Collected Works of C.G. Jung Vol 9 Part 1

What It Is

The central theoretical volume of Jung's Collected Works: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, translated by R. F. C. Hull for the Bollingen Series and published in English by Princeton University Press, first in 1959 and revised since.

It is not a book Jung sat down and wrote. It was assembled from papers written between the 1930s and the 1950s and arranged by his editors into an argument. Three opening essays lay out the theory; then come studies of particular archetypes, the mother, the spirit of the fairy tales, rebirth, the trickster; the last section turns to individuation and to the mandala images produced by his patients, which he reproduces and reads.

The register is heavy. Jung is addressing his profession, moving without warning through mythology, alchemy, Gnosticism and case material.

Why It Matters

The collective unconscious is one of the few genuinely new ideas the twentieth century produced about the mind, and this is where it is stated. Jung's proposal is that the unconscious is not merely a cellar of repressed things, and what he says it is instead is the burden of the three theoretical essays that open the volume. What he is describing cannot be observed directly, only its images, and those images turn up in dreams, in myth, in liturgy and in psychosis, among people who could not possibly have borrowed them from one another.

Whether or not the theory is true, its consequences are everywhere. Campbell's hero's journey came out of it, and out of Campbell came the shape of half the films you have seen. So did the way people now talk about themselves: the shadow, the persona, the anima. Almost nobody using those words knows they are quoting this book.

The honest difficulty is one Jung never resolved. He offers no mechanism by which archetypes could be inherited, and his evidence is convergence, the observation that the same images recur, which admits of other explanations. It is a real weakness, and also why the book has outlived a century of psychological theories that were more rigorous and are now unread.

Before You Read

This is the difficult end of Jung. Fifteen to twenty hours, and it wants months rather than weeks.

Do not begin Jung here. Modern Man in Search of a Soul first, then Memories, Dreams, Reflections, and only then this. Arriving cold, you will be asked to accept a vocabulary before you have a reason to want it.

The essays repeat each other, because they were written years apart for different audiences. The material on alchemy and Gnosticism is where most first-time readers slow to a halt; move through it lightly and return once you know why he thought it mattered.

Which Translation to Read

• R. F. C. Hull (Princeton University Press, Bollingen Series) — recommended. Hull translated the whole of Jung with a consistency of terminology that makes the Collected Works usable as a body rather than a heap. This is the authoritative text, the one every scholar cites, with the plates of mandala images the second half of the volume depends on. The cost: it is expensive, and Hull's English is exact rather than inviting. Where Jung is obscure, the translation preserves the obscurity. View on Amazon →
• Four Archetypes (Princeton, Jung Extracts; also Routledge Classics, with a foreword by Sonu Shamdasani). Hull's translation of four essays lifted from this volume: mother, rebirth, spirit, trickster. Cheap, slim, and the way to test whether you want the whole thing. The cost: it takes the illustrations and leaves behind the theory that justifies them.
• The Portable Jung, edited by Joseph Campbell (Viking, 1971; Penguin). Hull's translations, selected across the Collected Works, including the essay on the concept of the collective unconscious. The best single-volume introduction to Jung in print. The cost: only a fragment of Volume 9 Part 1 is in it, and a selection made by Campbell is a selection with a thesis.

If you read one volume of the Collected Works, read this one, in the Princeton edition. Read The Portable Jung first if you have never read him. And check that any edition names Hull as translator; the cheap reprints that do not are not the same book.

Getting the Most From This Book

Read the three theoretical essays first, and slowly. Everything after them is illustration, and a reader who has not understood the opening will experience the rest as a list of coincidences.

Look at the plates. Jung presents the mandalas as evidence, and the last section cannot be followed without them.

Watch your own resistance. Jung does not argue you into the archetypes; he accumulates until you either see it or you do not. Noticing honestly which has happened to you is the whole discipline of reading him, and it is worth more than agreement.