jung's contribution to an ecological psychology

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2001 41: 96Journal of Humanistic PsychologyJeremy D. Yunt

Jung's Contribution to an Ecological Psychology

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Jung’s Contribution to an Ecological PsychologyJeremy D. Yunt

JUNG’S CONTRIBUTIONTO AN ECOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY

JEREMY D.YUNT is a writer and independent scholarwhose particular areas of interest are environmentalphilosophy/ethics, depth psychology, Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and the thought of philosopher-theologian Paul Tillich. He recently completed aninterdisciplinary master’s degree in ethics and depthpsychology at the Pacific School of Religion (Gradu-ate Theological Union), Berkeley, California, wherehe wrote a thesis on the significance of Tillich’s thoughtfor environmental ethics and deep ecology. Duringhis graduate studies, he worked as a writer and edi-

tor for the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences, also in Berkeley.Prior to entering graduate school, he worked for the Sierra Club LegalDefense Fund, a nonprofit environmental law firm, and prior to that madecontributions to a multi-award-winning book on California’s natural andcultural history, titled Life on the Edge (Heyday, 1994). Currently taking ahiatus from graduate school to pursue his own writing and flamenco guitarstudies,he plans to eventually complete a doctorate in clinical psychology.

Summary

This article connects the psychological concepts and philosophicalinsights of Jung with some of the basic postulates of ecopsychology.The thesis of the article is that Jung’s depth psychological approach isa relevant hermeneutic device for understanding and dealing withthe psychic roots of the modern world’s ecological problems. Usingthe concepts of archetypes, the collective unconscious, repression,archaic consciousness, personal and collective shadows, and individ-uation, the article demonstrates how each has implications for theadvancement of an ecopsychological approach to the psyche and ourunderstanding of the world. Perhaps most important, the articleexemplifies how Jung’s psychological research allows us to envision

96

AUTHOR’S NOTE: My thanks to Richard Payne of the Institute of BuddhistStudies (Graduate Theological Union, or GTU), GTU doctoral student KimberlyWhitney, Tom Greening, and all the peer reviewers who offered their constructivecriticisms of this article.

Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Vol. 41 No. 2, Spring 2001 96-121© 2001 Sage Publications, Inc.



the interpenetration of psyche, nature, and spirit, thus bridging themodern epistemological gap that has developed between them in theWestern world.

As scientific understanding has grown, so our world has become de-humanized. Man feels himself isolated in the cosmos, because he is nolonger involved in nature. . . . His contact with nature is gone, and withit has gone the profound emotional energy that this symbolic connec-tion supplied.

—Jung (1964, p. 95)

The facts of nature cannot in the long run be violated. Penetrating andseeping through everything like water, they will undermine any systemthat fails to take account of them, and sooner or later they will bringabout its downfall. But an authority wise enough in its statesmanshipto give sufficient free play to nature—of which spirit is a part—needfear no premature decline.

—Jung (1966a , par. 227)

Even in light of the above quotations, Carl Jung never wroteanything explicitly about the science of ecology and in his lifetimeprobably never imagined there would one day be a field called“ecopsychology.” Yet, Jung’s psychological insights and philosophi-cal convictions often carried in them a strong foreboding of moder-nity’s swiftly changing relationship to the natural world. For thisreason, many of his psychological concepts and much of his writingon humanity’s understanding of itself and its world have direct sig-nificance for analyzing and dealing with one of modernity’s pri-mary problems: balancing human needs and desires with the eco-logically discernible needs of the natural world. Perhaps mostimportant is Jung’s conception of the fully developed, or individu-ated, human being, for, as we will see, the process of individuationdepends to some degree on our ability to participate actively in thevitality, richness, and depth of the natural world.

To set the tone for this article, it will be helpful to let one ofJung’s terse and timely insights shed light on the most fundamen-tal reason we are now making the connection between psychologyand ecology.Going to the root of the problem,Jung (1976) stated, “Itis becoming ever more obvious that it is not famine, not earth-quakes, not microbes, not cancer but man himself who is man’sgreatest danger to man” (par. 1358). These few words are of greatimportance for the theories and methods of ecopsychology, for they

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point to the inextricable link between the state of health of thehuman psyche and its concrete social and environmental impactson the world.

According to Barbara Hannah (1976, pp. 149-152), Jung’s friendand biographer, Jung believed that nature was one of four signifi-cant archetypal images to suffer repression in the civilized mind;the other three being animals, inferior man, and creative fantasy.When we face the basic origin of our ecological problems today—weourselves—how can we deny the significance of this repression? Ifwe appreciated the value and powers of nature, would rampantloss of nonhuman species,worldwide climate change,decimation ofancient ecosystems, or captive breeding programs for the specieswe have endangered exist? Outside of natural ecological and evolu-tionary processes, probably not. With this in mind, we must agreewith Jung’s now seemingly truistic insight: Humans are the great-est threat to themselves and the natural world.

Unfortunately, we often attempt to understand personal andcollective issues such as ecological problems under the rathernaive assumption that purely external, or extrapsychical, causescan be discovered for them. This neglect or repression of our intro-spective abilities can be seen as one of the main reasons for thebirth of modern psychology, for, in our outward search for answersto our problems we are, perhaps temporarily, saved from acknowl-edging our own personal contributions to them. However, psychol-ogy, particularly humanistic psychology, shows us that we need tobe called back to ourselves, back to our own culpability in personal,social, and now, ecological relationships (Mindell, 1996).

This holds especially true for ecopsychology,as this outgrowth ofhumanistic psychology does not see ecological problems as beingmerely “out there” in the physical environment. Clearly, we cannotfail to recognize the many ecological problems our modern techno-logical society is creating. However, from the perspective of eco-psychology, these problems are rooted most fundamentally in thedistorted understandings, repressed contents, conscious denials,and unconscious projections that exist in both the personal andsocietal dimensions of the human psyche. For this reason, our eco-logical problems must be addressed in the context of two of life’smost prominent polarities: the personal and collective and the con-scious and unconscious. One difficulty in achieving both of these isthat as helpful as psychology can be, its theoretical purview andpractical applications have, until recently, been severely limited by

98 Jung’s Contribution to an Ecological Psychology



its inherited biases and strict adherence to mechanistic under-standings of humanity and its world. Ecopsychology hopes tochange these limitations.

Let me begin by briefly introducing why use of the concepts ofarchetypes and the unconscious, both the personal and collective,are so important to Jung for relating the human psyche to theworld in which it exists.

ARCHETYPES, THE UNCONSCIOUS,AND MODERN EPISTEMOLOGICAL PROBLEMS

Philosopher Richard Tarnas (1991) has pointed out that in Jung’smiddle-period writings, he was still under the impact of Cartesian-Kantian assumptions concerning the psyche and its separationfrom the world. Tarnas (1991) said,

In his later work,however,and particularly in relation to his study ofsynchronicities, Jung began to move toward a conception of arche-types as autonomous patterns of meaning that appear to structureand inhere in both psyche and matter, thereby in effect dissolvingthe modern subject-object dichotomy. (p. 425)

Resonating Tarnas’s point,depth psychologist Lionel Corbett (1996)fleshed out the vital implications in Jung’s psychological approachfor understanding the spiritual dimension of our ecological problems:

The important point is that to assert the unity of psyche and natureis to repair a split which has bedevilled our culture. Unlike pre-technological societies which viewed the earth as sacred, in our cul-ture an apparent gap has emerged between the spiritual and thematerial realms. By contrast, Jung’s model of the psyche, because ofits stress on the numinosum,allows a sacramental understanding ofthe psyche as coextensive with nature, in which the divine is felt tobe immanent by virtue of experiences of the Self. When we experi-ence the numinosum in the wilderness, we are not “projecting” ontonature something that is actually inside ourselves; we are experi-encing the reality of the continuity of the Self across the barrier ofthe skin. The structure of the self, which includes both our psychol-ogy and physiology, is determined by the same archetypal or spiri-tual dynamics as those which obtain in nature at large. (p. 106)

The nature of this permeable, ecological conception of the selfwill be discussed later, but for now it is important to point out that

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for many people today, the world is seen as an inert, passive sub-stance that conforms to our reason and expectations but that hasno concomitant impact on our mind; in this unidirectional causal-ity, we act on nature, but nature does not act on us. As Tarnas (1991)and Corbett (1996) both elucidate, our modern understanding ofthe world makes it difficult for many to grasp the relationshipbetween what happens in our psyche and what occurs “out there”in the material world of nature. In fact, our understanding of theworld is still largely grounded in Kantian (limits of subjectivity),Cartesian (mind-nature dualism), and Newtonian (mechanistic)assumptions about the psyche and its relationship to events andobjects in the world. The relationship between what the mind con-ceives and the consequences these conceptions have on shaping theworld often go unseen, or, in our age of manufacturing perceptionswith the aid of psychological insights, these psyche-nature rela-tionships are misconstrued for reasons of convenience or profit.

The corporate world’s appropriation of mass psychology to man-ufacture the public’s perception of its needs and desires to sell aproduct or to “greenwash” its threatened ecological image throughmanipulative and misrepresentative advertising are but two exam-ples of this type of conscious distortion. Chevron’s “People Care”media campaign is one glaring example. Here, a corporate entitythat must necessarily damage the environment in its oil explora-tion and extraction activities tries to paint itself as environmen-tally friendly out of both fear (for loss of profits) and guilt (for itsclearly recognizable ecological transgressions).For instance, in oneof its past commercials, Chevron showed an oil pipeline left at thebottom of the ocean as their way of “creating habitat” for theocean’s creatures. In addition to many others, two questions imme-diately come to mind: (a) Why is this “habitat creation” even neces-sary if there was no previous disturbance at the bottom of theocean requiring this “conservation measure” in the first place, and(b) if their claims are scientifically correct, then why are we not lib-erally dropping much of our large industrial waste products, suchas oil barrels, scrap metal, and other materials to the bottom of theocean? The answers to these questions, I believe, are fairly obvious.In the final analysis, ads such as these simply feed the public’sdesire to feel as if someone in the corporate world is actually mak-ing reparations for all the damage we know it does in manufactur-ing our consumer products. Regardless of the intentions, such adscreate an effective mythology for the company that wants to be seen




as ecofriendly but that knows it will never be. It is a compensatorydevice par excellence.

In addition to their clear dishonesty, such compensations pointto a repression of the unconscious’s innate urge to express theSelf—Jung’s term for the supraordinate archetypal reality seekingto bring all opposing tendencies within the personal self into anindissoluble unity and balanced wholeness. For this reason, Jungfelt a primary task of psychology was to bring the modern mindback into contact with the archetypal realities that had beenrepressed or ignored in its overextension of scientific-technicalreason. Through this therapeutic process, he felt the self could bereconnected with its world in a relationship of healing and union,in contrast with the predominant Western-style relationship ofalienation and domination. Thus, Jung believed that any deliber-ate work on cultivating a relationship between one’s unconscious—through which the archetypes make their presence felt—and theworkings of nature had significant potential for mediating mean-ing and healing in the psyche.

Jung’s conceptualizations of the unconscious-nature relation-ship countered modernity’s tendency to see life processes in termsof scientific rationalism’s strict one-way causality. For instance,Jung (1966b) stated,

Because the unconscious is not just a reactive mirror-reflection, butan independent, productive activity, its realm of experience is a self-contained world,having its own reality,of which we can only say thatit affects us as we affect it—precisely what we say about our experi-ence of the outer world [italics added]. (par. 292)

Besides here establishing his clear opposition to Freud’s under-standing of the unconscious as simply a repository for our re-pressed infantile and sexual psychic contents, Jung supports theecopsychological truism that “the outer world”—that is, nature—acts as a prime psychological determinant in a way not completelydissimilar from that of the unconscious. These words also explainwhy attention and receptivity to the unconscious are so importantto Jung’s theories of psychological development and healing. Therealm of the unconscious is seen as a vast sea of wisdom from whichthe modern mind has become estranged and with which it needs,once again, to regain contact.Jung (1966a) summarized the signifi-cance of this reconnection by stating that

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through the assimilation of unconscious contents, the momentarylife of consciousness can once more be brought into harmony withthe law of nature from which it all too easily departs, and the [indi-vidual] can be led back to the natural law of his own being. (par.351)

He qualified this point by warning that the modern person

needs to return, not to Nature in the manner of Rousseau, but to hisown nature. His task is to find the natural man again. Instead ofthis, there is nothing he likes better than systems and methods bywhich he can repress the natural man who is everywhere at crosspurposes with him. (Jung, 1969a, par. 868)

According to historian and ecopsychologist Theodore Roszak(1992), Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious may prove to bethe most important concept in depth psychology for the develop-ment of an ecological psychology (pp. 301-302). For contact withthis prerational and symbolic dimension of the psyche, it is sug-gested, helps lead to an experience of one’s “ecological self,” acentral ecopsychological concept in which psyche and world are con-sciously joined through a transformation in psychological percep-tion of both one’s self and one’s place in the world. That is to say,when we recognize the common symbolic realities arising from thecollective unconscious, we begin to see that the boundaries weestablish between the “I” and the “Other”—the borders of our per-sonal identity—are quite arbitrary. The collective unconsciousbecomes even more telling of our interrelatedness with others andthe natural world when viewed in light of experiences and eventsunexplainable in either purely psychic or purely physical terms,such as intuitive dreams and synchronistic phenomena. It wasthrough such workings of the collective unconscious that Jung(1970) made the bold pronouncement regarding our interrelated-ness: “In some way or other we are part of a single all-embracingpsyche” (par. 175).

Depth psychologist Stephen Aizenstat (1995) has widened thispotential union of psyche and world from being seen in terms ofJung’s collective unconscious to being seen instead in terms of a“world unconscious” (pp. 95-96). The world unconscious is consid-ered the dimension of psyche that goes beyond the human collec-tive unconscious to embrace the relatedness of the inner subjectivenatures of all life. Because we assume that only the human species




has a fully actualized psychic life, this may be a difficult postulatefor many to accept. However, we must consider that just as animalsand nature manifest in the human psyche as symbolic powers,there exists the distinct possibility that human images appear inthe psychic life of other organisms in similar ways. Of course, thiswould not prove the ontological existence of a world unconscious—Jung warned of trying to prove the existence of, and thus reifying,the collective unconscious and other psychological concepts—butthe possibility of a world unconscious does point to the evolution-ary and psychological continuity in life as a gestalt.

Jung’s insistence on placing due value on the unconscious isrooted, among others, in two primary facts: First, almost half of ourlives are spent in this nocturnal dimension of the psyche (asopposed to consciousness, the diurnal dimension), thus making ourattention to the unconscious’s expressions and images just as cru-cial to self-understanding as that of consciousness; and second, theunconscious is the “home” of the instincts—the conservative, cau-tious expressions of the psyche that modern consciousness hasneglected far too long and, according to Jung, to its own detriment.Although the instincts serve as our innate protection against dan-gers both internal (personal) and external (sociocultural or ecologi-cal), modern consciousness continues to move further from thepast and higher and higher into the realm of pure rationality andconsciousness, never realizing that the

breakdown of a tradition, necessary as this may be at times, isalways a loss and a danger; and it is a danger to the soul because thelife of instinct—the most conservative element in man—alwaysexpresses itself in traditional usages. Age-old convictions and cus-toms are deeply rooted in the instincts. If they get lost, the consciousmind becomes severed from the instincts and loses its roots, while theinstincts,unable to express themselves, fall back into the unconsciousand reinforce its energy, causing this in turn to overflow into theexisting contents of consciousness. It is then that the rootless condi-tion of consciousness becomes a real danger. This secret vis a tergoresults in a hybris of the conscious mind which manifests itself inthe form of exaggerated self-esteem or an inferiority complex. (Jung,1966a, par. 216)

This relation between repression of unconscious contents andimbalanced psychic health—which can lead to imbalanced ecologi-cal health—will be covered in detail later.For now, it is necessary to

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further discover why the modern world is making connectionsbetween psychology and ecology.

THE MERGING OF PSYCHOLOGY AND ECOLOGY

According to Jung (1969a),

Western man has no need of more superiority over nature, whetheroutside or inside. He has both in almost devilish perfection. What helacks is conscious recognition of his inferiority to the nature aroundand within him.He must learn that he may not do exactly as he wills.If he does not learn this,his own nature will destroy him.He does notknow that his own soul is rebelling against him in a suicidal way.(par. 870)

Ever since widespread awareness of the ecological instabilitiesand environmental devastations wrought by human activity, themodern environmental movement has tried countless legal reforms,passionate admonitions, and relentless moralizing. In all this, ithas still largely failed in getting to the roots of our environmentaldilemmas. Unable or unwilling to see the human psyche and all itsmodern epistemological assumptions as the basis of our ecologicaltroubles, sensitive people bemoaned the steadily declining state ofthe earth’s life system. What was lacking, however, was an ade-quate psychological critique of our highly scientific-materialistworldview and technologically based lifestyles. Thus, conventionalenvironmental attempts to “change the world” through politicaland social movements caused us to turn to dubious substitutes forfacing the real need—changing ourselves (Shepard, 1995, p. 32).

However, in recent years, the scientific-materialist worldviewhas come under closer scrutiny by both the general public andscholars in a wide range of disciplines, including psychology. Fromwithin these disciplines issue many critical and constructiveresponses to the deleterious consequences our modern technologi-cal worldview is inflicting on the personal, social, and ecologicaldimensions of life. For instance, in psychology, there are connec-tions being drawn between neurotic disorders and the syntheticand desacralized environment that the materialist worldview isfast creating. Among other things, these ecopsychological findingsare helping us discover more about the basic human need for natu-ral, nurturing living environs.




Speaking metaphorically, we could say that ecopsychology istaking root in the tainted soil of our increasingly mechanized andtechnologically mediated society. Like the botanist who studies aplant’s root structure for signs of disease, the ecopsychologist isprobing the depths of the human psyche to better understand howsuch a supposedly rational creature could allow the beauty andintegrity of its own world to become despoiled to the point of threat-ening its own life support system—the biosphere, or mythologi-cally speaking, Gaia. And if there is validity to the Gaia hypothesis(Lovelock, 1979), which postulates that one gigantic system com-posed of all the organisms, atmosphere, seas, and the earth’s sur-face interact to control the temperature and chemical compositionin the biosphere in a way that makes Earth continually hospitableto life, then humans are surely the greatest foe of this ancientEarth goddess—a point often stressed by ecofeminists today.

Because it is responding to a new and critical situation, eco-psychology, much like the field of conservation biology, can be seenas a crisis discipline. But why exactly is this new field calledecopsychology? Roszak gives this definition:

Like all forms of psychology, ecopsychology concerns itself with thefoundations of human nature and behavior. Unlike other main-stream schools of psychology that limit themselves to the intrapsychicmechanisms or to a narrow social range that may not look beyondthe family, ecopsychology proceeds from the assumption that at itsdeepest level the psyche remains sympathetically bonded to theEarth. (Roszak, 1992, p. 5)

Even prior to this definition,Jung’s friend and colleague, the Swisspsychiatrist C. A. Meier (1985), succinctly stated ecopsychology’smain postulate: “Excessive interference with outer nature creates ofnecessity disorder of the inner nature, for the two are intimatelyconnected” (p. 2). This basic point has been framed in other ways bygroups concerned with the psychology of power relations, includ-ing, for instance, ecofeminists. From the ecofeminist perspective,the domination of nature is intimately tied to male domination ofwomen through repression of the male’s feminine side (anima).

Even before Meier’s (1985) ecopsychological statement, Jung(1959a) himself lamented the modern mind’s lack of connection tothe deeper, instinctual levels of the unconscious brought on by our“excessive interference with outer nature”:

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The more civilized, the more unconscious and complicated a man is,the less he is able to follow his instincts. His complicated living con-ditions and the influence of his environment are so strong that theydrown out the quiet voice of nature. Opinions, beliefs, theories, andcollective tendencies appear in its stead and back up all the aberra-tions of the conscious mind. (par. 40)

Such an insight led Jung (1966a) to the early perception thatwholly intrapsychic understandings of personality developmentand health lacked a basis for acknowledging the essential ground-ing of humans in the social and natural world:

Try as we may to concentrate on the most personal of personal prob-lems, our therapy nevertheless stands or falls with the question:What sort of world does our patient come from and to what sort ofworld has he to adapt himself? The world is a supra-personal fact towhich an essentially personalistic psychology can never do justice.(par. 212)

Today, ecopsychology takes this fundamental fact and makes itsrecommendation: Broaden the application of psychological princi-ples and practices to account for the influence of the phenomenalworld (nature) on the psyche and vice versa, thereby expandingpsychological understandings and therapeutic treatments beyondthe purely intrapsychic and interpersonal realms. Recognizingthis need for expansion of the field almost two decades ago,neo-Jungian James Hillman (1981) challenged the psychologicalworld to bring “asbestos and food additives, acid rain and tampons,insecticides and pharmaceuticals, car exhausts and [artificial]sweeteners, televisions and ions” into the purview of therapeuticanalysis (p. 111). Such a suggestion may seem humorous at first,but the seriousness of calling these into the fold of therapy is quiteunhumorous, insofar as we assert the continuity of mind (psyche),body, and earth; as all of the items Hillman specifies exert a pro-found impact on one or all of these three primary dimensions of life.

From our perspective today, it may seem startling to many peo-ple that modern psychology could have ignored or downplayed theprofound formative influences the natural world has on us. How-ever, until somewhat recently, psychology saw human interactionsas taking place in a vacuum, with nature acting only as a lifelessbackdrop to our unfolding relationships. These wholly intrapsychicand interpersonal understandings failed to take into account notonly our daily interactions with nature but also the diverse famil-




ial, religious, and cultural influences that help to shape our predis-positions toward the natural world. Modern psychology tried toshut out the fact that our lives are formed and affected by the cyclesand powers of nature, as much as we may try to pretend they arenot. In short, psychology ignored the fact that humans are animals—intelligent, clever, highly emotional, and creative—but, nonethe-less, beings living in, and dependent on, natural processes.

ARCHAIC AND MODERN CONSCIOUSNESSIN RELATION TO NATURE AND SOCIETY

Jung was clear in his conviction that all humans, even the most“civilized,” are still influenced by archaic, or “primitive,” impulses.One characteristic of this prerational part of the psyche is anunconscious identity with nature, or participation mystique. Jungregularly borrowed this phrase of Lucien Lévy-Bruhl to describepreindustrial, or “primitive,” peoples’ unconscious psychic projec-tions onto the natural world. These projections forged an identitybetween the inner (psyche) and outer (nature) worlds, therebydiminishing the actual and valuational dichotomy between thehuman and nonhuman realms.One example of this phenomenon isthe various animal spirits experienced and named by cultures liv-ing close to the land. It might be a temptation to idealize thisunconscious identity with the natural world as a paragon of ecolog-ical consciousness. However, the plurality of past cultures andtheir varied ways of relating to the natural world should keep usfrom seeking some once-existent form of ecological consciousnesswith which we can overcome our modern tendencies of dominationand destruction. We should bear in mind that many so-called prim-itive cultures, which today in popular culture are often portrayedas entirely environmentally benign, engaged in their own destruc-tive practices in nature. Their practices may not have been on thesame scale as that made possible by our modern technologies, butthey were nonetheless characterized by an unnecessary inflictionof harm and imbalance onto the natural world and its nonhumancreatures.

Evolution toward our highly differentiated modern conscious-ness seemingly has moved us away from an unconscious identitywith the world, but it was Jung’s belief that such identity remainslatent in even the modern consciousness. Jung tried to show that

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our gaining knowledge of, and contact with, this realm of the psy-che holds the potential for a significant increase in the evolution ofhuman consciousness. In fact, he saw many problems issuing fromthe modern mind’s neglect or repression of this archaic level of con-sciousness. Therefore, he made a strong correlation between ourdissociative split from this aspect of the unconscious and loss ofpsychic health. Jung (1970) clarified the inherent danger in thisdissociation in the context of the evolution of consciousness:

[Dissociation] was a liberation of consciousness from the burden ofirrationality and instinctive impulsiveness at the expense of thetotality of the individual. Man became split into a conscious and anunconscious personality. The conscious personality could be domes-ticated, because it was separated from the natural and primitiveman. Thus we became highly disciplined, organized, and rational onone side, but the other side remained a suppressed primitive, cut offfrom education and civilization.

This explains our many relapses into the most appalling barbar-ity, and it also explains the really terrible fact that, the higher weclimb the mountain of scientific and technical achievement, themore dangerous and diabolical becomes the misuse of our inven-tions. Think of the great triumph of the human mind, the power tofly:we have accomplished the age-old dream of humanity! And thinkof the bombing raids of modern warfare! Is it not a rather convincingdemonstration of the fact that, when our mind went up to conquerthe skies, our other man, that suppressed barbarous individual,went down to hell? (pars. 1008-1009)

With these words, we better understand Jung’s strong feelingsabout the dangers of repressing this “inferior,” prerational dimen-sion of the psyche. He continues this line of thought by stating ofthe modern collective person—the conformist—that

in so far as he is normally “adapted” to his environment, it is truethat the greatest infamy on the part of his group will not disturbhim, so long as the majority of his fellows steadfastly believe in theexalted morality of their social organization. (Jung, 1971, p. 101)

In the modern Western world, such conformist tendencies areparadoxically commingled with a strong sense of individualism.However, with an understanding of individuality that is not insome sense also relational, shallowness, superficiality, and debili-tating loss of meaning and moral concern are almost sure to follow.The resulting “existential vacuum” (Frankl, 1970)—a general sense




of meaninglessness or spiritual emptiness—exemplifies the factthat our relationships with others and the world are being stulti-fied by an overvaluation of social detachment and scientific calcu-lation. A driving force behind this growing existential dilemma isthe controlling reason characteristic of our scientific materialistworldview. Although technical reasoning is clearly useful, it is aform of reason that needs to be balanced by its opposite pole, partici-patory reason (Tillich, 1963, 1988). In the latter form of reason, con-scious participation in relations with others and the world predom-inates over detachment and calculation—primary characteristicsof technical reasoning. By stressing the inextricable and poten-tially empathetic link between psyche and nature, ecopsychologymakes development of this participatory reason a primary goal.

The efficiency of technical reason, which predominantly focuseson humans and nature as means toward some predetermined end,can hinder the possibility of social or ecological concerns and evenlead to aggressiveness. At a personal level, Jung refers to thisone-sidedness as the fragments (or complexes) of one’s psycheovertaking the personality. In the case of our ecological problems,one way this manifests is in our personal and collective dissocia-tion from the painful knowledge we have of the damage we inflicton ourselves, others, and the earth. In fact, our hypertechnical cul-ture could not exist without such dissociation being built into itsvery economic, political, social, and educational structures.

As stated earlier, in contrast with our highly differentiated mod-ern consciousness is what Jung called archaic consciousness. Inthis state of consciousness, or relative unconsciousness, as it were,everything in existence—including the natural world—has a psy-chic endowment. Conversely, to establish dominance over nature,our differentiated consciousness seeks to eliminate any connectionbetween the assumed objective and subjective realms by con-sciously withdrawing (rationalizing), or unconsciously repressing,its projections. With projections seemingly mastered, we begin toreach a state of inflation or, in theological terms, hubris. Jung(1966a) claimed that

with the integration of projections . . . the personality becomes sovastly enlarged that the normal ego-personality is almost extin-guished. In other words, if the individual identifies himself with thecontents awaiting integration,a positive or negative inflation results.Positive inflation comes very near to a more or less conscious mega-lomania. (par. 472)

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With our ever-increasing scientific knowledge and ability toharness and transform the natural world, it is not difficult to seethat Western, technological consciousness has reached a state ofinflation: “In this we can already see the modern man who has gotto the stage of building his world on a single function and is not alittle proud of his achievement,” said Jung (1966a, par. 491). Hisclear reference here to the thinking function, that crowning hall-mark of “civilized” consciousness, shows how the regnant material-ism of our day has tried to eliminate any spirit from our experienceof the world. Spirit, a complex and often misunderstood term, isused here as the philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich (1963,Vol.3,Pt.4) used it—as the dimension of finite human life that, in beingdriven into transcendence of itself, experiences the undisruptedunity and source of its power, meaning, and creativity. Referring tothe transcendent power uniting opposites, Tillich saw the creativespirit in humanity as bringing together power and meaning, whileJung, broadly speaking, saw spirit as the unifier of consciousnessand the unconscious (Dourley, 1981, p. 79).

Modern consciousness has diminished this creative and trans-formative human power by psychologizing away the archetypalprojections previously used to saturate the world with a living, andtherefore meaningful, vitality. From Jung’s perspective, as con-sciousness reaches higher levels of differentiation and asserts itsrational self-sufficiency and self-certainty, the unconscious fallsfarther behind and is forced to compensate for its neglect. In aneffort to strike a psychic balance, the unconscious must then makean extra effort to express its repressed contents. It does this throughdreams, psychic disturbances, and/or projections, which, due totheir unconscious origins, are usually not recognized or under-stood. From the perspective of a depth-oriented ecopsychology, theindividual and collective psychic projections manifested in theworld as ecological problems can only be rectified through a con-scious attempt to assimilate and, therefore, depotentiate the effectsof these projections. However, as we all know from our own inter-personal relations, it is much easier to unload (project) our unwantedbaggage (shadows) onto those around us than to “carry the weight”ourselves. We find it difficult, and understandably so, to claimresponsibility for our own internal darkness and insecurities.Thus, in line with Jung’s theory of projection, it is my contentionthat if the psychological roots of our ecological problems are not




addressed in the context of these unconscious projections, we cannever hope for a more humane relationship with the natural world.

SCIENCE, SHADOWS, AND THE “WILD” UNCONSCIOUS

Reminding us that human development is based on a process ofbalancing the various functions of the human psyche, Jung (1969b)emphasized that

one should never forget that science is simply a matter of intellect,and that the intellect is only one among several fundamental psy-chic functions and therefore does not suffice to give a complete pic-ture of the world. For this another function—feeling—is needed too.Feeling often arrives at convictions that are different from those ofthe intellect,and we cannot always prove that the convictions of feel-ing are necessarily inferior. (par. 600)

For all the clear benefits spawned by modern science, we can stillsee the importance of Jung’s words in relation to the disastrousecological effects arising out of modern science’s applied technolo-gies. On an intellectual level, we have quickly developed and mas-tered the theories and methods of science. However, each of theseintellectual and technical advancements has been achieved largelyin isolation from the other main psychic functions that Jung feltwere necessary for their prudent application: intuition, sensation,and feeling. In fact,when we consider the physical,psychoemotional(not an anthropomorphism in the case of animals, as some mightassert), and chemical damage we knowingly inflict on nature andourselves, it seems that no matter how much our lives are filled ex-ternally with technological novelty, we often remain deep down in-side just as primitive as the so-called primitives.

Jung’s point, therefore, was to show that a truly healthy evolu-tion of consciousness can come only when our psyches are directedby all of our available functions, not just one. Through thousands ofanalytic sessions with his patients, he became convinced thatwhen one consciously understands, accepts, and integrates allaspects of one’s self—including projections, denials, and shadows—an evolution of consciousness and new vision of reality can takeplace that is grounded in a radical honesty. From the viewpoint ofecopsychology, such an insight is of the utmost importance, for only

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in honesty can we consciously recognize and become accountablefor the rampant and unnecessary pains we inflict on nonhumanlife forms. It is important to note, however, that such a process neednot lead to inescapable guilt. In fact, guilt is a quite natural statethrough which one must pass on the way toward a more compas-sionate consciousness; it is a necessary response issuing from ourinnate psychological and moral constitution. However, under theconditions of self-acceptance and self-actualization, this guilt canbe transformed into a true concern for one’s psychological growthand ethical maturity.

Part of achieving this psychological maturity is in seeing thatour instincts, archetypally induced affects, and deep-seated archaicimages—those elements we repress with an overemphasized ratio-nality but that continue to make their presence felt—point to thefact that the human is a somewhat wild creature. Jung’s insistenceon our need to reconnect to this unconscious “wildness” lends psy-chological credence to Thoreau’s famous maxim: “In wildness is thepreservation of the world.” For Jung (1969b), the loss of contactwith this wildness is of significance: “In the course of the millennia,we have succeeded not only in conquering the wild nature allaround us, but in subduing our own wildness” (par. 87). In fact,widespread alienation from this “inner” wildness, in addition tothe concomitant alienation from our bodies, is a fundamentalcause of the fear many civilized people have of nature or “outer”wildness. I believe we need no more examples of the type of worldsuch an alienated relationship creates to substantiate our need forcontact with this wildness; our increasingly homogenized, syn-thetic, and fast-growing theme park–like suburbs and strip mallsare striking enough.

The now deeply enculturated and firmly enforced Westerndichotomy between the wild and tame helps lay the foundation fora number of alienating and mechanistic worldviews that keep onefrom having access to the latent healing forces of the unconscious.And because it is out of the unconscious that symbols arise to bringabout wholeness and meaning, modern consciousness is increas-ingly left without symbolic power in the natural world to eitherthreaten or inspire a sense of awe. From this loss of symbolic mean-ing, modernity’s relationship with nature has become one charac-terized by dangerous projection. The chaos and imbalance withinour own alienated psyches are thrown at the world like a rock at anenemy; and as we increasingly treat the world as our enemy, so it




becomes our enemy.Like the repression of our shadows,which sim-ply come back as inferior, archaic impulses to haunt our psychichealth, so, too, our strictly rational, conscious projections arethrown into the world and come back in the form of ecologicalimbalances. In a reproving strike at the unbalanced and uncheckedpowers of human rationality and its dangerous technological pro-jections, Jung (1970) stated that

everything possible has been done for the outside world: science hasbeen refined to an almost unimaginable extent, technical achieve-ment has reached an almost uncanny degree of perfection. But whatof man, who is expected to administer all these blessings in a reason-able way? He has simply been taken for granted. (par. 442)

Far from advocating the misanthropism that some critics levelat those concerned about developing right relations with nature,Jung and ecopsychologists recognize this need for continual selfand societal criticism and make no excuses for challenging us toengage in it. For, as Jung (1966a) wisely reminded those of usacutely aware of our own internal darkness,

Recognition of the shadow is reason enough for humility, for genuinefear of the abysmal depths in man. This caution is most expedient,since the man without a shadow thinks himself harmless preciselybecause he is ignorant of his shadow. The man who recognizes hisshadow knows very well that he is not harmless, for it brings thearchaic psyche, the whole world of the archetypes, into direct contactwith the conscious mind and saturates it with archaic influences.(par. 452)

Recognition and assimilation of one’s personal shadows were ofsupreme importance for Jung’s theory of personality development.However,Jung took this concept even further by warning of the col-lective shadow. Speaking of this collective darkness in relation toour modern notion of “progress,” Jung (1959b) stated that the

tempo of the development of consciousness through science andtechnology was too rapid and left the unconscious, which could nolonger keep up with it, far behind, thereby forcing it into a defensiveposition which expresses itself in a universal will to destruction.(par. 617)

Unfortunately,what one finds in the predominant Western worldview—what I have referred to generally as scientific materialism—is a

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neglect of this dark shadow side of humanity. With its myth of thepossibility for endless, linear progress, this worldview rejects, orlargely downplays, the shadow side of humanity and instead pro-mulgates an (unwarranted and utopian) optimism about our abili-ties to better the world and ourselves.

Certainly, we should work toward personal and societal improve-ment, but in some worldviews, a rigid conformism to establishednorms is often required to achieve such advancement. The resultcan be an overly civilized and desensitized approach to life. In thescientific worldview, we see this exemplified by modern society’sfascination with, acceptance of, and quick dependence on, noveltechnological devices. In the dualistic religious worldview, it is seenin desperate attempts of people to purify themselves of anythingconsidered sinful or evil—often meaning nature and any wild,unconscious force that cannot be consciously acknowledged orintegrated because of social taboos or fear imposed through reli-gious dogma.

For us today, we certainly cannot expect, nor desire, a return toarchaic consciousness to resolve our dangerous and improvidentrelationship with nature, self, and others. However, with Jung, wecan believe that access to healing symbols will arise when we beginto acknowledge and relate with the personal and collective shad-ows arising from the unconscious. This work will then lend balanceto our developmental process and reunite the tensions and warringopposites that block our path to both personal psychological healthand collective ecological health. In Jung’s terminology, this processof self-discovery will lead us toward individuation. The followingsection will examine this process of individuation as it relates toecopsychology.

ONE-SIDED MODERN CONSCIOUSNESS ANDTHE URGE TOWARD WHOLENESS (INDIVIDUATION)

Jung (1966a) stated,

The unconscious is the spirit of chthonic nature and contains thearchetypal images of the Sapientia Dei (Wisdom of God). But theintellect of modern civilized man has strayed too far in the world ofconsciousness, so that it received a violent shock when it suddenlybeheld the face of its mother, the earth. (par. 480)




By now, it should be clear that Jung believed certain dangersinhere in any theory or endeavor too narrow in its concern or appli-cation.Modern ecological problems wrought by a one-sided empha-sis on rationality uphold Jung’s concern about this issue, as hestates in the previous quotation. Therefore, it was Jung’s (1961)belief that modern humanity’s “rationality is won at the expense of[its] vitality” (p. 245) and that we suffer from a “dangerous atrophyof instinct.”

The temptation for some, however, is to subscribe to the rathersimplistic notion that if we simply acknowledge our archaic, instinc-tual nature and our ecological dependency, we will somehow trans-form our abusive and controlling relationship to the natural world.Although this romantic perspective is indeed a vital motivator formany, it fails to acknowledge and appreciate the fact that humanconsciousness is in many ways a propitious characteristic of ourspecies and, therefore, of nature herself. Without attaching anyvalue judgment to the uniqueness of human consciousness, it isimportant to find a way of holding these elements—a highly differ-entiated consciousness and an archaic, instinctual one—in a uni-fiedbalance.Jung(1963)calledthisprocess thecomplexioopposi- torum,the union or reconciliation of opposites, and saw its potential actu-alization as a chance for a significant evolution in human con-sciousness. Speaking of the natural urge toward wholeness in theevolution of consciousness, Jung (1966a) said that

one is hardly conscious of the extent to which “nature” acts not onlyas a driving force but as a helper—in other words,how much instinctinsists that the higher level of consciousness be attained. This urgeto a higher and more comprehensive consciousness fosters civiliza-tion and culture, but must fall short of the goal unless man volun-tarily places himself in its service. (par. 471)

When Jung calls this drive toward wholeness an ethical duty, hehighlights ecopsychology’s own belief that individuation is ap-proached only to the degree that one extends the concept of psycho-logical wholeness to embrace the health and wholeness of one’snatural and social environment. In Jungian terms, through the on-going process of individuation, the ego is relativized and placed inthe service of the Self, widening the personal self’s scope of concernso that one’s concerns and well-being are seen as dependent on,and reflected in, the quality of one’s relationship with the world atlarge. Although this process can sink into a form of ecological

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anthropocentrism and/or speciesism—“we’d better curb our con-sumption of fossil fuels, or the carbon we release into the air willmake the atmosphere unbreathable”—the hope is that a widenedsense of self will cause one’s concerns to reach beyond one’s per-sonal self and species to embrace that of life itself. As stated earlier,this act manifests the “ecological self,” through which one sees de-struction of the natural world as destruction of one’s own personalidentity and spirit. Reverence for all life (Schweitzer) is the fur-thest extension of embodying such selfhood, and this carries radi-cal implications for our reconceptualization of what it means to bewhole. Jung (1966a) clarified this when he defined the self as

both ego and non-ego, subjective and objective, individual and collec-tive. It is the “uniting symbol” which epitomizes the total union ofopposites. . . . Hence,properly understood, the self is not a doctrine ortheory but an image born of nature’s own workings, a natural sym-bol far removed from all conscious intention. (par. 474)

From the last words of his statement, it might seem as though onehad no control over actualizing one’s self, let alone expanding tothis deeper, ecological self. However, Jung (1966b) balanced this byhighlighting the deeply collective, that is, ethical, implications in-herent in the process of individuation:

The more we become conscious of ourselves through self-knowledge,and act accordingly, the more the layer of the personal unconsciousthat is superimposed on the collective unconscious will be dimin-ished. In this way there arises a consciousness which is no longerimprisoned in the petty, oversensitive, personal world of the ego, butparticipates freely in the wider world of objective interests. Thiswidened consciousness is no longer that touchy, egotistical bundle ofpersonal wishes, fears, hopes, and ambitions which always has to becompensated or corrected by unconscious counter-tendencies; instead,it is a function of relation to the world of objects, bringing the indi-vidual into absolute, binding, and indissoluble communion with theworld at large. The complications arising at this stage are no longeregoistic wish-conflicts, but difficulties that concern others as muchas oneself. At this stage it is fundamentally a question of collectiveproblems, which have activated the collective unconscious becausethey require collective rather than personal compensation. (par.275)

What Jung makes clear is that as we turn more of our attentiontoward more of our self, we at the same time extend our concernsbeyond the merely personal and begin to embrace the concerns of




the world as a whole. Transpersonal psychology, another out-growth of humanistic psychology, describes this act in terms of egotranscendence, through which one gains contact with the numin-ous dimension of life.

CONCLUSION

Although written in 1928, prior to mass consciousness of theglobal ecological problems we now face, Jung’s previous quotationbrings forth an inescapable truth of our modern world: the need toovercome our separateness and alienation from the material worldin which we exist. In religious terms, this is to open ourselves to theworld’s own revealing (revelation) of its latent unity; to discoverthe “at-one-ment” of the world that transcends, yet inheres in, ourown individual interests and concerns. Clearly, this necessitates areevaluation of our priorities and an expansion of our worldviews,including an appreciation of the various religious traditions thathave given expression to the divine depth of the world. It alsorequires rediscovering and cultivating the inner reaches of ourpsyche and the outer realms of nature, while avoiding falling intodualistic hairsplitting that causes philosophical noncommitmentdue to the unknown ontological veracity of a psyche-nature rela-tionship. As Jung would propose in such cases of philosophical orscientific uncertainty, we must place the psychological facts beforethe supposed physical facts. In other words, we can incessantly dis-cuss the nature, or possible nonexistence, of the psyche’s relation-ship to the world while the world crumbles down before our veryeyes.

For Jung, it was a simple truism that the psyche serves as both asubjective “instrument” for perceiving the world and as an expres-sive part of the world’s own depth, or soul. The ability to compre-hend and give full expression to both of these essential and mean-ingful aspects of the human condition is a fundamental goal of life.Tarnas (1991) elucidated this process by following the theoreticallines of both Jung and Kant, of whom Jung was quite found:

In this view, the essential reality of nature is not separate, self-contained, and complete in itself, so that the human mind can exam-ine “objectively” and register it from without. Rather, nature’sunfolding truth emerges only with the active participation of thehuman mind. Nature’s reality is not merely phenomenal, nor is it

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independent and objective; rather, it is something that comes intobeing through the very act of cognition. Nature becomes intelligibleto itself through the human mind.

And it is only when the human mind actively brings forth fromwithin itself the full powers of a disciplined imagination and satu-rates its empirical observation with archetypal insight that thedeeper reality of the world emerges. A developed inner life is there-fore indispensable for cognition. . . . The human imagination is itselfpart of the world’s intrinsic truth; without it the world is in somesense incomplete. (p. 434)

Tarnas (1991) rightly stressed the importance of developing asense of inner psychic wholeness through the utilization of one’simaginal, creative, and intellectual capabilities. Describing oneparticular instance of his own cognitive kinship with nature, Jung(1959b) resonated Tarnas’s sentiments:

I believe that, after thousands and millions of years, someone had torealize that this wonderful world of mountains and oceans, suns andmoons, galaxies and nebulae, plants and animals, exists. From a lowhill in the Athi plains of East Africa I once watched the vast herds ofwild animals grazing in soundless stillness, as they had done fromtime immemorial, touched only by the breath of a primeval world. Ifelt then as if I were the first man, the first creature, to know that allthis is. The entire world round me was still in its primeval state; itdid not know that it was. And then, in that one moment in which Icame to know, the world sprang into being; without that moment itwould never have been. All Nature seeks this goal and finds it ful-filled in man, but only in the most highly developed and most fullyconscious man. Every advance, even the smallest, along this path ofconscious realization adds that much to the world. (par. 177)

Jung does not mean here that the world would not exist withouthuman consciousness of it but, rather, that nature’s full capacityfor experiencing and expressing itself arises most acutely throughhuman consciousness. We can, of course, choose to interpret thisarrogantly as humanity’s superiority over other life forms. Alter-natively, we can see this as the gift of consciousness, inspiringresponsibility and gratitude in us for our ability to appreciate andbenefit from all the wonderfully diverse life forms made intelligi-ble and emotionally affective to us.

Throughout his life, Jung criticized the one-sided scientific-materialist approach to life. He also continually warned of thephysical, psychological, and spiritual dangers arising from such




one-sided worldviews. Most important, however, he helped clarifythat for us to approach any psychological, spiritual, and, I wouldnow argue, ecological healing, we must transcend the desire for aromantic return to archaic consciousness—which is impossibleanyway—as well as the pernicious anthropocentrism that placeshuman rationality and all its increasingly nonvital desires overand above the vital needs of nature. In this way, Jung charted apath for human development consonant with the insights andprinciples of ecopsychology. In the end, we can only concur with hiscrucial and timely observation that

everything now depends on man: immense power of destruction isgiven into his hand, and the question is whether he can resist thewill to use it, and can temper his will with the spirit of love andwisdom.

He can no longer wriggle out of it on the plea of his littleness andnothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemi-cal weapons into his hands and given him the power to empty out theapocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures. Since he has beengranted an almost godlike power, he can no longer remain blind andunconscious. (Jung, 1969a, pars. 745, 747)

I believe what Jung’s thought shows, perhaps only implicitly, isthe possibility of developing a nondualistic worldview that subli-mates the inextricable interconnectedness of our psyches, bodies,and nature; that is, a worldview characterized by ecocentricity,rather than egocentricity. Helping people recognize, develop, andlive out of this worldview is, in fact, the therapeutic goal ofecopsychology. In the end, it requires nothing less than placingone’s self gracefully and gratefully within the cosmos.

Can we not understand that all the outward tinkerings and improve-ments do not touch man’s inner nature, and that everything ulti-mately depends upon whether the man who wields the science andthe technics is capable of responsibility or not? Christianity hasshown us the way, but, as the facts bear witness, it has not pene-trated deeply enough below the surface. (Jung, 1959b, par. 455)

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Reprint requests: Jeremy D. Yunt, 1218 Castillo St. #2, Santa Barbara, CA 93101;e-mail: [email protected].

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jung's contribution to an ecological psychology

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