Buddhist Romanticism

psyche had given rise to the dream—whereas Jung also asked of the dream
the more teleological question, “what for”: i.e., what purpose the dream
might have in bringing the patient to psychological health. By asking this
question, Jung was going beyond the mainstream science of his day, which
saw all causality in the universe as mechanical, deterministic, and
purposeless. To carve out room for teleology in such a universe, Jung
followed James in arguing that psychic reality, instead of being experienced
as a product of physical reality, actually comes prior to it. As he stated in
Psychology and Religion,
“We might well say, on the contrary, that physical existence is
merely an inference, since we know of matter only in so far as we
perceive psychic images transmitted by the senses.… Psyche is
existent, it is even existence itself.” 13
Because psychic processes can only be understood in terms of what they
mean, Jung reasoned, we have to assume that they have a purpose. Thus the
question, “What for?” is the question most deserving of an answer.
However, simply adding this second question to the psychological inquiry
required that Jung give his own distinctive answer to Freud’s first question
of “why.” Freud had satisfied himself that the “why” could be ferreted out
by tracking down a repressed memory in the patient’s unconscious. Jung
decided that there was more to the unconscious than just that.
His eventual hypothesis was that there were three levels to the psyche.
The first was the conscious level, which he also termed the ego. This was
composed of all the emotions and memories that fit with one’s persona: the
face that one wanted to present to oneself and to the world. Any emotions
and memories at odds with the persona were repressed and buried as
neuroses in the second level of the psyche, the personal unconscious. This
part Jung called the “shadow,” the dark side of the person’s unconscious
that had to be faced before the patient could access the third and deepest
level of the psyche, the collective unconscious. This third level contained
not neuroses but archetypes: innate mental structures or patterns that were
not personal in origin, but that acted as factors independent of the patient’s
conscious will, often on the principle of compensation: communicating
through symbols the message that the patient’s ego was out of balance and
suggesting ways in which balance could be recovered.
In analyzing his patients’ dreams, Jung found that there were countless
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