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Toward a New Animism: Jung’s Vision of Reality

David Tacey, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. email: D.Tacey@latrobe.edu.au

Postmodern science will lead us into a new kind of animism. This seems
ironic because it was science that debunked animism and asked us to see it as a
form of error. But postmodern science is preparing the way, albeit unwittingly, for a
re-enchantment of the world. Perhaps we can plot the development of human
thought in three stages. The first stage is ancient enchantment through animism and
pantheism. The second is modern disenchantment through rationality and reason.
The third, and this is the possibility that interests me, i is re-enchantment through
postmodern science, philosophy and depth psychology. In the third stage, we return
to the ancient perception of the world but know it differently and with increased
understanding.ii
A key element of a post-rational enchantment involves replacing the archaic
literalism about ‘spirits’ in nature with a fluid and metaphorical awareness about
soul in the world. The animating factor would not be seen as supernatural, but as
deeply natural. The new understanding is that spirit is inherent in nature, and does
not have to be ‘put there’ by forces from above. Spirit does not intervene in the
natural order in an artificial way because it is always already part of that order.
Thus the new understanding of an animated universe is neither dualistic nor
supernatural, because we experience a depth dimension in nature which was
previously hidden from our sight. The first stage of primal enchantment saw it but
interpreted it in literal and metaphysical ways, while the second stage of human
reason denied its very existence.
We are on a journey into a new way of experiencing the world, and while it
owes a great deal to ancient cosmology, it refuses to identify with the first stage as
it moves toward a vision we can barely comprehend at this time. As D. H.
Lawrence said in this context:
Our road may have to take a great swerve, that seems a retrogression … We must make a
great swerve in our onward-going life-course now, to gather up again the savage mysteries
… But this does not mean going back on ourselves. We can’t go back. iii
Lawrence gets it right: we need to take a great swerve in our onward-going
life-course, in favour of the primordial mysteries, our psychic and spiritual
relationship with the world. However, he admits that this ‘great swerve … seems a
retrogression’. Those of us who are called to this pathway will be accused of
regression by our critics and by ‘progressives’ who fail to see the vital importance of
the swerve. Let us, with this in mind, turn to Jung, who conducted the swerve, the
detour, and saw clearly the difficulties involved.
On the subject of the animation of the physical world, we see a deep rift or
division in Jung’s work, and it is due to these divisions that different schools have
emerged in his name, each claiming to represent the true Jung. One Jungian school

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of analytical psychology claims that Jung was primarily concerned with psyche
inside the human person, and that his theories provide the basis for a clinical
practice. Another school of archetypal psychology takes up the thread leading out to
the psyche or soul of the world, and argues that his work leads necessarily to eco-
psychology and to healing the neuroses of the world and the environment.
The clinical aspect of Jung’s work was concerned with the so-called
‘withdrawal of projections’ and in this regard his thinking seemed to be modern,
sceptical and rational. As a clinician, Jung viewed the experience of spirits of place,
totemic animals, sacred spaces, ancestor spirits, gods and demons as psychic contents
that had been unconsciously projected onto the world. Freud had already said that the
primal view of an animated universe ‘is nothing but psychology projected into the
external world’,iv and a certain stream of Jung’s thinking is identical to Freud’s. In his
1937 Terry Lectures at Yale University, Jung made clear the nature of premodern
animism. He was particularly interested in how magical or animistic thinking was
undermined by the rise of science:
The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First,
in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main
body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects: it was projected,
as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At
most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious
knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of
astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant
projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step
followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and
rivers, from trees and animals. v
Jung wrote: ‘All anthropomorphic projections were withdrawn from the object one
after another … and there was disclosed the inner wealth of the soul which lies in
every man’s heart’.vi This side of Jung is indistinguishable from Freud, and it is this
side that followers of James Hillman have in mind when they hit out at Jung as a
reductionist and dualist. The withdrawal of psychic projections leads inevitably to
disenchantment and loss of spirit in the world. This has been the dominant form of
thinking in the modern period. Rational enlightenment lands us in a spiritual and
emotional wasteland, in which reason and science have cleansed the world of all
‘projections’, leaving nothing left in the world for us to relate to or form spiritual
bonds with. Disenchantment leads, in turn, to the ecological crisis, since the world is
no longer experienced as sacred, and that is a serious blow to the integrity of the
world. If it is divested of spiritual significance and no longer sacred, we tend to
experience the world as profane and have no reason to care for it in the old ways.
Divested of its spiritual significance, it becomes a short step to regard it as real estate
or material resource to be used to satisfy egotistical desires. The desacralisation of
nature leads quickly to the degradation and exploitation of nature. In this sense,
Hillman is right when he says ‘we’ve had a hundred years of psychotherapy and the
world’s getting worse’.vii

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But running alongside this modernist and Cartesian project of the withdrawal
of projections is another stream of Jung’s thought, moving in the opposite direction.
This side of Jung is concerned with what might be called the reanimation of the
world. This is the side of his thinking that led to the discovery of the concept of
synchronicity, the acausal connecting principle between psyche and world. When
Jung happened upon the notion of synchronicity, which was sparked by his early
conversations with Einstein,viii he was made aware that a large part of his work was
thrown into doubt and confusion. While ‘projections’ appear to come from inside us,
they may be archetypal rather than personal, and they might represent imperfect
attempts to capture the animating spirit of the world. The most profound projections
are expressions of archetypal reality that speak of the nature of ultimate reality. In
other words, these projections do not only belong inside us, or to the human mind,
but might belong inside the soul of the world, the anima mundi.
The very word ‘projections’ may be inadequate, because it assumes a dualistic
Cartesian universe at the outset, in which nature possesses no spiritual content unless
it is first projected into it by the human being. If we adopt a dualistic approach, there
can be no way that we might comprehend that spiritual forces in nature are ‘always
already’ there, independent of our mental activity. Jung worried a great deal about the
subjectivism of the position that speaks about all animations as ‘projections’. Indeed,
as Roderick Main has argued, ‘the concept of projection had in its way contributed to
the disenchantment of the world, for the concept implies that the meanings we
perceive in the world are not there in reality, but are being foisted onto the world by
the human mind’.ix Gilles Quispel reports that after Jung delivered his lecture on
synchronicity at Eranos in 1951, Jung told him that ‘now the concept of projection
should be revised completely’.x This moment represents a crisis in the history of
analytical psychology, but it is a crisis which has yet to be explored or even admitted.
Analytical psychologists continue to speak in their clinical practice of the withdrawal
of projections, as if this is a completely unproblematic process, without being
mindful of Jung’s late concern about this theory.
Increasingly in his late career, Jung reversed the directions of his earlier
thinking about psyche and world. He sought an objective psyche that was not merely
‘put there’ by the projection-making factor. It is as if, beneath and below a certain top
layer of obvious projections, there is a deeper layer of experience in which psyche
and world are intermingled. Jung became less patronising to so-called ‘primitives’
who project their psychic contents into nonhuman objects. Jung is suddenly assailed
by the suspicion that we might be the primitive ones, and the indigenous peoples
might be able to comprehend the interior psychic nature of reality. They are seeing
more than we see, not because they are infantile or deluded, but because they are
intuitive. Jung explored this insight in ‘The Role of the Unconscious’, ‘Mind and
Earth’, ‘Archaic Man’, and ‘The Complications of American Psychology’.
But in each of these essays Jung kept hitting a conceptual and epistemological
brick wall. His scientific thinking, based on Newtonian science and Cartesian logic,
could not carry him across the dualistic boundary which separates psyche and world.

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In each of his attempts to write about the psyche that is ‘always already’ in the world
he has to resort to poetry, myth and metaphor. He cannot find the right scientific
language that would allow him to walk in a one world or unus mundus which is free
from such boundaries. In a letter of 1943, he writes: ‘I am deeply convinced of the –
unfortunately – still very mysterious relation between man and landscape, but hesitate
to say anything about it because I could not substantiate it rationally’.xi
In his influential book, The Reenchantment of the World, Morris Berman
acknowledges that Jung was the only figure in the scientific community of his time to
attempt to move beyond the dualistic Cartesianism in which science had been caught.
But Berman ends up dismissing Jung’s attempt as a failure:
Jung broke with scientism, but doing so propelled him backward in time. In Medieval and
Renaissance alchemy he recognized a wholeness that permeated the psyche of the Middle
Ages, and which was still present in human dream life. Clearly, dream analysis has a
timeless importance, but any science constructed on Jungian premises would necessarily be
a straightforward revival of the occult world view and thus a return to naïve animism. Jung
shows us the path to a non-Cartesian world view, but his premises cannot be the basis for a
post-Cartesian paradigm.xii
This is an example of what I mentioned earlier: Jung takes the ‘great swerve’ in the
direction of the past and he is accused of being naïve and regressive. The leading
Lacanian scholar, Slavoj Zizek, makes the same accusation:
Jung advocates a return to the pre-modern universe of Wisdom and its sexo-cosmology, the
universe of a harmonious correspondence between the human microcosm and the
macrocosm – that is to say, for him the subject of psychoanalysis is the pre-modern subject
living in a universe in which ‘everything has a meaning’.xiii
It is so easy for clever intellectuals to make fun of Jung’s project. Jung attempts
Lawrence’s great detour toward the primal mysteries, and his critics cry foul. They
claim he is not going beyond the modern paradigm, but going behind it, into the
world of premodern cosmology. But not all voices chime in with this condemnation.
For instance, physicist Wolfgang Pauli and biologist Rupert Sheldrake have argued
that Jung’s thinking points the way forward to a post-Cartesian paradigm.xiv More
recently, scientific enquirers such as Jean Knox, Joseph Cambray and John Clarke
have argued that Jung may have been more successful than Berman or Zizek
intimate.xv Although his work on psyche and world may seem like a reversion to
magical thinking, developments in neuroscience, complexity theory and emergentism
may be able to show that Jung was working with postmodern scientific concepts
ahead of schedule as it were, and he was groping in the dark for a science that had not
yet been invented. Recent interpreters of Jung have argued that Jung’s research can
be better understood in the twenty-first century than in the twentieth, now that we
have the ‘new sciences’ to act as our guide.

i
David Tacey, ReEnchantment (Sydney: HarperCollins, 2000).
ii
See David Tacey, ‘Mind and Earth: Psychic Influence Beneath the Surface’, in Edge of the Sacred: Jung, Psyche,
Earth (Zurich: Daimon, 2009), pp. 19-33.
iii
D. H. Lawrence, ‘Herman Melville’s Typee and Omoo’ (1923), in Studies in Classic American Literature
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), pp. 144-146.

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iv
Sigmund Freud, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901), in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works, Vol. 6 (London: The Hogarth Press, 1953), pp. 258-9.
v
Jung, ‘Psychology and Religion’ (1938/1940), CW 11, para. 140.
vi
Jung, ‘Transformation Symbolism in the Mass’ (1942/1954), CW 11, para. 375.
vii
James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse
(San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1992).
viii
‘It was Einstein who first started me off thinking about a possible relativity of time as well as space, and their
psychic conditionality. More than thirty years later this stimulus led to my relation with the physicist Professor
Wolfgang Pauli and to my thesis of psychic synchronicity’. Jung, letter to Carl Seelig (25 February 1953), in
Gerhard Adler, ed., C.G. Jung Letters, Vol. 2, 1951–1961 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p.
109.
ix
Roderick Main, ‘Ruptured time and the re-enchantment of modernity’, in Ann Casement (ed.) Who Owns Jung?
(London: Karnac, 2007), p. 26.
x
Gilles Quispel, quoted in Robert Segal, June Singer, and Murray Stein (eds.) The Allure of Gnosticism: The Gnostic
Experience in Jungian Psychology and Contemporary Culture (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), p. 19.
xi
Jung, Letter to Emil Egli (1943), in Gerhard Adler (ed.) C.G. Jung Letters, Vol.1, 1906-1950 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1976), p. 338.
xii
Morris Berman, The Reenchantment of the World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), p. 156.
xiii
Slavoj Zizek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 209.
xiv
Wolfgang Pauli and C. G. Jung, The Interpretation of Nature and the Psyche (1952) (London: Routledge & Kegan
Paul, 1955); Rupert Sheldrake, The Presence of the Past: Morphic Resonance and the Habits of Nature
(London: Collins, 1988); and The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God (New York: Bantam
Books, 1991).
xv
Jean Knox, Archetype, Attachment, Analysis: Jungian Psychology and the Emergent Mind (New York: Routledge,
2003); Joseph Cambray, Synchronicity: Nature and Psyche in an Interconnected Universe (College Station,
TX: Texas A&M University Press, 2009); John Clarke, ‘Jung and Emergentism’, unpublished paper delivered
at University of Essex, 28 April 2010.

Discussion
This paper raises a number of issues to do with a modern Cartesian stream in Jung’s work and later, from the
theory of synchronicity onwards, a post-Cartesian, in which the theory of ‘projections’ collapses.

Have the makers of analytical psychology overlooked this collapse?

Is Jung’s research better understood in the 21st century now that we have the “new sciences” to act as our
guide?

Did Jung abandon science and if so what replaced it?

What does the theory of animism tell us about indigenous knowledge and the proponents of these theories?

How does post-modern science affect this?

Can there be meaning and purpose to projections within Jungian psychology?

If meaning is already present how can we know this if we are forced to discover it post hoc or after the
event?

David Tacey 16/6/20