Applied Social Science: Science and Theology, Michele Marsonet & Georgeta Rață (ed.

),
Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle, 2013, pp. 79-87, Isbn13: 978-1-4438-4404-8

Esse in anima: C.G. Jung’s Phenomenological Ontology

Iuliu-Mihai Novac

Introduction

Though the relationships between the two schools of thought have initially lingered somewhere between
reciprocal ignoration and a more or less outspoken hostility, during the last three decades, an increase in the degree
of reciprocal interest became rather manifest: some of the analytical psychologists1 became aware of the potential
relevance of the phenomenological method, with respect not only to theoretical issues but to therapeutic ones as
well, part of the phenomenological community grew more receptive to the possibilities that this new and peculiar
field of study, namely the unconscious, entailed for the application and use of the phenomenological method. Of
course, the setting of the unconscious as field of study for phenomenology, had already been heralded by names
such as Ricoeur, Binswanger, Boss and so on, but this had taken place under the auspices of Freud’s psychoanalysis,
while the Jungian approach to the unconscious, though seemingly closer in spirit to phenomenology, was initially
ignored. It is said that, if you will, as any form of theoretical or clinical psychology is, in Jung’s words, a form of
subjective confession, it appears that it comes more naturally to phenomenology to attune its sense of hearing to this
confession, while abiding by its epistemological gentleness principle (Seinlassen), rather than to that of
psychoanalysis. By all means, a certain degree of invasiveness is here also required, but, allegedly, it would be
possible to keep it on a much lower level and, the more important, it could be carried out while following, as Husserl
would put it, the guiding purpose-idea of analytical psychology in its capacity as noematic phenomenon. This
marked the beginnings of an ample project for the cleansing of Jung’s analytical psychology of its subjacent
positivist assumptions, respectively the disclosure and elaboration of its substantial fallow phenomenological layer.
This article was conceived as a contribution in this regard, mainly brought from the standpoint of Heideggerian
phenomenology as set in Being and Time.
First I would like to stress the fact that I am not claiming this to be a sufficient elaboration of the subject
matter, but only a necessary determination of the discursive horizon and of the main interpretative hypotheses. So,
what is phenomenology after all? As a preliminary answer I will point out a pertinent analogy made by one of
Heidegger’s interpreters (Guignon, 1993): just as the objects in a room can become visible only provided that the
light making them visible stays invisible, he claims, so all things can become manifest only insofar that which
makes them manifest stays unapparent. In the terms of the classical Heideggerian distinction, the objects represent
the entities, while the light corresponds to the Being and phenomenology constitutes that specific existential
undertaking by which starting from the former (the apparent phenomenon), we can arrive at the latter (the hidden
phenomenon).
Now, going over to Jung, one of his main distinctions is the one between archetype, on the one hand,
archetypal image, on the other. Basically, the archetype corresponds to the recurrent unconscious tendency of our
Psyche to select and arrange certain (types of) experiences according to specific universal patterns, while the
archetypal images constitute the definite products of this process, which are specific to each epoch, culture and,
ultimately, biography. Michael Vannoy Adams’s (2008) example in this respect is quite edifying: if Hermann
Melville had never seen a whale he would have never written Moby Dick. On the other hand, he could have written
some other novel about the archetypal experience of being engulfed. As such, the archetype stands only for our
innate inclination towards certain types of images and their arrangement in certain patterns, but not for the particular

1
Brooke, Romanyshyn, Hillman, Welman

1
images as such. As a consequence, according to Jung, an archetype can never be described as such, only postulated
(in a Kantian sense), i.e. necessarily guessed behind certain images. 2

Methodology

Now, back to Heidegger, we must take note of the fact that for him (as for Husserl) phenomenology
constitutes first and foremost a method:

“’Phenomenology’ neither designates the object of its researches, nor characterizes the subject-matter thus
comprised. The word merely informs us of the ‘how’ with which what is to be treated in this science gets exhibited
and handled. To have a science ‘of’ phenomena means to grasp its objects in such a way that everything about them
which is up for discussion must be treated by exhibiting it directly and demonstrating it directly.(…) The character
of this description itself, the specific meaning of the λόγος, can be established first of all in terms of the
‘thinghood’ [“Sachheit”] of what is to be ‘described’- that is to say, of what is to be given scientific definiteness as
we encounter it phenomenally.” Heidegger, M. (1927/1962: par. 35)

In the light of these considerations, we can now throw a glance at the supposed latent phenomenological
dimension of Jung’s work. In this respect we must note that the main critical arguments Jung brings Freud regard
precisely the infringement of the same imperatives as the ones stemming out of the quoted claim: the fact that the
psychoanalytic approach defiles through its biologistic-reductionistic method the specific and essential features of
the phenomena it aims at dealing with. More precisely, for Jung, phenomena such as art, dream, religion, no longer
represent dissimulating sanctuaries for the recurrent and ever oppressed manias of the pleasure instinct, but
spontaneous manifestations of the Psyche as an autonomous existential field. The psychic phenomenon must not be
deciphered, as a code, in order to find what lies behind it, for it carries with itself its own signification-background
in the very ingenuity it presents itself first and foremost (zunächst und zumeist), as Heidegger would put it. Of
course that the language to which the unconscious appeals is always symbolic in nature, but the task is here not so
much to find the symbol’s eventual reference in a so called objective-material world, but rather that of unraveling as
much as possible of the signification system it is embedded in, while at the same time determining its specific place
within it3.

“Image and meaning are identical; and as the first takes shape, so the latter becomes clear. Actually the pattern needs
no interpretation: it portrays its own meaning.” (Jung 1947/1954:204)

Moreover, Jung himself has repeatedly characterized his method as being “exclusively phenomenological” that is
“concerned with occurrences, events, experiences” (Jung 1937/1970:5). „(...) our science is phenomenology” (Jung
1976:289) claims Jung in The Symbolic Life. On the other hand, considering his implicit understanding of the term
phenomenon, a certain ambiguity becomes apparent: „I am an empiricist and adhere as such to the
phenomenological standpoint...I restrict myself to the observation of the phenomena and I eschew any metaphysical
or philosophical considerations” (Jung 1937:5). The aforementioned double paradigmatic loyalty of Jung becomes
here very transparent: a positivistic claim of the premises but bolstered by a phenomenological substrate- the quoted
claim very much resembles Husserl’s own transcendental reduction.
As such, my analytic hypothesis is that from behind Jung’s own self-labeling as an empiricist, a rather
phenomenological attitude and substance shines through, momentarily understanding phenomenology rather in
Husserl’s sense or along Heidegger’s formal meaning of the concept of phenomenon. Now, in a second stage, I aim
at showing that Jung, despite his official rejection of any ontological or metaphysical elaboration of his
considerations, slips, especially in his later work, precisely towards an ontological level of theorization that draws
him close to Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology. Hereinafter, I will make a few observations on this point.

2
One might say, in an analogous manner to that in which the astrophysicists infer the existence of a black hole by its
gravitational influence upon the neighboring celestial bodies.
3
Specifically Jungian methods such as amplification or active imagination aimed precisely at an intensification and
not a reduction of the symbol. Authors such as Chapmann (1988) and Corbett (2000) seem to agree on the fact that
the emphasis Jung lays on direct experience and his care for keeping the prima facie layer of any psychic image
intact, qualify him as a phenomenologist.

2
 Further developments
With Heidegger phenomenology becomes, from mere method, ontology. How does this happen? According
to Heidegger, that which we generally call phenomenon essentially constitutes itself as a synthetic structure between
a formal-naive sense, as that which shows itself in itself (das Sich-an-ihm-selbst-zeigende), i.e. as first glance, prima
facie presence, and a deeper, specifically phenomenological sense, in which precisely that which first and most often
does not show itself becomes phenomenon, namely the relational background in which (without our explicit
knowing) the respective thing is embedded and which makes it be precisely that which it is. As such, what a thing
is, is determined by the world to which it belongs, namely by the way it, with its specific role and function relates to
other things, themselves provided with their own specific roles and functions, in nuce by its Being-connection. Any
particular thing is made possible by a preexisting world which, as long as it is understood, the thing opens. Thus, the
entity becomes apparent in its Being, and phenomenology, precisely as long as it is capable of bringing to light
(Aufweisung) and legitimating (Ausweisung) its connection to the Being, becomes, as said, ontology.
Now returning to our argument, Jung slips, from a certain point on, in a more or less voluntary way, from
his experiential inclination that drew him close to phenomenology in the formal-methodological understanding of
the term, to a genuine ontology grounded on the synthesis between the Psyche and the world.

“A third, mediating point is needed. ‘esse in intellectu’ lacks tangible reality,’ esse in re’ lacks mind. Idea and thing
come together, however, in the human psyche, which holds the balance between them. What would the idea amount
to if the psyche did not provide its living value? What would the thing be worth if the psyche withheld from it the
determining force of sense-impression? What indeed is reality if it is not a reality in ourselves, an ‘esse in anima’?
Living reality is the product neither of the actual, objective behavior of things nor of the formulated idea
exclusively, but rather of the combination of both in the living psychological process, through’ esse in anima”. (Jung
1921: para. 77)

Though the dualist Cartesian ontology still echoes in this claim, we can already catch a glimpse of that
double movement specific to phenomenology, i.e. of removal of consciousness from under the exclusive claim of
the subject, on the one hand, of the world from under that of the object, on the other, and of placing them in an
ontological relation of concrescence in which the two terms, consciousness and world, constitute reciprocal a priori
preconditions of possibility. The actual shape this consciousness-world fusion takes with Jung is, as we have seen,
this ontology of esse in anima, which in fact follows from that principle which is most deeply rooted in his vision,
namely the autonomy of the Psyche. As such, for Jung, at least in his latter perspective, consciousness as Self is
neither an epiphenomenon, an irisation of something more profound, of an eventual material-objective nature, nor a
mere autonomous domain with a per se functioning, but the very generative principle and utterance background of
that which we call existence, of which, eventually, we can say that it objectifies itself as world, respectively
subjectifies itself as ego. Two notable consequences of this fact:
First, for Jung there is no Archimedean point with respect to the Psyche, no non-psychic perspective from
which it can be looked upon in an un-interpreted and unbiased manner. The Psyche is always the one looking upon
itself and, consequently, everything coming out of this contemplation is a reflection of the very Psyche asking the
question: there is no neutral (freischwebend) way of asking the question – every answer is a reflection of its question
and every question is a projection of the (pre)answer it seeks to question4. As noted, we are drawing very close to
Heidegger’s interpretation of the question of Being5.
Secondly, the world, becomes for Jung the very screen upon which the immanent drama of the Psyche is
projected, we can no longer have, except in an heuristic sense, a distinction between the exogenous and the
endogenous aspects of the Psyche. In this context, classical Jungian concepts, such as archetype or archetypal
image, become from regulative structures of the subjective inneity, existential stances with respect to (or rather
within6) the world, ontical illustrations of the corresponding ontological existentials. In the words of Romanyshyn
(2000)7, the real depth of the depth psychology is the world 8. Of course, this would require a certain deviation from

4
See Jung, C.G. (1937/1970).
5
An understanding of Being is already included in conceiving anything which one apprehends as an entity.
Heidegger, M. (1927/1962: par. 3)
6
In the sense of Heidegger’s being-in-the-world (in-der-Welt-sein)
7
The concept of lateral depth.

3
the Jungian norm, namely a mundane contextualization of the concept of archetype, i.e. its transformation from an
acultural and hereditary regulative structure in a, shall we say, existential stance specific to the being-in-the-world
(in-der-Welt-sein) of every culture.
But in the end, just how acultural is Jung’s archetype? He underlines the fact that the archetype is essentially
inscrutable, namely that it cannot be directly observed but only somehow intuited, guessed if you will, behind
certain (types of) images that instantiate it specifically in every cultural context. Culture is for Jung, if not the source
of the archetype, certainly its logos and its predilect environment of coming into being. Just as the phenomenon for
Heidegger, the archetype essentially constitutes itself as a synthesis structure between an ever apparent aspect, the
archetypal image, and an overshadowed one: one could say that the archetypal image is the one that, on the one
hand, indicates the archetype, but on the other, covers it, ensuring its essential condition of hideness (Verdecktheit).
Reiterating, the essential question one could ask here would be: can the archetype be taken as that
determination of the Being of Dasein, called existential? This is one of the major issues I am concerned with in this
study. In short, the existentials represent not so much whats but rather hows of the existence, i.e. perpetual issues
with which the Dasein implicitly or explicitly confronts itself along its life and which ultimately modulate its entire
destiny. In this context, the destiny of the Dasein amounts to the specific existential stance resulted from the totality
of answers it managed to provide to these essential issues. Here are some actual examples of existentials: being-in-
the-world, being-with, being-there, being-towards-death etc..

Moreover, Heidegger claims:

“When something no longer takes the form of just letting something be seen, but is always harking back to
something else to which it points, so that it lets something be seen as something, it thus acquires a synthesis-
structure, and with this takes over the possibility of covering up.” Heidegger, M. (1927/1962: par 34)

respectively,

“Yet that which remains hidden in an egregious sense, or which relapses and gets covered up again, or
which shows itself only in disguise is not just this entity or that, but rather the Being of entities, as our previous
observations have shown.” Heidegger, M. (1927/1962: par 35)

Hence, the basic idea with Heidegger is that we are born, as consciousness, already endowed (vorgestattet)
with an anticipative layout of the world on the basis of which we are from the start predisposed to a specific
(culturally) determined understanding of the world. That is why we almost spontaneously know, for instance, how to
use a hammer when we meet one, maybe for the first time, namely because, ever since before our becoming
conscious beings as such, we have grown (tacitly) accustomed with that particular world in which a hammer is
handled in such a way, that is not as, shall we say, decorative object, nor as balance weight, but for hammering:
everything else that we know and do with respect to this world implies the hammer’s use in such a way and in no
other. This originally embeds any-thing in a specific sense, i.e. in a particular Being connection which is, as already
mentioned, determined by the place that thing holds with respect to all the other things within this specific world.
Evidently, the implicit assumption would be that we are not originally born in full consciousness, that is that the
moment of our biological birth does not overlap with that of our, shall we say, cognitive birth: we become conscious
as we grow up, namely as the cultural-ontological model is (unseeingly) delivered to us or, better put, we are
delivered to it.
Synthetically, the world, in its original-transcendental capacity, represents, according to Heidegger, a
culturally specific semantic9 configuration, which subjacently polarizes any relation between us and one thing or
another. In other words, transcendentally speaking, to the extent that our initial relation to the object precedes and
constitutes the object in cause, the world regulates our relation. This is what Heidegger calls the pre-giveness of the
world. On a more specific note, this is how I understand Heidegger’s claim that we do not so much perceive objects
that meet things, in the sense that, in our daily lives, we do not just take note, on a purely constative basis, of a given
inert object that, initially doesn’t mean anything to us and to that, given our relation to it, we come to apply a certain
subjectively imagined sense or label (thereby it gaining a certain meaning to us). Quite the contrary, Heidegger says,
we first and foremost spontaneously subsume objects to preexistent meanings that we hold on account of our

8
In this respect Brooke claims: “ (…) human light called consciousness is the capacity to awaken the world into its
own Being” (Brooke 2000 iii:19)
9
In a much broader understanding than the purely linguistic one.

4
specific cultural model. We know from the start, if you will, what we want to hear from our perceptual world and
what we seek is that certain something to offer us the desired answer. Correspondingly, the world does not come to
be by the agglutination of inert objects but, au contraire, it is by the dieresis, i.e. the instantiation, of the world in
particular given contexts that the things (as meaningful objects) come to be.
In my opinion this is the Heideggerian interpretation of a distinction Husserl made on the level of the
noema, between the so called intentioned object, basically the pre-intentional perceptual material (hylé) of any
experience and the intentional object, that is a specific transcendental rule regulating the perception of such
particular type of object – the world constitutes the general system of all these rules. Consequently, every time we
are faced with one thing or another we are automatically sent back to this original ontological model that was
delivered to us through culture along our pre-cognitive formation.

Conclusions
Well, what I try here to investigate is whether and how Jung’s archetype can be related to these culturally
generated existential categories that predetermine our relation to all surrounding things. This is what Heidegger calls
an existential.
Obviously, in this context, the fulfillment of the abovementioned task calls for a removal of the concept of archetype
from its aprioristic-biologistic background, which is still substantially rooted in its classical Jungian approach, and
its placement within a more explicit cultural dynamics. In nuce, in this latter interpretation culture would constitute
more than the mere coating of the archetype, that is its genuine source.
However counter-intuitive, this task doesn’t seem to me so far fetched and this on account of some of the
claims Jung himself made:

“The creative process, so far as we are able to follow it at all, consists in the unconscious activation of an archetypal
image, and in elaborating and shaping this image into the finished work. By giving it shape, the artist translates it
into the language of the present, and so makes it possible for us to find our way back to the deepest springs of life.
Therein lies the social significance of art: it is constantly at work educating in the spirit of an age, conjuring up the
forms in which the age is most lacking. The unsatisfied yearning of the artist reaches back to the primordial image in
the unconscious which is best fitted to compensate the inadequacy and one-sidedness of the present. The artist seizes
on this image, and in raising it from the deepest unconsciousness he brings it into relation with conscious values,
thereby transforming it until it can be accepted by the minds of his contemporaries according to their powers.” (Jung
1922: 820-83)10

As such, the modification I suggest here would amount to understanding the original revert that we perform
under the impact of the archetype no so much on a psycho-phylogenetic scale, but rather on a cultural-ontogenetic
one: by the archetype I would not so much fall back on an ahistorical and acultural psychic eidos that recurrently
expresses itself in the language of the time, but rather on those subjacent cultural patterns that were instrumental to
my becoming an individual consciousness – the regression would be rather transcendental than historical.
Now, on a more pragmatic note, it would be better, in the end, to outline an answer to a more
epistemological question: what can phenomenology do for the analytical psychology and what can the analytical
psychology do for phenomenology? The answer would be that, on the one hand, phenomenology can take analytical
psychology all the way, it can make it fulfill its original guiding intention that is precisely the one that grants
analytical psychology its specific place within the epistemic field, on the other hand, analytical psychology can grant
phenomenology access to the domain of the unconscious and it is more suitable for this task than other
psychological approaches precisely because, as I have attempted to prove, it already latently develops a
phenomenology sui generis.

Bibliography :
Adams, M.V. (2008) „The Archetypal School” in Cambridge Companion to Jung, Polly Young-Eisendrath and
Terence Dawson (Ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp.107-124

10
An interesting discussion on the matter can be found in Kugler, P. (2000).

5
Brooke, R. (2000) “Introduction” in Pathways into the Jungian World, R. Brooke (Ed.), London: Routledge, ii, pp.1-
9

Guignon, B. C. (1993) “Introduction” in Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Charles B. Guignon (Ed.),

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1-41

Heidegger, M. (1927/1962) Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
Heidegger, M. (1927/1967) Sein und Zeit, Max Niemeyer Verlag, Tübingen
Heidegger, M. (1927/2003) Fiinţă şi timp, trans. Gabriel Liiceanu & Catalin Cioabă, Bucharest: Humanitas

Jung, C.G. (1922) “On the relation of analytical psychology to poetry”, CW 15.

Jung, C.G. (1937/1970) Psychology and Religion, CW11, trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull , Princeton
University Press

Jung, C.G.. (1947/54) On the Nature of the Psyche, CW8, trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull, Princeton
University Press

Jung, C.G. (1951/59) Aion. Researches in the Phenomenology of the Self, trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull,
Princeton University Press

Jung, C.G. (1936/1937) „The Concept of the Collective Unconscious”, CW9, trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull,
Princeton University Press

Jung, C.G. (1954) „The Archetypes of the Collective Unconsciuos”, CW9, trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull,
Princeton University Press

Jung, C.G. (1976) The Symbolic Life, CW18, trans. Gerhard Adler and R.F.C. Hull , Princeton University Press

Kugler, P. (2000) „Psychic Imaging: a bridge between subject and object” in Cambridge Companion to Jung, Polly
Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson (Ed.), Cambridge University Press, pp. 77-91

Romanyshyn, R. (2000) “Alchemy and the Subtle Body of Metaphor” in Pathways into the Jungian World, R.
Brooke, (ed.), London: Routledge, pp. 24-44

Welman, M. (2000) „Thanatos and Existence. Towards a Jungian Phenomenology of Death Instinct” in Pathways
into the Jungian World, R. Brooke, (ed.), London: Routledge, pp.121-137