Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

Group Work 117
and had to be peeled off the ceiling.
Jung acknowledged that one can feel transformed during a group
experience, but he cautioned against confusing this with the real
thing. He pointed out that the presence of many people together
exerts great suggestive force due to the phenomenon of participation
mystique, unconscious identification; hence in a crowd one
risks becoming the victim of one’s own suggestibility. Jung writes:
If any considerable group of persons are united and identified with
one another by a particular frame of mind, the resultant transformation
experience bears only a very remote resemblance to the experience
of individual transformation. A group experience takes place
on a lower level of consciousness than the experience of an individual.
This is due to the fact that, when many people gather together to
share one common emotion, the total psyche emerging from the
group is below the level of the individual psyche. If it is a very large
group, the collective psyche will be more like the psyche of an animal,
which is the reason why the ethical attitude of large organizations
is always doubtful. The psychology of a large crowd inevitably
sinks to the level of mob psychology. . . . In the crowd one feels no
responsibility, but also no fear. 116
Positive group experiences are certainly possible. They can spur
a person to noble deeds or instill a feeling of solidarity with others.
The group can give one a degree of courage, a bearing and dignity
that may easily get lost in isolation. But in the long run such gifts
are unearned and so do not last. Away from the crowd and alone,
you are a different person and unable to reproduce the previous
state of mind.
For some people, dealing with what happens to them in the
course of an ordinary day is either too difficult or too mundane,
sometimes both. Esoteric group practices—crystal balls, vision
quests, pendulums, channeling and the like—are much more exciting.
They tempt with promises few are immune to: deliverance
116 “Concerning Rebirth,” The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, CW 9i,
par. 225.