of us.  But we live within great complexity, now more than ever.  Is the Simple Life still possible, and if so, how might one cope with the demands of diversity and complexity in order to find one's way to the Simple Life?  I don't know . . . and McGraw doesn't provide any instructions.  Practical instructions would require a psychology, not a philosophy, which is far too general and does not take into account the structure, dispositions, and needs of the human psyche.

McGraw's prescription, though not inane, is far too simplistic for my tastes . . . and in itself, it offers no real innovation (no way of really incorporating our more sophisticated understanding of materiality into a post-Epicurean kind of philosophy).  What is most interesting about McGraw's book and thinking is his core rejection of Platonic thinking.  I think he really has put his finger on a major problem of modern society (especially in the West, but in our increasingly globalized/Westernized world, this has become everyone's problem).

It is important, I feel, with McGraw, to follow the thread of spirit/body dissociation back to its source (at least to its ideological source in Platonism) and ask why we so deeply and absolutely embraced this dissociation.  And I mean dissociation in the pathological sense of the term.  Whatever innovations we may ascribe to Platonism, the fact remains that it is the ideology responsible for dividing our sense of spirit from our sense of matter in a way that enabled Christian ideology (among others) to wage its brutal war against body, matter, and instinct.  A war that took many casualties, not the least of which is the socialized or acculturated psyche (ego) of Western humanity (which has been denuded of its materiality).

We still struggle to see the Wound in this mass psychic movement . . . but I think we would do well to strive for such recognition.  Unlike McGraw, I'm not inclined to point the finger of blame at either shamanism or the "dangerous meme" of Platonism.  I suspect that Platonism was more a symptom than a cause.  I think the cause itself was modernization.  To put it too simply in order to make a point: population expansion, diversification, and societal and technological advancement placed increasing demands on the human ego . . . or on the unconscious "obedience" of the human ego to the instinctual unconscious.  "Modern consciousness" was increasingly needed in order to navigate the swelling and complexifying mass of social/cultural information . . . i.e., the "tribal consciousness/ego" was being asked to do more, and to do it more abstractly (to deal with more and more information).  In other words, modern egoism was necessitated by a change in our environment (and the human environment is culture or society) . . . and modern egoism logically led to an ideology exalting modern egoism as a good in itself, i.e., a foundation of Platonism.

The proto-modern demands on the ego led to what might be seen as an over-dependence on this manifestation of egoism.  The ego was plastic enough to offer functionality in proto-modern living, to facilitate proto-modern living . . . and it therefore became the totem of proto-modernism, the vehicle through which proto-modern humans were successful and achieved proto-modernistic "fitness".  As such a totem, a religiosity developed around the ego and its specific capacities and talents.  But this religiosity's attribution to the egoic meant that some of the spirit newly afforded the egoic had to be wrested away from matter and Nature.  The victims, often enough, were the very things that restrained or directed the ego, that tied it to matter and instinct and the body.

But modernizing society rewarded egoism, especially egoism that could (at least seem to) repress the "temptations and distractions" of the body.  So on one hand (or in a particular set of social circumstances), egoism was "fit", but on the other hand, it produced "externalities" or shadow.  Part of modern egoism is the fight with the shadow, the attempt to bury it or keep it well out of the way of the ego's attitudes and ambitions.  This dissociation tended to necessitate ego-inflation, as the body, instincts, and the matter grew more and more demonized, misunderstood, cast aside . . . allowing them access to the act of living only through "backdoor" means, perhaps providing a demonic impetus to ambition, law-making/-enforcing, and other modernistic religiosities. 

Platonism essentially provided an ideological justification for this spiritualization of the ego.  It's myth of Socrates' self-sacrifice served as one of the most important precursors and archetypes for the later, Neoplatonic Christian myth (where not only the body, but the entire humanness of Jesus is sacrificed for the absolutely disembodied "spiritual personality").  Socrates' self-sacrifice indirectly states that the true seat of selfhood is not the body, but the abstract, the idea, the spirit, which disseminated (via Plato in this case) can become eternal.  The abstract ego is entitled to an afterlife . . . where it merges with the mythic.  No human personage is better preserved or immortalized in this deified way than Plato's Socrates.  As "spirit" Socrates has affected and influenced countless millions, maybe billions of people.

In the Christian myth, the debasement of the body is given even more dramatic coloring.  Not only in the preaching of the Christ, but in the bloody story of his Passion, where the body of Jesus is treated with vengeful sadism.  The abstract life (or after-life) is prescribed as the perfect antidote to living.  If seen as the myth of body and spirit, the Christian story is like a pornographic snuff film.  Think that's extreme?  You would be wrong.  It wasn't that long ago that Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ recaptured this very essence that had always been a major part of the Christian story.  Many Christian institutions advocated for the Gibson film, even prescribing it to their congregations, and millions of people watched it (many feeling rushes of "religious" feelings that helped reinvigorate their "faith").

Of course, Mel Gibson didn't invent the Passion Play.  It had been used back in the middle ages as Church propaganda and officially sanctioned entertainment.

One thing that McGraw doesn't address in his book is the way that, even with the post-Enlightenment rise of materialism, the body (and matter) remained debased.  The Platonic/Christian attitude toward (or valuation of) the material remained as present as ever in rationalistic materialism.  We might even say that such materialism was not the opposite of Platonic Christianism, but its rightful heir.  God was more expendable than the debasement of the body and matter.  But perhaps what was happening (psychologically) was that the spirit that had been abstracted (out of matter) and deified in Platonic Christianity (leading to the notion of an egoic God . . . or Trinity of Gods) was abstracted even more and became invested in the ego entirely.  The archaic anthropomorphization or egoization of material instinctuality was no longer needed in the "Age of Reason", because the ego has swallowed all right to be worshiped.

I can't help but see the worship of the ego in modern materialism as the inevitable fulfillment of the Platonic movement.  Where Christianity was a middle passage to increasing egoism (division of spirit and matter; "spirit" was later re-termed "mind").  Even within Christianity, we can see the movement from the earlier Catholicism to the later "reformation" of Protestantism, which is significantly more abstract and "modernized" in most of its forms than Catholicism was.  Jung took issue with Protestantism significantly for this and similar reasons (i.e., it is less animistic, more egoic than Catholicism).  More recently, fundamentalist and evangelical Christianities have sought to return to a more tribalistic condition, but they are attempting to do this with little or no recognition of the ego-worship and inflation inherent in the belief system.  They seem to have grown unconscious of their egoism or the seeming conflicts in their symbiotic collaborations with overtly egotistical clans and ideological institutions (e.g., neocon Republicanism).

Ardent materialists like the "New Atheists" and their supposed opponents, the fundamentalist religionists, may have more in common than they have in conflict.  Both are legitimate heirs of Platonism and its inheritance of devalued matter.


What does this mean to Jungians?

Not a whole heck of a lot if, like most Jungians, one is perfectly content with his or her neo-tribalistic, neo-animistic environmental niche.  Very little going on in the "real world" touches us (neither disrupting nor sustaining us).  Of course, Jungians are just as Platonic as anyone else, and that means we might find some kind of meaning in an investigation of our Platonic Wound.  Jung was aware of this problem, but didn't necessarily have much to offer.  I.e., not much to offer in a constructive way.  He decried modern egoism and its penchant for positivistic rationalism and advocated a quasi-animistic reanimation of the human environment (or re-mythologization).  Jung was perhaps less adept at recognizing how some of his ideas might stem from part of the problem he meant to address.

That is, Jung placed a great deal of importance on "consciousness" and attributed not only a certain "divine entitlement" to its position in the human psyche but also a rather heroic capacity to "do something about" the Problem of the Modern.  In Jungian psychodynamics, consciousness and unconsciousness are still basically opposed and at war with one another . . . and the Jungian unconscious is distinctly materialistic, instinctual, and biological (even if not entirely so).  It is, for instance, consciousness that "gets sick" or suffers and is treated in Jungianism, and that consciousness must both deal with the "opposing" illness and its equally ego-compensating "cure".  In other words, the ego is the potential solution.  Only more vaguely is it also seen as the problem.  More often and more distinctly, Jung attributes problems to "complexes" that are autonomous, largely unconscious, and disruptive to egoism.

Of course, the Jungian "cure" is a reformation (individuation) of the ego . . . but that is relegated to the fine print of the analytic contract and colored over with slogans like "you need to strengthen your ego to do this analysis".  In the Jungian notion of psyche or Self, there is still a prominent and (typically) primitive "dark half", an Antichrist, a demonic underminer pushing the ego toward archaic, self-destructive "solutions".  The ego still needs to separate the sheep from the goats.

Jung's notion of the Self as both Good and Bad was a significant improvement over Freud's idea of the devalued, primitive/infantile, and dangerous id, but the very notion of Good vs. Evil is a relativistic human construct.  Why not see the unconscious as merely a natural life force, a will to live common to all material lifeforms?  Life is a will, and will conflicts, makes its own obstacles.  These need not be Evil, nor need the will be Good (or Evil).  Can we look at Nature accurately as Good and Evil?  Even the Nature in us or that we are?  Abstract Evil is a human creation.  We are the only beings capable of it (or at least we are the most prone to it).  Is it fair to attribute this Evil to our material instincts?  Can there be Evil action without ego?  And if not, should ego be the most likely suspect for the origin of Evil?

The idea that the ego mediates and restrains an innate inclination toward Evil sounds like a very Platonic notion to me . . . especially when we know that empathy and altruism seem to have pre-human/pre-egoic roots (i.e., are not spiritualistic, but material attributes).

I'm not interested in pursuing the notion of Evil right now.  I want merely to reflect on our (Jungians as well as human) Platonic inheritance of a spirit/matter dissociation Wound.  As Jungians, we have continued to devalue "materialism" and rationalism.  That is part of our tribal credo.  But why do we occupy ourselves with the continued devaluation of materialism (and component exaltation of spiritualism) rather than dedicate ourselves to the valuation of materialism?  Not the advocacy for a devalued/de-animated matter (i.e., ideological positivism), but a true revaluation of matter that doesn't Platonically place it below spirit.  Yet we can only imagine materialism as positivism, as de-spirited matter.

It is not positivistic materialism that is the problem for us Jungians.  The problem is our positivistic prejudice and inability to recognize the innate value of matter.  As Platonists, we fail to understand the majesty of matter and therefore turn to spiritualism, an egoization and abstraction of matter's majesty.  But the failing is ours in this case, not the so-called materialistic rationalists'.  Our spiritualism only reinforces a de-spirited materialism.  Our fear to valuate matter is, I think, ultimately the fear to remove egoism from its currently deified position.  The ego has gobbled up matter's majesty.  It's not spirit or meaning or the gods that we protect with our spiritualism . . . it's our sense of self, our notion of the divine or semi-divine ego.  Rationalism frightens us because it brings our inflation into our field of awareness.  The 19th century rationalists that Jung criticized were notably inflated and egotistical, seeing themselves as masters of Reason and conquerers of spiritualistic superstitions.  But such conquering involves assimilation of the thing conquered.  In that 19th century style of rationalism, ego inflation and the sense of "Man's supremacy" are clearly evident.

But this, I propose, is the shadow of Jungian spiritualism.  It can be seen in egoic exaltation in Jungian individuation and in the bitterness with which materialism is ignored or despised.  It can be seen in the fear and demonization of "archetypal inflation", the debasement of "thinking types" (the "thinking type" in Jungianism is more clearly egoic, holding up a dangerous shadow-mirror to the Jungian temperament), and the transformation of Jung into a disembodied guru, a wise man disconnected from his personal ambitions and sexual desires.  Jungianism has become more Platonic since Jung, not less.

We have failed to valuate matter . . . and in this failure we can find our still bleeding dissociation Wound, as well as our insurmountable obstacle, our inability to progress in our understanding of the psyche or our experience of individuation.  The Platonic prejudice against matter is too precious to us, and we won't relinquish it.  We can barely even mention the body without qualifiers like "subtle" or "psychophysical" that spiritualize and abstract the reality of the body.

I think it is time (has long been time) for Jungians to re-ensoul matter (very different than spiritualizing matter, which we have long excelled at, much to our deficit).  That is in many ways the project behind Useless Science and behind my own theory building and revising.  I think we are at an impasse as Jungians and must start reimagining our collective project.  This should probably start with a reevaluation of our Platonism and our lowly opinions of matter.

Materialism doesn't have to be a bad word . . . nor does it have to imply a desacrilized world.  And that's what really matters: meaning, sacredness, valuation.  Spiritualistic belief is an acceptable causality of Jungian theoretical progress.  Jungian psychology is, after all, supposed to be a science . . . not a religion.