Great piece, Ian. One way to deepen this is to consider how historically radical it is to locate "mind" inside the individual brain, nervous system, molecular and neurological “robots,” etc.
Across most of human history, what we now call cognition was understood as external and mapped onto the heavens, ritual life, sacred geography, or the order of symbols and gods. The idea that thought (or certainly “sense-making” or “meaning-making”) happens primarily inside a private brain or psyche is a recent construction.
Freud and Jung, in different ways, preserved this symbolic order by internalizing it. The gods became complexes and myth became dream. But in doing so, they conceded the basic Cartesian frame: that the mind is housed in the individual. What if that premise itself is flawed?
Much of what we think of as "mental" life seems rather to be distributed across a symbolic and social field. Are language, ritual, architecture, memory, and myth perhaps not exogenous, but endogenous and constitutive aspects of subjective perception? Along this line, does the individual mind become not a standalone processor but a node in a larger semantic ecology?
This also reframes Jung’s psychological types. Perhaps cognitive functions are not meant ever to be fully balanced within each person (though greater individuation and integration are surely crucial vectors of health, growth, and moral integrity), but rather across populations.
To the extent we take Jung’s types seriously, could evolution have selected for psychic differentiation—making social integration not optional, but necessary, even for individual psychological health? Individuation, then, is not self-sufficiency but the refinement of one’s symbolic role within a greater whole.
The Logos, not grasped in isolation, emerges through the dynamic between inward formation and outward mediation; between the soul and the symbolic structures that make meaning possible.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Matt. You add much-needed nuance and depth to this reflection. You're absolutely right to question how Jung’s framework takes the symbolic—once understood as a form of collective consciousness—and reshapes it into a Cartesian structure that might actually undermine its original purpose.
Your image of being a “node in a larger semantic ecology” opens up a compelling reinterpretation of psychopathology. Perhaps to be disordered is to lose the capacity to participate meaningfully in that ecology—to become alienated from the shared symbolic and social field we naturally long to integrate within. From this angle, it makes perfect sense that as we’ve internalized the self more deeply, we’ve also seen rising psychological fragmentation.
This also sheds light on your point about psychic differentiation. Maybe disorder isn’t just internal imbalance but a loss of orientation to one’s communal role in the larger symbolic order.
Your last line is especially powerful. It beautifully reframes Jung’s project—not as a private excavation of meaning, but as participation in a relational process that gives rise to meaning through the dance between soul and symbol.
Great piece, Ian. One way to deepen this is to consider how historically radical it is to locate "mind" inside the individual brain, nervous system, molecular and neurological “robots,” etc.
Across most of human history, what we now call cognition was understood as external and mapped onto the heavens, ritual life, sacred geography, or the order of symbols and gods. The idea that thought (or certainly “sense-making” or “meaning-making”) happens primarily inside a private brain or psyche is a recent construction.
Freud and Jung, in different ways, preserved this symbolic order by internalizing it. The gods became complexes and myth became dream. But in doing so, they conceded the basic Cartesian frame: that the mind is housed in the individual. What if that premise itself is flawed?
Much of what we think of as "mental" life seems rather to be distributed across a symbolic and social field. Are language, ritual, architecture, memory, and myth perhaps not exogenous, but endogenous and constitutive aspects of subjective perception? Along this line, does the individual mind become not a standalone processor but a node in a larger semantic ecology?
This also reframes Jung’s psychological types. Perhaps cognitive functions are not meant ever to be fully balanced within each person (though greater individuation and integration are surely crucial vectors of health, growth, and moral integrity), but rather across populations.
To the extent we take Jung’s types seriously, could evolution have selected for psychic differentiation—making social integration not optional, but necessary, even for individual psychological health? Individuation, then, is not self-sufficiency but the refinement of one’s symbolic role within a greater whole.
The Logos, not grasped in isolation, emerges through the dynamic between inward formation and outward mediation; between the soul and the symbolic structures that make meaning possible.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment, Matt. You add much-needed nuance and depth to this reflection. You're absolutely right to question how Jung’s framework takes the symbolic—once understood as a form of collective consciousness—and reshapes it into a Cartesian structure that might actually undermine its original purpose.
Your image of being a “node in a larger semantic ecology” opens up a compelling reinterpretation of psychopathology. Perhaps to be disordered is to lose the capacity to participate meaningfully in that ecology—to become alienated from the shared symbolic and social field we naturally long to integrate within. From this angle, it makes perfect sense that as we’ve internalized the self more deeply, we’ve also seen rising psychological fragmentation.
This also sheds light on your point about psychic differentiation. Maybe disorder isn’t just internal imbalance but a loss of orientation to one’s communal role in the larger symbolic order.
Your last line is especially powerful. It beautifully reframes Jung’s project—not as a private excavation of meaning, but as participation in a relational process that gives rise to meaning through the dance between soul and symbol.