C.G. Jung

Today we pay tribute to Switzerland’s Carl Gustav Jung, the analytical psychologist who – like the artist William Blake and the civil rights leader Malcolm X – has risen to become a modern day World Prophet of the West not through any contemporary public’s mass reaction to his heroic deeds of the day, but through the sheer continued U S E F U L L N E S S of his New World View which, having filtered down through the decades to this present time, still daily presents we 21^st Century Moderns with a rigorous enough paradigm to keep on keeping on. So hail to thee, mighty Carl Jung who dared not only to split with Freud, but whose Visions (and extraordinarily thorough research papers) regarding the so-called Collective Unconscious made of him nothing less than a latter day Zarathustra, better still a northern Odin in the truest frontiersman sense, for Jung DARED to judge, to stand one before the other, point a finger and say: ‘That one!’

Whereas Freud in his concept of the non-personal mind saw only murk and jettisoned human debris, C.G. Jung’s vision of the Collective Unconscious was an almost infinitely-levelled  psychic ocean of all past collective human experience from whose unfathomable depths even the most forgotten experiences could with consideration yet be retrieved. Nothing was lost forever, only buried deep in the silt of time. And Jung it was who set the West on its head with his research into UFO’s, alchemy and the occult, his adventuresome spirit always craftily concealed beneath his fierce reputation as a cold analyst and hefty scientific credentials, which the good doctor, throughout his long career, cannily deployed at any opportunity in order to trespass into the kind of obscure areas of bizarre, unauthentic research that would have ruined the careers of lesser men.

So let us raise our glasses to C.G. Jung, this Sage of the Scientific Age, this Freer of the West whose decades of visions, research and literature has so aided our first tentative steps into this post-Christian Age.

[Written by Julian Cope]