Now that relations between brain and psyche have been sketched, we shall investigate whether what we know of the brain will support Jung's ideas about psyche's structure and function. This chapter will discuss Jung's view of psychic process, what he calls “individuation.” Individuation describes the development of a human psyche over the course of one's life as a person adapts to the demands of the outer world and the “internal” needs of her organism. In its simplest form, individuation is an idealized picture of psyche-as-process, a relatively simple model that can be complicated with setbacks, hang-ups, side tracks and other neurotic phenomena that regularly occur in all of our lives. The individuation process can be put back on track when these very human divergences are overcome, and analytical therapy aims to assist in the reorientation. Individuation, therefore, serves as a kind of ground plan for psychic process. It is the theoretical background against which all psychic phenomena are interpreted. In this chapter, we shall describe that process and search for parallel events taking place in the neural substrate that can account for individuation.

          In the next chapter, we will consider the sorts of disturbances that may disrupt the individuation process, how Jung believes they arise, and how analytic therapy is said to work -- always with an eye to the underlying brain dynamics and the central question of whether Jung's psychology is consilient with contemporary biology and therefore built upon a sound basis.

Psyche as Individuation Process

          Before sketching a general picture of individuation, it will be useful to have an overview of Jung's professional career so that we can appreciate the role played by the idea of individuation throughout the thirty or so volumes of his writings [1] and justify the choice of sources that will be employed for this argument.

Jung's opus. Jung began his psychiatric career in 1902 with a dissertation on the psychic processes he observed in a case of “somnambulism” in a teen-aged girl (his own cousin) who had held séances in which she seemed to serve as a mouthpiece for the spirits of several deceased individuals. Spiritualism of this sort was a very popular activity in Victorian parlors a century ago, and the subject of investigation by psychological experts in Geneva, Paris, London, and Boston (E. Taylor, 1996). This international “school” of psychological thinking, writing in French and English and conversant with one another's work, described its central preoccupation as “somnambulism,” which today corresponds to what is called “dissociation.” Somnambulism designated a complex of phenomena, including hysteria, multiple personality, susceptibility to hypnosis, and such trance- and reverie-based activities as automatic writing and mediumship. Jung's discussion of his cousin's performances interpreted her spirit-messages as dissociation phenomena revealing internal conflicts in her self-identity. The most original part of the work was his argument that one of her spirit guides amounted to a spontaneous unconscious project whereby she was “dreaming” her way into an adult identity. Already the notion of psychological transformation and goal-directedness as a natural capacity of the human psyche was central to his thought (CW 1: ¶1-150).

          Jung was accepted for a residency in psychiatry at one of Europe's most prestigious hospitals, the Burghölzli in Zurich, where his chief was Eugen Bleuler, famous for developing the world's first description of schizophrenia, a perspective that is still influential today. Bleuler set Jung the job of developing the Word Association Test [2] as a diagnostic tool, which led to a slew of papers published over the next five years that caught the attention of psychiatrists, world-wide (CW 2). By asking patients to supply the first word that comes to mind in response to each on a list of 100 everyday words and by measuring the time elapsed between stimulus and response, Jung determined that words which trigger an emotional reaction in the patient will naturally fall into clusters, which he called complexes. Each complex describes something very much like the split-off part-personalities that the dissociation school was studying.

          Believing that the tendency to “block” on emotionally-charged words -- as measured, for instance, by a delay in response times -- constituted empirical evidence for Freud's theory of repression, Jung sent the first volume of his Association Studies to the Father of Psychoanalysis, who enthusiastically responded that he had already bought a copy (1906). There followed the famous seven years of correspondence and collaboration between the two giants of twentieth century psychology, in which Jung vacillated between his natural allegiance to the dissociation school and psychoanalysis (McGuire, 1974). He tried to integrate the two approaches in a book published in 1907, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (CW 3: ¶1-319), which contrasts the dynamics of hysteria (Freud's specialty) with that of schizophrenia (known at the time as “Dementia praecox,” Jung's specialty). A close reading of the text shows that Jung is still closer in his thinking to Paris and Boston than to Vienna (Haule, 1983; 1984). Cooperation between Freud and Jung began to encounter serious difficulties as early as 1909 on a trip to Clark University in Worcester, MA, when they could no longer trust one another with their dreams (Jung, 1961: 158-65). At that time, they were discussing the idea of a central complex, a sort of kernel of the psyche (Kernkomplex) against which psychoanalytic interpretation could find its compass. Freud favored the Oedipus complex. Jung thought sex could hardly be more important in our psychic economy than the drive for nourishment (CW 4: ¶234-42). Persuaded by the natural splittings in a dissociable psyche, Jung could not be convinced that the sex drive was more important than any other. He began a study of mythology to learn what other phylogenetically significant themes have been uppermost in the psyches of human beings since the dawn of recorded history. His study resulted in the book we now call Symbols of Transformation (CW 5) [3]; and that brought about the end of his collaboration with Freud.

          In Symbols Jung interprets the fantasy material of a young American woman, Miss Frank Miller, [4] by finding mythic parallels to her dreams, visions, poems, speculations, and the like. The Kernkomplex appears as the “night-sea journey” of the sun, illustrated with a diagram from mythologist, Leo Frobenius in his book dealing with “The Age of the Sun God.” [5] In myths of this type, the sun sinks into the Western Sea at dusk and then undergoes a struggle with the forces of darkness all the night long as it transits beneath the earth from west to east in order to rise renewed out of the Eastern Sea at dawn (CW 5: ¶306-12). For Jung, this describes the nature of psychological transformation. When our stance toward life needs renewal, we must enter into our own unconscious and do battle with the figures we encounter there. What we learn in these encounters will change us. We will have integrated a bit of our psychic process that has been unconscious. Later on, the night-sea journey became Jung's model for individuation.

          In a Foreword to the revised edition of Symbols (1950), Jung said that writing the book convinced him that we are all living a myth, whether we know it or not, and that, having no idea what his own myth was, he determined to find out (Ibid., xxivf). In fact, the break with Freud occasioned a “creative illness” (Ellenberger, 1970: 39), what some biographers have likened to a psychosis, and Jung began deliberately descending into his own unconscious, which in any event would not leave him alone (Jung 1961: 170-99). There, in the mind's eye of his reveries, he encountered horrifying scenes and met figures who instructed him. He returned to ordinary consciousness and subjected these materials -- some of which he elaborately painted first -- to the same mythological scrutiny he had employed with the fantasies of Frank Miller. While engaged in this “self analysis,” he withdrew almost completely from public life during the years of the First World War.

          At the end of this process, in 1920, Jung completed a huge volume, Psychological Types (CW 6), whose theme he had been considering since his last Psychoanalytic Congress in 1913, just before his break with Freud, where he presented a paper that argued Freud's theory of love and Adler's of power were irreconcilable because they stemmed from two different types of mind (CW6: ¶858-82). After leaving psychoanalysis, Jung continued to explore “the problem of the existence of two kinds of truth” through an extensive exchange of letters with his friend Hans Schmidt (Bair, 2003: 279). He began to conclude that people pay attention to the world via at least eight different attitudes. [6] Everyone follows a single, clearly seen course through the world; and most of us pay little attention to the much larger part of the scene that lies out of focus, blurry, and all run together.

          Types is a discussion of the inevitable imbalance of the ego, whereby only one approach to life is trusted, and other possibilities remain neglected and without focus. Inevitably, however, life provides situations where ego's narrowness is challenged. When forced into blurry, undifferentiated sectors of our human experience, we encounter our “Amfortas wound” -- a reference to the Grail King, rendered impotent by a wound that bled unstaunched for 400 years. The Kingdom of the Grail was entirely male and thoroughly chaste. Amfortas had been a hero in that narrow world until his encounter with his undifferentiated side. He tried to save a raggedy wild woman with magical powers, and he was tempted (Haule, 1992). Taken together, Symbols and Types describe the process of individuation; complexes turn it off course.

There are two kinds of psychic process. Symbols says that processes outside of our awareness powerfully influence our experiences, attitudes, and behaviors, and can also be seen in emotions, fantasies, intuitions, and the like, that occur as the background of our conscious attention. They occur as typical, phylogenetic patterns, later called archetypes; and historically, evidence of their existence can be found in myths, rituals and other socio-cultural phenomena. Consequently, when fragments of archetypal processes are discernible in an individual's dreams or behavior, their larger meaning can be gathered by tracking down the cultural prototypes. Jung demonstrated the method with his treatment of the Miller fantasies.

          While Symbols explores the structure of the unconscious, Types explores psyche's conscious processes, its attitudes. Our conscious standpoint is always a partial perspective on our own identity (introversion) and on the reality of the world (extraversion). Its narrowness appears in the way we structure our personal narrative, the story of who we are, what we remember of the past and how we project our future. Inevitably, there are large areas we have not yet worked out, that we gloss over and tell ourselves are not important. They are our vulnerable spot, where we carry our Amfortas wound. The blurry, undifferentiated material that breaks through this gap challenges our conscious self-image and sets us tasks we may find repugnant or overwhelming. As off-putting as this material may be, however, it offers completion and balance. By learning how to survive in areas of life formerly ignored, we develop our neglected “psychic functions.” That struggle is our night-sea journey. If we succeed in our course through the dangerous “womb [7] of the unconscious,” we will emerge with our approach to life renewed, more effective, and more satisfying.

          Although they lay out the foundations of Jung's approach to understanding and working with the human psyche, Symbols and Types are huge ramshackle tomes comprising more than 1100 pages between them; and the message I have just delineated is not easy to extract. Jung was aware of this problem and had been tinkering since 1916 with two essays that together would provide an easily comprehensible overview of how he understood psyche and how his treatment approach was designed to work. Today these two short works are published together as Volume 7 of the Collected Works and ought to be read as a restatement of the most important themes of Volumes 5 and 6, but with an eye to practical application.

          Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (CW 7), therefore, provides Jung's most complete account of individuation; and it was his last attempt to sketch the basic trajectory of his theory. From about 1930 onward, he devoted the majority of his efforts to the study of alchemy, Gnosticism, hermeticism, and other neglected cultural themes that represent a subterranean stream within Western culture. Just as unconscious themes run below the surface of the individual's conscious life, so have these esoteric traditions played counterpoint to the dominant cultural stream. Jung was searching in these out of the way places for naïve evidence of the individuation process. For example, alchemical attempts to turn lead into gold were bound to fail, but the alchemists' fantasies about what they were observing in their laboratories suggest a great deal about their unconscious psychic process. Jung saw the alchemists as unconscious psychologists, and he mined their work for evidence of the individuation process in medieval imagery (CW 12: ¶1-43).

“On the Psychology of the Unconscious” (1917/43). The first of the Two Essays begins with a case history in which tracing the meaning of an hysterical crisis back to a childhood trauma (as Freud urged) would have missed the meaning of the event in the present. Neurosis is “self-division” (¶18) and the evasion of a problem (¶23), it requires that we look into the unexamined `shadow-side' of the psyche” (¶27). By reducing neurosis to issues of love or power, Freud and Adler undervalue its potential (¶71). We would be better advised to observe the course of psyche's natural process [8] and assist it (¶76-8). “[T]he values which the individual lacks are to be found in the neurosis itself” (¶93).

          Usually the first fantasies to emerge from the neurosis are related to parental authorities, but eventually archetypal imagery will emerge from “the depths of the unconscious” (¶97-105) “like highly charged autonomous centers of power [that] exert a fascinating and positive influence on the conscious mind” (¶110). When an archetype appears, there is a danger of enantiodromia (Heraclitus), of flipping back and forth from one extreme position to its opposite (¶111-15). The way to handle such a labile situation is not to repress the matter, but to “put it clearly before [oneself] as that which [one] is not” (¶112). “The point is not conversion into the opposite but conservation of previous values together with a recognition of their opposites” (¶116).

          “The process of coming to terms with the unconscious . . . does not proceed without aim and purpose, but leads to the revelation of the essential man . . . the unfolding of the original, potential wholeness. . . . I have termed this the individuation process ” (¶186). “The initiative lies with the unconscious, but all the criticism, choice, and decision lie with the conscious mind. If the decision is right, it will be confirmed by dreams indicative of progress. . . . The course of therapy is thus rather like a running conversation with the unconscious.” When the right interpretation is made, there will be “an uprush of life,” while a wrong interpretation “dooms [patient and doctor] to deadlock, resistance, doubt and mutual desiccation” (¶189).

“The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” (1916/38). The second of the Two Essays begins with the case of a woman who sees Jung as her father/lover (personal image), but then dreams of her father transformed into a colossus, rocking her in his arms in a wheat field (archetypal image) (¶202-15). Such archetypal forces are dangerous for one's personal integrity. Identifying with them leads to inflation, and being overwhelmed by them leads to despair, even psychosis (¶221-39). “For the development of personality, then, strict differentiation from the collective psyche is absolutely necessary” (¶240). Know your limits, do not merge indiscriminately.

          “Individuation means becoming an `in-dividual,' . . . [it] embraces our innermost, last and incomparable uniqueness . . . [it is] `self-realization'” (¶266). Individuation is not an extreme pose like “individualism” but is one's own personal adaptation to universally human “functions and faculties” (¶267). Following its course “divest[s one] of the false wrappings of the persona on the one hand, and of the suggestive power of primordial images on the other” (¶269). In its “running conversation” with the collective unconscious, therefore, ego's knowledge of itself is gradually being adjusted in the direction of appreciating its relatively small role in the “totality of the psyche,” which Jung calls the “self” (¶274). “That touchy, egotistical bundle of personal wishes, fears, hopes, and ambitions . . . has to be . . . corrected by unconscious counter-tendencies” (¶275). Such compensation does not follow “a deliberate and concerted plan.” It is rather a matter of the natural, organic balancing of complimentary processes (¶291) -- the sort of balance that is found in every organism from the protozoa on up.

          In following the course of individuation, we discover our own authentic relationship with the two collectivities: (a) collective consciousness, the public world, the assumptions and pressures of society -- for these lie behind “the false wrappings of the persona” -- ; and (b) the collective unconscious, the phylogenetic propensities that arise from within -- “the suggestive power of primordial images.” Individuation is thus characterized by two dialogues running simultaneously.

          Jung describes each of these dialogues in terms of a mediating figure (¶296-340). Regarding the outer dialogue, we have spoken in earlier chapters of the “persona” as our social strategy. Jung calls persona a “mask” and an inner psychic figure which mediates between the ego and the outer world. It may appear in personified form in our dreams; and Jung prefers to speaks of it as though it were a nearly independent personage, as if to say, I am not my persona strategy, although it is part of my totality (¶312f). In the inner dialogue, on the other hand, the mediator between ego and self is a contra-sexual figure (“anima” in men, “animus” in women). Anima and animus, beginning with their gender, personify everything that is other than the ego. They can be fascinating or fearsome, seductive or repulsive, depending on the ego's attitude and stability. This contra-sexual archetype not only conducts the running dialogue between ego and self, but also plays a significant role in our relations with people of the opposite sex. [9]

          Not surprisingly, persona and anima [10] are frequently at odds with one another:

When the anima continually thwarts the good intentions of the conscious mind, by contriving a private life that stands in sorry contrast with the dazzling persona, it is exactly the same as when a naïve individual, who has not the ghost of a persona, encounters the most painful difficulties in his passage through the world (¶318).

Clearly we need well-refined mediators for both running dialogues, and it is disadvantageous to develop one at the expense of the other.

          From this point on in the essay, the emphasis is upon the inner dialogue. Jung presents the example of a “spotless man of honour and public benefactor, whose tantrums and explosive moodiness terrify his wife and children” (¶319). He has developed his persona at the expense of his anima, and Jung proposes “an actual technique” to remedy the situation. The man must stop merging with his moodiness and separate himself from his anima (¶321). Then he must “listen to the affect” patiently and without criticizing it, hearing its message the way he would listen to the complaints of “a real person.” Once heard, however, he must criticize that message as he would that of a colleague, and allow the “discussion” to continue as long as it needs to. This is precisely the method Jung employed for his own night-sea journey during the time of his “creative illness.” Later, he calls this technique “active imagination.”

          “Scrupulous honesty with oneself and no rash anticipation of what the other side might conceivably say are the indispensable conditions of this technique for educating the anima” (¶323). A variety of examples follow, all exhibiting the same technique. Ego trims away its touchiness and neurotic attachments, while anima or animus is “depotentiated” from its role as inner despot so as to take up its rightful position as “a psychological function of an intuitive nature” (¶374).

Summary. By the end of the second essay, we understand what Jung meant back near the beginning, when he said, “The values which the individual lacks are to be found in the neurosis itself” (¶92). Let the neurotic affect “speak” and ego's limitations will be addressed. Engage it in dialogue, and ego will find its rightful place within the totality of psyche's processes.

          Since we have already devoted some attention to the persona -- finding it to be the archetype of sociality with roots that run deep into our primate heritage, probably extending far enough to include all mammals and birds -- we will not need to justify it further in biological terms. Psyche-as-individuation-process will reveal itself as consilient with neurobiology and evolution only if we can identify brain processes that correspond to ego, to self, and to evidence for a dialogue between them. Specifying the neural foundations of anima and animus would not represent a separate problem, for the contra-sexual archetypes are simply personifications of the running dialogue itself. If they appear in dreams or visions as powerful, magical demons or divine figures, they are still the uncanny and fascinating face of the self: psychic wholeness as mysterious other. There can be no doubt that they are regular figures in mythology, but we can establish the cerebral basis of individuation without devoting special attention to them.

The Self: Holistic Process

          The very idea of “an ego” or “a self” raises the specter of a Cartesian homunculus. We may wish to avoid it, as did Jung's Parisian mentor, Pierre Janet, who preferred to speak of the “real present moment” as it manifests itself “to me.” When things happen around me, I have an unavoidable sense that I am involved. Me-ness, therefore, is not a substance within me but a feeling, le sentiment du moi (Janet, 1903i: 471-7). We must be careful not to conjure Cartesian ghosts, but we cannot ignore the obvious. I am a living personal identity, a body-and-mind, a hungry, itching unity with consciousness. My conviction that I act, that things happen to me, that I have a distinct identity, that I make deliberate choices, and that -- deliberate or not -- what I do has consequences: aspects of egohood such as these can be investigated at the level of the cerebral substrate. On the other hand, in Jung's comprehensive sense of self-as-totality, selfhood must be something radically different from egohood. The self is other than me; sometimes it even seems to oppose me, and yet it is still somehow mine. It includes everything that belongs to the totality of my being. Unlike ego, the “conscious part,” self does not follow “a deliberate and concerted plan.” It is nothing separate from the whole, not part of psyche but all of psyche. Self is everywhere I am, yet in no specifiable place. Jung loved to say that self is “a circle whose center is everywhere and the circumference nowhere.” [11]

          Joseph LeDoux, Professor of Neural Science at New York University, expresses himself in nearly the same words as Jung: “When I use the term the self I am referring to the totality of the living organism . . . similar to what William James had in mind when he described “self” as the sum total of who one is (2002: 26). That totality is later specified as encompassing an animal's physical, biological, psychological, social and cultural being (Ibid., 31). Self is the expression of an animal's fundamental commitment to life, the way it seems to pull together all of its component processes to work for the good of the whole. Philosopher John Gray observes “a coherent global pattern that emerges from the activity of simple local components, which seems to be centrally located but is nowhere to be found” (2002: 73).

          A self emerges from the parts of every organism -- precisely insofar as it is a single, unitary animal. Self, therefore, in its most rudimentary form is already present in every protozoan, for each of them is so thoroughly “bent on staying alive” that its many disparate forces seem to marshal themselves in the service of that goal. This is so evidently the case that Antonio Damasio says that even the lowly amoeba exhibits “the form of an intention” (1999: 136). In another example, he says: “A brainless creature [a paramecium] already contain[s] the essence of the process of emotion that we humans know -- detection of the presence of an object or event that recommends avoidance and evasion or endorsement and approach” (2003: 41). A fly, he says, feels angry when we swat at it, happy when it feeds, and becomes giddy from sipping alcohol (Ibid.).

          If an organism's parts do not pull together, it will surely fail in the Darwinian struggle for survival. The “microstructures” that make up every animal -- the proteins that test the environment, the neurons that communicate electrochemically, etc. -- are like evolution's Lego blocks, used over and over again by “virtually every taxonomic group.” Each animal combines these microstructures into its own species-specific “macrostructure that has functional consequences” (Plotkin, 1998: 167). Therefore, when we speak of the self, we refer to the emergence of a higher order of cooperation -- something that can hardly be in doubt for well-functioning animals, but nevertheless a principle we should not take for granted.

          Matt Ridley reminds us that every organism is constantly struggling against mutiny from within. An animal “is merely the sum of its selfish parts; and a group of units selected [by evolution] to be selfish cannot surely turn altruistic” (Ridley, 1996: 33). He points out that the fetus frequently behaves like a parasite within the mother's body. Mother and infant, for instance, “churn out escalating quantities of hormones which have opposite effects and simply cancel one another out” (Ibid., 23). Within the mother, herself, “the ovaries are parasites on the liver”; for the ovaries cannot survive without the metabolic and detoxifying activities of the liver. But in the end, the ovaries make off with “the jackpot of immortality by producing an egg that carries its genes into the next generation” (Ibid., 28). And this struggle among the parts goes all the way down to the individual cell, whose molecular parts are all pulling in opposite directions (Ibid., 31).

          The amazing thing is that, without a plan and without a hierarchy, selfhood emerges. This is perhaps the strongest argument for mind not being a separate substance from the body. Mind does not even dominate the body as we have so long wanted to believe. Mind emerges out of body, out of the totality of its parts. Every organ, every tissue, every cell, and every protein is a partly anarchic, partly cooperating member of a whole; and the principle of holism that emerges out of the potential cacophony of the parts is the self. Freeman attributes this self-organizing evolution to AM waves (2000: 105). In principle, Damasio agrees, when he attributes the process we call self to “a coherent collection of neural patterns which map, moment by moment, the state of the physical structure of the organism in its many dimensions.” This “occurs in many places within the brain at a multiplicity of levels” (1999: 154).

          We can summarize these findings as a series of three emergent processes. Self emerges from the parts that comprise an animal as its organismic process. Ego emerges from self as conscious, reflective process. Individuation emerges from the tension between ego and self as psychic process.

          What Jung means by the self's effects upon consciousness -- its capacity to bring unconscious realities to bear on the situation of the present moment -- has been nicely suggested in a recent best seller by Malcolm Gladwell, Blink (2005). Apparently innocent of Jung's contributions to the topic, Gladwell has assembled an entertaining collection of anecdotes and experimental results, all designed to demonstrate an idea that happens to be one of the founding principles of Jung's work, namely that we do not create our thoughts, they are given to us. “`Thinking' existed long before man was able to say: `I am conscious of thinking'” (CW 9i: ¶500). Self is the ego's benefactor: “The ego stands to the self as the moved to the mover, or as object to subject, because the determining factors which radiate out from the self surround the ego and are therefore supraordinate to it. . . . It is not I who creates myself, rather I happen to myself” (CW 11: ¶391).

          Although Jung does not want us to forget that the self's role is frequently disruptive of ego's plans, Gladwell concentrates his efforts on more benign evidence, for what he calls the “adaptive unconscious” (2005: 11). He opens his book with an account of experts detecting and failing to detect art forgeries, finding that intensive analyses are far less effective than the “intuitive repulsion” an experienced expert is apt to feel at first sight of a forgery. Similarly bird watchers -- who may rarely get to see the whole bird from a good enough angle to allow identification -- have to rely on hints derived from the fragmentary shapes and angles the bird presents as it hops from branch to branch behind a curtain of leaves (Ibid., 44). Fragmentary information is assembled unconsciously and simply handed to the ego. George Soros, to take another example, may be full of theories to justify his stock-trading decisions; but in the end, according to his son, he makes no changes until “his back starts to kill him” (Ibid., 51). There is a hint of Zen consciousness or Taoism lurking behind the relation between ego and self:

The freest human being is not the one who acts on reasons he has chosen for himself, but one who never has to choose. Rather than agonizing over alternatives, he responds effortlessly to situations as they arise. He lives not as he chooses but as he must. Such a human being has the perfect freedom of a wild animal . . . (Gray, 2002: 114f).

Such a free individual would be living his life under the direction of an undivided self. No doubt ego would be watching, experiencing deeply, even making all the right decisions because, in some way or other, ego would be in intuitive, feeling connection with the wholeness of self. Reaching the point where ego can dependably maintain its harmony with self is the goal toward which the individuation process moves.

The Ego: Reflective Process

          Jung did not devote a great deal of attention to the nature of the ego. For the most part, he called it “the center of consciousness,” taking it for granted that we all know from our everyday experience what having an ego is like (CW 6: ¶706). His idea of egohood does not include unconscious operations, as Freud's does. He calls ego “the subject of all personal acts of consciousness” and says that it rests on somatic and psychic foundations, most of which are unconscious (CW 9ii: ¶1-3). Ego is responsible for making decisions, the free-will executive functions of consciousness (CW 7: ¶87; CW 8: ¶723f), but ego is most frequently described as a complex -- that aggregate of ideas, images, and feelings of which we are conscious in any given moment. Jung emphasizes the fluctuating and changeable nature of the ego-complex (CW 8: ¶611). Ego is therefore a selective synthesis of matters that are important at the moment (CW 8: ¶614), very similar to what contemporary investigators have been calling “working memory” (e.g., LeDoux, 2002: 176). The task of the ego is simultaneously to adapt ourselves to the inner world of the self and to the outer world of physical and social necessity, while at the same time drawing upon relevant memories for guidance (CW 8: ¶611). It does all these things on the basis of rather small data samples: “The ego has scarcely the vaguest notion of the incredibly important regulative function of the sympathetic nervous system in relation to the internal bodily processes. What the ego comprehends is perhaps the smallest part of what a complete consciousness would have to comprehend” (CW 8: ¶613).

          Jung's account of ego's ephemeral and fluctuating nature is very much in agreement with modern researchers. Llinás calls it “no such tangible thing, just a particular mental state,” a sort of stand-in, like the image of Uncle Sam, who represents the complex reality of a heterogeneous country of some 300 million individuals (Llinás, 2002: 127f). T. D. Wilson, in a more popular discussion, thinks that president of the executive branch of government may be too strong a description. On the other hand, presidential press secretary suggests something more like epiphenomenalism. Probably the most accurate image would be of a president like Ronald Reagan, i.e., the entertaining spokesperson for a staff of smart, hard-working powers (T. D. Wilson, 2002: 46-8).

          I think it would not at all distort Jung's account of ego-function to include a few distinctions made by his more philosophical mentor, Pierre Janet [12] -- especially since Jung cites Janet so frequently on the ego's level of psychic functioning. [13] Janet contrasts “immediate belief” -- that is to say the inability to disbelieve in the truth of what is presented to one, an uncritical attitude that characterizes dream consciousness -- with “reflective judgment” which characterizes a realistic and effective engagement with the world. For him, the first characteristic of truly conscious functioning is critical judgment, then the capacity to mobilize one's resources to carry out activities judged appropriate. Consistent and deliberate planning for the future on the basis of an accurately remembered past is also expected of a high-functioning individual, as well as a distinctive style of living that Janet calls “individuation” [14] (Ellenberger, 1970: 386-94; Haule, 1983, 1984).

In search of a cerebral substrate. It should be noted that psychology and neurobiology have found very little agreement on nomenclature. What Jung calls “self” is probably a much larger reality than LeDoux's “implicit self” or Damasio's “core consciousness” or several other expressions such as “simple consciousness” and “primary consciousness.” On the other hand, ego might be called “explicit self” (LeDoux), “extended consciousness” (Damasio) or “reflexive consciousness” and “secondary consciousness” (Solms & Turnbull, 2002: 95).

          Most researchers agree that there is no single area of the brain that is responsible for ego-function. Nevertheless, there is one area which many believe to play a large role, namely the prefrontal cortex (usually abbreviated, PFC) located behind the forehead. In making his case for the importance of the PFC, LeDoux points out that it has far more neural connections within itself than it has with other parts of the brain, making it a place where a great deal of “processing” takes place (LeDoux, 2002: 188). Furthermore, it has a large supply of axons containing the neurotransmitter dopamine, and the quantity of dopamine in the brain correlates directly with the capacity and efficiency of the PFC. Dopamine biases nerve cells engaged in working memory (the “ego-complex”) by “focusing attention on active current goals and away from distracting stimuli” (Ibid., 189). These are activities that are crucial for ego-function: directing executive operations and storing relevant information (Ibid., 184).

          Solms and Turnbull agree with this emphasis on the PFC as an “executive system,” but they note that the most important work of this brain region may be inhibition, namely its capacity to “suppress the primitive, stereotyped compulsions that are encoded in our inherited and emotional memory system.” The PFC delays automatic decisions in the interests of clear, critical thinking (Solms & Turnbull, 2002: 281). If they are right about this, they have found the cerebral substrate that makes a substantial contribution to Janet's distinction between “immediate belief” and “reflective judgment.” Solms and Turnbull also link the PFC to another of Janet's characteristics -- the ability to realistically plan for the future -- for “the prefrontal lobes . . . can check to see whether the imagined solution matches the initial demands of the task . . . by mentally trying out actions . . .” (Ibid., 27). Richard Restak agrees with these arguments and adds that we “lose time” when we switch from one activity to another, and that this corresponds to the PFC shutting down one activity and initiating another (Restak, 2003: 56). Furthermore, damage to the PFC results in a “loss of restraint and an inability to inhibit aggression and exercise judgment (Ibid., 67), all indications that ego-functioning is faltering.

          The correlation of PFC functions with ego can be overestimated, however, for the full complexity of ego-function involves wide-ranging patterns in the brain. To illustrate the sort of research that tracks down such patterns and to indicate that there can be little doubt that a neural substrate -- however complex it may be -- does support ego-function and the emergence of consciousness, we shall consider two different but not necessarily incompatible approaches, that of Antonio Damasio and that of Gerald Edelman.

Damasio's “somatic marker” hypothesis. For Antonio Damasio, the brain is a device, assembled by nature and shaped by culture, for generating “somatic states in response to certain classes of stimuli.” These somatic states include emotion and are generated in social situations that leave their imprint upon our “adaptive somatic responses” (1999: 177). Consciousness, even the implicit sort, involves relating the objects in the surrounding world to a reference point, a “me,” which knows of its own existence (2003: 184). This “me” is not a homunculus but “a perpetually recreated neurobiological state of our being” (1994: 100). Such a recurring condition seems closely to resemble the coming and going of AM waves, but Damasio never refers to such things.

          This transient, pulsing reality is our sense of selfhood in the here and now, and it functions as the background and foundation of an ego. Damasio calls it “core consciousness” and distinguishes it from “extended consciousness,” a personal identity “richly aware of the lived past and of the anticipated future, and keenly cognizant of the world beside it” (1999: 16). Most of his discussion involves core consciousness, which probably occupies a point halfway between Jung's “self” and his “ego.” Damasio emphasizes that core consciousness is associated with emotions, and that disturbances in emotion affect the entire range of mental activity. Every act of knowing corresponds to a perturbation in somatic state. The rods and cones in our retinas, for instance, are set into electrochemical activity when light reflects off the world before us. These activities generate cascades of firing patterns in neural networks. Emotions of fear, attraction, and the like, will be aroused as the reflected scene is made sense of by the brain. Perhaps the sympathetic nervous system will be set into action.

          When things are quiet, we are deeply unconscious; core consciousness begins with fluctuations. (1999: 125). Only when slow and constant rhythms are disturbed by spikes and nervous shudders, only when irregularity erupts, is consciousness possible. “Core consciousness occurs when the brain's reception devices generate an imaged, non-verbal account of how the organism's own state is affected by the organism's processing of an object, and when this process enhances the image of the causative object, thus placing it saliently in a spatial and temporal context” (1999: 169). Against the blurry and undistinguished field of our visualization, acting figures stand forth and grab our attention.

          Consciousness arises from a variety of combinations within the brain. Damasio refers to “convergence zones,” where sensory information from the outer world is combined with memories involving the body and emotion. The sensory system activates neural maps that analyze the outer-worldly object that is seen, heard, tasted, etc.; and simultaneously, neural maps of the “proto-self” are also activated. The effect of the object upon our brain occurs in concert with our sense of ourselves being affected by the object. Both sorts of map belong to what Damasio calls “image space,” as though the primary information is merely factual (1999: 170, 220).

          A third set of neural structures rides the same surge of perturbation that generated the images of object and self (1999: 242). This third sort of neural structure is what Damasio calls a “convergence zone.” Such zones are located in the temporal and frontal cortices, but also in such subcortical structures as the amygdala and the thalamus, which are responsible for emotional reactions (1999: 221). In contrast to “image space,” convergence zones are described as “dispositional space,” for they affect the dispositions of our body-and-mind. They bring together “implicit knowledge,” which has been lurking in neural network patterns often fired in the past, with the situation I face in the present. Memory images color my disposition with the feeling-tone of past incidents (1999: 219).

          In effect, nothing has meaning without emotion. Emotion is essential to “core consciousness,” which disappears during epileptic attacks and other mental states characterized by “absences.” “The lack of emotion when core consciousness vanishes may be parsimoniously explained by suggesting that both emotions and core consciousness require, in part, the same neural substrate” (1999: 100). Psyche, in its broadest sense, emerges from the neural substrate at the moment things become emotional.

          Convergence zones pull all three things together: an image of the object, an image of the self, and emotional dispositions based upon previous experience that resembles the set of neural perturbations occurring right now. Each dispositional representation “comes to life when neurons fire with a particular pattern, at certain rates, for a certain amount of time, and toward a particular target, which happens to be another ensemble of neurons” (1994: 103f). Multiple, parallel, converging streams of neural signals “never `terminate' as such, they feed forward and back to create a perpetual recurrence (1994: 92f). There is an implicit narrative here, as the brain represents its own changing state to itself (1999: 170). Marshack's Peking Man could not resist spinning mythic narratives around his experience with fire -- how it lives, has to be tended, sleeps in its coals, etc. -- because his brain simply worked that way. A brain is always in constant motion, and always comparing the present with the past in order to predict the future.

          All of this activity belongs to “core consciousness,” which really functions as an “unconscious background” that may be closer to Jung's “self” than to his “ego.” Even without ego-consciousness decisions are constantly being made. Damasio demonstrated this with a gambling game involving two decks of cards. One deck provided an occasional big win, but it was always offset with loses that were even larger. The other deck gave the players no spectacular gains or losses, but extended play with that safer deck resulted in slow gains. The brains of normal subjects (their core consciousness) were soon accurately predicting bad outcomes for the more dangerous deck and were avoiding it long before the players knew what they were doing. Thus, normal subjects began playing rationally long before consciousness “clicked in.” People with damaged frontal lobes, however, persisted in going for the big win, using the dangerous deck. Even after they had been told about the two decks and could rationally discuss the difference between them, they could not resist taking chances they knew would eventually lead to disaster. Damasio says they have an exaggerated tendency “to go for the now rather than to bank on the future” (1994: 217).

          What makes the difference in these two groups? It is surely a quality normally associated with ego, the ability to make rational and patient plans that are in harmony with oneself and with the situation one faces. A reality function (Janet's fonction du réel) such as this works only on the basis of what Damasio calls a “somatic marker.” The body has to be charged with emotion, a complex reaction generated by a convergence zone. An alarm goes off: this deck of cards is dangerous, avoid it! Conversely, a positive somatic marker would function as an incentive and would also be based on previous emotional experience (1994: 173f). A somatic marker, therefore, is an “emotional signal that marks options and outcomes with a positive or negative signal. Emotion “narrows the decision-making space and increases the probability that the action will conform to past experience.”

          The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that some of the most important functions of the ego are dependent upon “body states” that can range from the wholly positive (fast, idea-rich thinking associated with pleasant feelings) to the wholly negative (slow, repetitive thinking associated with painful feelings) (1994: xivf). The two most important brain areas associated with somatic markers are the prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the amygdala. “By virtue of the basic mechanism, the body is engaged by the prefrontal cortices and amygdala to assume a particular state profile, whose result is subsequently signaled to the somatosensory cortex, attended, and made conscious” (1994: 184). The essential piece in ego-consciousness is the somatic marker, by which we become aware of the emotional value of what faces us. We are jolted into consciousness by impending significance.

Edelman's “dynamic core” hypothesis. Although he has written several books on “how matter becomes conscious,” Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Gerald Edelman is clearly no metaphysical reductionist. He says, “No amount of neuroscientific data alone can explain thinking . . . therefore attempts to reduce psychology to neuroscience must fail” (1992: 174f). He is impressed with the phenomenology of consciousness and agrees with Jung that the ego does not create its own thoughts but is given them: “When we speak, we know roughly what we want to say, although we typically do not know the words we are going to use. Luckily, however, words seem to pop up when we need them, in the right place at the right time, with the right sound and the right meaning” (2000 [15]: 182). Jung would describe this common experience as the ego's being moved by the self. Edelman describes it as “higher order consciousness” drawing upon the activities of a “dynamic core.”

          Edelman distinguishes three different sorts of brain organization. First is the thalamo-cortical meshwork, roughly what we have had in mind with the phrase, “neural networks.” Neural impulses from the sense organs lead both to the thalamus deep inside the brain and to sensory maps in the cortex. In addition, extensive feedback runs in both directions between thalamus and cortex. A very dense and complicated system results, whereby “any perturbation in one part of the network may be felt everywhere” (2000: 44). The thalamo-cortical network is responsible for analyzing sensory data, and also for “generating different patterns of expression in the sensory modalities” through the specific thalamic nuclei [16] that are engaged in the feedback loops (2004: 21). In this manner, signals from the world are categorized and made sense of (Ibid., 49).

          The second system is not a meshwork but a series of parallel, unidirectional loops that connect the cortex with basal ganglia, cerebellum, and hippocampus. The loops are isolated from one another -- just the opposite of a meshwork arrangement -- making it possible to execute “complicated motor and cognitive routines” (2000: 46). The third system is described as a “hairnet” or “large fan” of fibers that deliver neuromodulators to the cortex. Edelman calls this arrangement, the brain's “value system,” for it assigns emotional significance to a complex cluster of brain activities. Large populations of cortical neurons are simultaneously affected by the release of chemicals such as noradrenalin, serotonin, and dopamine, broadly over large areas of the cortex, as though by a “leaky garden hose” (2004: 25) “whenever something important or salient occurs, such as a loud noise, a flash of light, or a sudden pain” (2000: 46).

          The most important element in all this complicated and simultaneous analyzing of sense impressions, assigning of categories, and applying of emotional values, is what Edelman calls “reentry,” mutual exchange of information. “Functional clusters” of neurons, that is large aggregates of neurons communicating mainly among themselves, also send signals to other functional clusters, which reply. This “ongoing, recursive interchange of parallel signals” between functional clusters is “reentry.” Signals from the same source are entered, returned and reentered into active clusters with the result that selective brain events are altered and signals correlated, leading to “integration of perceptual and motor processes . . . [generating] the ability to discriminate an object or event from a background” (2000: 48). Surely this is the least we would expect of consciousness -- at least of the automatic kind whereby subjects can differentiate between safe and dangerous decks of cards without knowing what they are doing.

          The complex and dispersed processes that are bound by such reentrant circuits into a single functioning unit so as to produce a unified scene is what Edelman calls the “dynamic core.” It is a subset of all the neuronal groups contributing to consciousness in any given moment: it is a functional cluster (a) characterized by strong mutual reentry activity, (b) taking place in tenths of a second, and (c) highly complex (2000: 139). By high complexity, Edelman means that a dynamic core is comprised of a large and diverse group of sub-clusters. If any one of them changes its state of activation, it will have effects upon the whole dynamic core (2000: 148). By such means, a unified scene changes, as it reflects events in the outer world or within the observing animal (2004: 70).

          When the dynamic core makes a real-world scenario appear in the psyche of a conscious animal, Edelman calls this the “phenomenal transform” (2004: 77). Phenomenon is the English form of a Greek word that means “that which appears.” Neural networks blink, and suddenly a world springs into three-dimensional view. Complex electrochemical exchanges become phenomenology, inner life.

          Edelman identifies the dynamic core with “primary consciousness,” a lower-order psychic capability lacking in introspection and sense of time like LeDoux's “implicit self.” It is nowhere near as comprehensive as Jung's self, for the dynamic core does not occupy the entire brain. We might visualize its meshwork as a glowing, blinking blob with indefinite edges, the highly activated portion of the brain, pulsing, trembling, sending out tentacles and retracting them, bulging this way and that, so as to reflect the scene in the world outside as well as our own mood and state of mind. “The same group of neurons may sometimes be part of the dynamic core and underlie conscious experience, but at other times, not be part of it and thus be involved in unconscious processes” (2000: 144). Clearly this is a proto-ego rather than a proto-self. It is but a part of a whole, and its contents are in constant flux, just like Jung's ego-complex. But it is not the ego; for according to Edelman, there is a “higher order consciousness” we have not yet begun to investigate.

          His picture of the dynamic core seems quite plausible and compelling for its nearness in image and feeling to the phenomenal world inhabited by our human psyches. Edelman's is a well-respected view, perhaps because its structure is open enough to accommodate other theories -- like Damasio's somatic marker hypothesis. For we can hardly doubt that the sensations and emotions that would comprise a somatic marker would have to be part of the dynamic core. Edelman seems to agree: “Even before higher-order consciousness appears, a bodily-based neural reference space or body-centered scene will be built up. Such a namable self emerges in humans as higher order consciousness develops” (Edelman, 2004: 73).

The Vagaries of Consciousness

          Consciousness is one of the loosest terms in our vocabulary. Sometimes it designates any psychic phenomenon. In this extremely broad usage, we would say that “human consciousness” is capable of supplying the words that just “pop” into our minds when we have a general notion of what we want to say. But it would be just as correct to say that “the unconscious ” supplies those words and images to the ego. Solms and Turnbull point out that groups of neurons, called “nuclei,” in the brain stem control heartbeat, breathing, digestion, wake/sleep cycles, and the like, in a completely automatic manner, for their circuits are “hard wired,” shared by all mammals, and inaccessible to cultural shaping. “The mind begins,” they say, “where these systems end” (Solms & Turnbull, 2002: 275). By this definition, most of what we usually attribute to unconscious functioning (dreams, words that pop into mind, etc.) would be considered part of the activity of consciousness. On the other hand, Damasio says, “We become conscious when [our] representation devices exhibit . . . the knowledge that [our] organism's own state has been changed by an object” (Damasio, 1999: 25). In using the term knowledge, Damasio may be limiting consciousness to those states in which I know that I know; but it is not clear. For, when I dream of a bull charging at me, does not the imagery and the panic that I experience in the dream imply a certain “knowledge” that my “state” has been altered? Is it important that the bull is only imagined and not seen? Or that I be awake and not asleep?

          It has often been said that late nineteenth and twentieth century notions of an unconscious have functioned primarily to extend our idea of what consciousness entails, for what is unconscious clearly belongs to the realm of the psyche. Unconscious factors may not be explicitly known, but they have demonstrable effects upon our attitudes and behavior. And what is unknown is much greater than what is known. From an evolutionary point of view, therefore, it seems reasonable to conclude with Damasio, Searle, Edelman, and Llinás, that consciousness emerged as a tool to select out of this vast unknown the factors that matter and to decide what they mean. Consciousness, our experts tend to say, is a device for dealing with novel or highly complicated situations, where choices have to be made and strategies laid out. True enough, but strategizing the construction of a sentence or discerning the difference between safe and dangerous decks of playing cards takes place without our knowing how we do it. Such strategies might more accurately be called unconscious.

          LeDoux says, “States of consciousness occur when the system responsible for awareness becomes privy to the activity occurring in unconscious processing systems” (1996: 19). But when is that? Our speaking in sentences surely must be “privy to the activity of unconscious processes,” for those processes have given us the words. But most people do not realize that they are not themselves consciously inventing the sentences; and those of us who do, know nothing of the process itself. Perhaps LeDoux's statement makes more sense if we turn it around and say, we believe we understand something about processes in the neural substrate when the shape of those processes resembles our conscious experience of thinking, imagining, and feeling.

          Ultimately the criteria for making such distinctions lies within our everyday experience. Surely this is the foundation for describing several well-known degrees of unconsciousness. Searle (2004: 240-2) outlines a traditional set. Nearest to knowing-that-we-know is (a) Freud's “pre-conscious” and Jung “personal unconscious”: I know it, but it is not on my mind until the issue comes up. Somewhat more unconscious is (b) personal knowledge that has been repressed: Freud's patient Dora coughs because of her sexual desire for Herr K. We are deep in the unconscious (c) when we are influenced by matters that have never in any way been consciously thought: a three-year-old acquiring grammar rules. Much further down in the deepest unconscious, (d) are neurobiological processes such as neural patterns that never become images [17] and the firing of sleep/wake nuclei in the brainstem. Even these last phenomena, as mechanical as they may seem, will have significant effects upon one's state of consciousness. Any definition of an unconscious must emphasize that it has effects upon consciousness. “Conscious experience does not just float freely above an ocean of functionally insulated, unconscious processes. Instead, it is constantly influencing and being influenced by many unconscious processes” (Edelman & Tononi, 2000: 177). These views are highly supportive of Jung's positions, for he repeatedly insisted that we know an unconscious exists because it has effects upon consciousness. Searle's layered unconscious has the same structure as Jung's (conscious, personal unconscious, collective unconscious, and psychoid), and his choice of language acquisition in a three-year-old reminds us of Jung's notion of the archetypes.

Higher-order consciousness. Edelman describes the consciousness generated by the dynamic core as “primary consciousness.” It integrates a large and diverse body of information “for the purpose of directing present or immediate behavior” (Edelman & Tononi, 2000: 103). He describes this level of conscious functioning as “the remembered present,” for the dynamic core does not have the ability to construct explicit scenes from a remembered past or an imagined future. In contrast, developing a human ego enables primary consciousness to obtain “a temporary divorce” from the present moment, so that a whole new mental world can be constructed, made possible by images of a relevant past and an anticipated future (Ibid., 195). Set free from the emotionally riveting scene of the moment, human thought can construct a sense of selfhood moving through time, an autobiographical fabrication that depends to a large extent upon social and affective interactions with other human subjects (Edelman, 1992: 133-5). Higher consciousness is a subtle tool for making choices, selecting courses of action, and steering a nervous system that has “grown too complex to regulate itself” (Edelman, 2004: 83f).

          Highly sophisticated differentiation appears to be the crucial capacity of higher-order consciousness. Whereas the dynamic core could discriminate wine from water, as it were, an ego can learn to discriminate between white wine and red, and eventually between cabernet and pinot noir (Edelman & Tononi, 2000: 174). Billions of different conscious states, each with its own behavioral outcomes must be weighed, and selections made. A variety of routines can be tried out, evaluated for effectiveness, and subtly refined. In the process, consciousness effectively selects neuronal maps, loops, and circuits, highlighted by values -- especially involving the deployment of dopamine, which reinforces desired and effective behavior with the reward of feeling good about it (Ibid., 188). Conscious control is necessary for accomplishing such refinements, but with practice each conceptual, sensory, or motor routine becomes progressively more automatic, freeing consciousness to attend to other matters in need of refinement (Ibid., 59). Edelman demonstrates this last claim with an experiment in which subjects devoted four to eight weeks of daily practice learning the computer game, Tetris. At first, PET [18] scans showed an increase of glucose metabolism in certain regions of the cortex; but, with time, these areas of furious activity decreased -- showing that conscious control was declining at the same time that game performance was undergoing a seven-fold improvement (Ibid., 60).

          It is significant that Edelman has far less to say about the neural processes underlying ego function than he has regarding the dynamic core. This discrepancy reveals the fairly general and unspecific nature of what neurobiology has been able to determine about how the neural substrate supports conscious experience. What is most convincing about his work is his sensitive and flexible description of proto-egoic function. His work and that of others -- such as Damasio, LeDoux, Llinás, and Freeman -- is highly consilient with Jung's speculations of a century ago.

Phylogeny and the ego. Edelman is fairly confident that all animals with a cortex have primary consciousness, a form of the dynamic core that can provide “global mappings” that bind sensory and motor systems through reentrant circuits (2004: 49). This would include all mammals and birds, possibly snakes, but not lobsters, making consciousness about 300 million years old. Damasio, although less specific in his claims, appears to agree (1995: 195).

          The question about higher-order consciousness, an ego, is much more difficult to settle. Damasio goes so far as to opine that chimpanzees, bonobos “and some dogs of my acquaintance” seem to have liberated themselves from Edelman's “remembered present” and gained some notion of a past and a future (Ibid.). Edelman is somewhat more specific, saying that it is “likely” that chimpanzees have a form of higher-order consciousness. He says they clearly communicate with one another (“semantic ability”) but lack the capacity for syntax. They have sufficient sense of self to be able to recognize their faces when they see them in a mirror; and they employ a theory of mind to predict the behavior of other chimps (Edelman, 2004: 98). Llinás “suspect[s] that subjectivity is what the nervous system is all about, even at the most primitive levels of evolution” (2002: 113).

          Probably the most convincing evidence we have seen that bonobo consciousness is not confined to a “remembered present” is the behavior of Kanzi on the day that his mother was taken away. Savage-Rumbaugh reports that he immediately began communicating with the keyboard, and described not only what he wanted to be given, but also what he planned to do later on. His capacity to understand his own existence as fundamentally temporal seems therefore to be innate and not to be something humans have taught him.

          Frans de Waal has devoted his career to collecting evidence of mental abilities in animals, particularly apes, which are quite capable of recognizing themselves in mirrors, imitating one another and humans, and expressing empathy and intentional deception (1996: 78). Mirror recognition, indeed, is sometimes only the beginning of the evidence for a chimpanzee's capacity for a self-concept. De Waal reports observing a chimpanzee checking her teeth and genital swellings in a mirror, an orangutan viewing her reflection with vegetables on her head, and chimpanzees decorating themselves with vines and dead mice draped over their shoulders (Ibid., 71). Even more impressive, since it expresses an awareness of self-image within a social context, is the chimp who wiped a grin off his face with his hand so as not to telegraph his state of mind. Another young male chimpanzee, when the alpha-male came by, used his hand to cover the erection he had been displaying to woo a female. De Waal also gives several examples of chimpanzees deliberately manipulating the mood of others for their own purposes (Ibid., 76f).

          There is also evidence of self-awareness in animals lower than the great apes. De Waal says that monkeys are very much aware of where they rank in their group on the basis of specific skills they have developed. They also have a sense for how far into the canopy their hands, feet, and tail will reach -- clearly signifying a very definite and accurate body image which they can apply to everyday situations in the jungle. Bats' capacity for echolocation includes the talent for distinguishing the echoes they themselves produce from those produced by other bats. Finally, it is obvious that dogs recognize their own scent and distinguish it from that of other dogs (Ibid., 68).

          To return to the importance of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) for ego function, it is explicitly mentioned by Damasio and Edelman as a significant contributor to the dynamic core -- whether in humans or other animals. Monkeys that have had their PFC ablated on both sides are no longer able to maintain normal social relations (Damasio, 1994: 74). LeDoux reports that rats, with their much reduced PFCs, are far more limited in categorizing the world than are primates, less capable of making distinctions, and less able to make associations, with the result that they are poorer at problem solving (2002: 196). Quartz and Sejnowski report on the spindle-cell count in an area of the PFC called the anterior cingulate cortex. The more spindle cells, the more capable an animal is in managing issues related to sociality. Not surprisingly, human adults have a large number of spindle cells, chimpanzees far fewer, and gorillas and orangutans very few indeed. They do not appear at all in the human brain before the fourth month of life (2002: 131). Such correlations of the complexity of neural circuitry with the level of psychic functioning strongly supports the arguments outlined in this chapter regarding the support role played by the neural substrate in conscious abilities.

Ego the story-teller. Temporality -- our being always in a present that is the outcome of a remembered and lesson-filled past, a now that is simultaneously shaped by an anticipated future -- has been a recurring theme in this study. Evolution itself is a story of origins, transformations, and futures in preparation. Marshack's study of notched bones and antlers took us back to some of the earliest of human artifacts, which are evidently about marking the passage of time and predicting the changing of the seasons as their makers anticipated the regular return of specific game animals. Marshack's account of Peking Man's mastery of fire was another lesson in time-consciousness: waiting for the wet or green wood to dry, banking ashes around the coals against an anticipated revival of the blaze for tomorrow morning's breakfast. Kanzi the bonobo, when he began communicating, “spoke” of his plans for the future. The brain itself, we have learned, is a temporal instrument, recording the past in neural networks that have been “wired together” by previous experience and AM waves finding at every burst familiar basins of attraction.

          Kanzi, and possibly Peking Man, could not talk, and yet they evidently understood themselves and their world in episodic, narrative terms. The continuous working of episodic memory is the foundation of our sense of self, our active construction of egohood within a social world (Siegel, 1995: 46). The narrative self-structure that is central to our conscious identity holds past and future together as the two poles of a now that moves relentlessly through time and makes sense to us only in the stories we tell ourselves (LeDoux, 2002: 20). There is no doubt that story-telling precedes language and “is, in fact, a condition for language” (Damasio, 1999: 189). We learn to speak because we have stories to tell. Philosopher Daniel Dennett identifies story-telling as humanity's “fundamental tactic of self-protection, and self-definition,” comparable in its way to the spider's web-spinning and the beaver's dam-building (1991: 418).

          We like to think that all these stories we tell ourselves are true, but there is considerable reason to doubt our pious assertions. For it is a matter of fact that consciousness is full of holes, and we need our stories to hide them from ourselves, to gloss over our uncertainties. Evolution itself is a story full of holes. Scientists often speak as though they are steadily filling them in, but surely no one expects them all to be filled. Proponents of the theory of “intelligent design,” a.k.a. “creationism,” seize on the gaps in evolution's evidence and beg us to let them tell their story of evolution -- yet another gloss, and a far less useful one. “The conscious brain in health and disease will integrate what can be integrated and resists a fractured or shattered view of `reality'” (Edelman, 2004: 136).

          Our primate eyesight is a case in point. We like to believe that we see the world clearly, in good focus, held steady, and full of detail. In fact, however, we have a blind spot in the middle of our visual field, and what we can hold in focus is a relatively tiny portion of that field -- “two to three degrees around dead center” -- the rest is a blur. We prevent ourselves from recognizing these deficiencies by keeping our eyeballs in constant movement, darting about in “saccades,” about five times a second, “an incessant and largely unnoticed game of visual tag with items of potential interest in our field of view” (Dennett, 1991: 54). In patients whose cerebral hemispheres have been surgically separated, the left (language) hemisphere is famous for inventing spurious reasons for behaviors or sensations processed by the right hemisphere (LeDoux, 1996: 32; Rose, 2005: 201f). Morton Prince (1929/39), one of Boston's contributors to the dissociation school of psychology, reports the same of hypnosis subjects who have carried out post-hypnotic suggestions. Unaware they had been hypnotized, they give absurd reasons for doing what they did -- reasons they strenuously defend and evidently believe. We tell stories, in part, to cover up what we do not know, to hide the gaps from ourselves. Our story-telling ego is beset on all sides by its Amfortas wound.

          Philosopher John Gray takes a largely Buddhist (“no-self”) position regarding the specious stories we tell ourselves to make our lives seem coherent and our data field continuous. “The I is a thing of the moment, and yet our lives are ruled by it. . . . This is the primordial human error, in virtue of which we pass our lives as in a dream” (Gray, 2002: 78). But note: we do not invent these glosses consciously; we are unaware that we are lying to ourselves. The root story-teller is ultimately not the ego but that unconscious proto-ego, the dynamic core. “Our tales are spun, but for the most part we don't spin them; they spin us. Our human consciousness, and our narrative selfhood, is their product, not their source” (Dennett, 1991: 418).

          Since we inevitably tell ourselves stories to define who we are, it is clear we would be better off if our fictions were not superficial, ad hoc cover-ups for momentary embarrassments, but rather in some deep sense true to our nature. This is, indeed, why Jung spoke of discovering the myth each of us is already living. There is a mythic and phylogenetic dimension to our life, whether we know it or not, and we would be better off knowing what it is:

Myth, says a Church Father, is “what is believed always, everywhere, by everybody”; hence the man who thinks he can live without myth, or outside it, is an exception. He is like one uprooted, having no true link either with the past, or with the ancestral life which continues within him, or yet with contemporary human society. . . . The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back many millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and fruit of a season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things (CW 5: xxiv).

Myth makes sense of life in an ultimate sense, provides a realistic ground under our feet, and has done so from time immemorial. The ego, however, with its ephemeral nature, is hardly able to invent a narrative of mythic significance. Rather it is, itself, part of the larger story being spun by our dynamic core; and this, ultimately, is what Freud and Jung were looking for a century ago when they disagreed over the nature of the “nuclear complex” that would make sense of all psychic phenomena. The dynamic core is capable of spinning tales of an archetypal, phylogenetic nature, which is why they impress us with their depth of meaning and enduring significance.

Dreams and Individuation

          The foremost source of narratives, mythic and otherwise, spun by our dynamic core and observed by our ego is the theater we enter every night when we sleep. In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud called dreams the royal road to the unconscious (SE IV-V). He thought they were designed by a devious unconscious mechanism, the “dream work,” to fool us into encountering benign versions of unconscious thoughts that would otherwise be too horrifying to tolerate. Disguised by references to events remembered from the previous day and subjected to various reversals and inversions, the heinous thoughts were alleged to slip by their censor as charming absurdities. Dreams were a royal road, because their manifest content did not directly express unconscious intentions but provided a riddle for psychoanalytic detectives to unravel in order to reach the real thoughts that lurked latently in the unconscious.

          No doubt Freud's conviction that we inveterately lie to ourselves was not entirely mistaken. Ego's autobiographical tales are surely designed to paper over gaps, convenient and otherwise, that riddle its images of self and world. Ego's errors generally take the form of oversimplifications and editorial liberties designed to reduce internal conflicts, but they are nothing so flagrantly deceptive as Freud's dream work.

          The view that emerges from the present study -- a gappy ego narrative trying its best to deal with an overabundance of sensations, emotional reactions and internally created fantasies supplied by a dynamic core -- leaves no place for the sorts of distortion Freud attributed to unconscious imagery. Dream images, as Jung insisted, mean what they say. If there is a “royal road” anywhere for us, it would not lead to the unconscious but emerge as the running dialogue between ego and self that Jung calls individuation. The proto-ego of the dynamic core will inevitably be somewhat out of harmony with the tendencies of the larger organism, the self. Imbalances within our organism as a whole will pull the dynamic core into different shapes as new brain regions register outer world and inner subjectivity with greater or lesser force. In Jung's terms, the self (in the guise of the shadow) is always trying to reestablish holistic balance -- just as every living organism draws its conflicting components into service of the whole. Meanwhile, ego is consumed with narrow conscious concerns dealing with meaning, direction and consistency.

          Dreams constitute the primary source of challenges to the autobiographical fictions we cultivate while awake; and they call us to investigate the inevitable tensions that arise between the reflective process of ego and the organismic process of self. Individuation is the royal road to wholeness that emerges from these tensions.

Jung's phenomenology of dreaming. A casual reading of the Word Association papers (CW 2) and The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (CW 3) will reveal that Jung never accepted Freud's disguise theory of dreaming. Even while occupying his seat as Crown Prince of Psychoanalysis, Jung saw dream imagery as a transparent manifestation of unconscious tendencies -- that is to say, the dream images mean what they seem to mean and have not undergone an obfuscation process, as in Freud's notion of dream work. Therefore, dreams require “translation” only insofar as they speak in emotionally charged images rather than in words. [19] In 1911, he described “Two Types of Thinking” in the second chapter of Symbols (CW 5: ¶4-33). Conscious thinking is “directed thought,” usually verbal, outer directed, learned and shaped through social interactions, and tiring to maintain. It is the foundation of “our modern empiricism and technology.” The other kind of thinking is “not directed”; it “lacks all leading ideas and sense of direction emanating from us” and occurs as an “autonomous play of ideas.” It is characterized above all by “association” that occurs spontaneously and is “guided by unconscious motives.” It is effortless, does not tire us out, and is the source of dreams. Dreams can be “archaic,” presenting material that has never been conscious and so out of touch with external reality as to be “autistic,” even psychotic in appearance. Myths, “the most mature products of young humanity,” were produced by the “more basic” thought processes that resemble our modern dreaming. “What was once strong enough to mould the spiritual life of a highly developed people will not have vanished without a trace from the human soul in the course of a few generations.”

          In that same chapter, written in his thirty-sixth year, Jung advances one of the strongest themes in all his later writings on dreams, the idea of “compensation,” that the imagery and motifs in our dreams tend to reestablish psychic balance and make up for the ego's “one-sided” tendency to pursue linear notions and favored ideals and to steer clear of the fuzzy, undifferentiated and “shadowy” aspects of life -- avoiding what Jung later calls our Amfortas wound. As he goes on from this chapter in Symbols, Jung makes it clear that he finds the associative thinking in dreams to be organized by archetypes into mythic themes, and these universally human patterns will be secondarily shaped by the dreamer's personal, autobiographical experience. The “instigator” of the dream is always a powerful affect that has been unconscious (CW 18: ¶858).

          In “The Practical Uses of Dream-Analysis” (1931), Jung ties dream theory to his claim that the values an individual lacks are to be found in the neurosis; for the dream represents the inner situation of the dreamer, even though the waking ego is likely “to deny its truth and reality, or admit it only grudgingly.” Thus the dream describes “the aetiology of the neurosis [and gives] a prognosis as well” (CW 8: ¶304f). The tension between the dream's truth and the dreamer's reluctance to admit it indicates what is amiss right now in the dreamer's life and suggests what might be done about it.

          As we shall see, all of the above features of Jung's dream theory have been supported by contemporary neurophysiological research. One contention, however, might not be. In 1945 Jung wrote that dreams have a typical structure. They regularly begin with an “exposition” that gives the scene, protagonists, and initial psychological situation of the dreamer. This is followed by a “development” section in which tension emerges and “one does not know what will happen.” In a third phase, the situation is abruptly changed, and the action reaches its “culmination.” Finally the dream may end with a resolution (“lysis”) (CW 8: ¶561-5). This beginning-middle-end organization of the dream text really might best be understood as a heuristic device to assist the analyst in elucidating a dream's meaning rather than as a theory of dreaming itself.

          Setting aside this last detail, Harvard psychiatrist and neurophysiologist, J. Allan Hobson, probably the most respected investigator of the dreaming brain, is wholly in agreement with Jung: “My position echoes Jung's notion of the dream as transparently meaningful and does away with a distinction between manifest and latent content” (1988: 12). He does not find the unconscious to be full of threatening, heinous drives, as Freud did, but sees it as “an ally and a guide to survival and socially sensible reproduction” (2002: 134). In the end, Hobson's view fully supports a theory of psyche as individuation process: “I view dreams as privileged communications from one part of myself (call it the unconscious if you will) to another (my waking consciousness). There can be no doubt that our dreams are trying to tell us something about how our memories are organized, that associationism is alive and well, and that dream discussions will continue no matter what we scientists say!” (2005: 83). He lists seven major differences between his findings and Freud's theories, every one of which lines him up with Jung's stance. The energy of the dream process is (a) intrinsic to the brain and (b) the source is neural (both corresponding to Jung's idea that the organismic self is the source of the dream); (c) the sensory images of the dream prepare us for the future and do not represent a regression to the past (Jung's idea that the running dialogue is oriented to present difficulties and future solutions); (d) the information processing in the dream elaborates new life themes and does not disguise unacceptable ideas; (e) the bizarreness of the imagery is a primary characteristic of the dream and not a secondary product of defense mechanisms; (f) the meaning of the imagery is transparent rather than opaque; and (g) themes of conflict are incidental rather than fundamental (1988: 220f).

          Hobson's explicit support for Jung's theory of dreams is particularly impressive in view of the fact that he seems to be embarrassed by it. Evidently he fears that association with Jungian ideas may undermine his thesis in the eyes of his readers. [20] He gives bizarre versions of what he thinks “a Jungian would say” about the meaning of a dream, and calls Jung “strongly anti-scientific,” while confusing the identity of Jung's chief at the Burghölzli and misspelling proper names (2005: 63, 118f). [21] Apparently Hobson believes Jung thought that images themselves are inherited and “intrinsic to the nervous system” (1988: 27) -- popular misconceptions that we have refuted in earlier chapters.

Dreaming Process in the Neural Substrate

          This section summarizes the findings of Hobson and Jaak Panksepp, the authority of whose Affective Neuroscience (1998) is widely cited. Panksepp's chapter on the neuroscience of dreaming includes the word “mythmaking” in its title. A footnote explains that the word was included as a tribute to C. G. Jung.

Three states of consciousness. Discussions of the dreaming brain inevitably begin with the explanation that the brain is capable of three quite different behavioral states. The waking state is characterized by high-frequency, low-amplitude beta waves, as recorded by EEG; and the irregularity of these waves corresponds to the processing of diverse information and frequent changes in attention that waking life requires. Our muscles are toned and ready for action. We are oriented to the world outside of ourselves. The dreaming state, by contrast, is recognizable by rapid eye movements (REM) visible behind closed eyelids. The brain is even more active in REM sleep than it is in the waking state, despite its unresponsiveness to sensory stimulation and the flaccidity of our muscles. The REM state is intrinsically introverted. Slow wave sleep (SWS, also called non-REM; I shall follow Panksepp's preference for SWS) is characterized by high amplitude slow waves that perform very little active processing of information (Panksepp, 1998: 125).

          Although there is evidence for some dreaming in SWS, [22] most investigators have studied REM sleep. Hobson identifies five physiological characteristics of REM (1988: 205-10): (1) REM is “switched on” when neurons originating in the brain stem deliver the neurotransmitter acetylcholine to the cortex. (The waking state returns when different neurons deliver norepinephrine and serotonin to the cortex.) (2) Signals from the brain stem deactivate the sensory neurons that respond to events in the outer world, and the brain becomes so busy processing information in its internal association circuits that it ignores any sensory data that may get through the sensory blockade. (3) Neurons that control motor output (muscle movement) are also blocked. (4) The outer world having been shut out, internal association circuits and corresponding emotion-managing regions are synchronized by strong regular pulses, “indigenous bolts of neural `lightning' called PGO [23] spikes” (Panksepp, 1998: 129). Finally, (5) the mode of information processing is different in REM: internally-generated signals are interpreted by the brain as though they are of external origin. This is what leads us to experience the activity of the neural substrate as our life in dreamscape. Hobson believes that this change in processing mode explains our habitual failure to remember our dreams.

          PGO spikes account for several of a dream's peculiarities. The spikes do not occur during the waking state in normal individuals, but have been recorded in the brains of schizophrenics and those under the influence of LSD (Panksepp, 1998: 127). Here is one connection between the bizarreness of dream imagery and that of psychotic and psychedelic experiences. Other parallels will be discussed below. PGO waves constitute what Hobson calls a “startle program.” Our consciousness is startled by every spike, and this seems to be the cause of abrupt scene changes in our dreams. Furthermore, it appears that the constantly novel and unpredictable quality of dreaming results from the “uninhibited running of the startle program” (Hobson, 2004: 44; 2005, 45).

The evolutionary significance of REM. Research shows that REM is an evolutionary achievement that characterizes mammals above all. There is no evidence of REM in fish or reptiles, and only rudimentary evidence has been found in birds (Panksepp, 1998: 135). Since it is well established that the amount of dreaming increases when organisms have to face stressful and emotionally challenging situations (Ibid., 128), it seems likely that REM sleep is a selective processing device that enable[s] recent memories to be evaluated against `phyletic' memories” (Fox, 1989: 181). In this statement, Rutgers anthropologist Robin Fox suggests that recent personal events undergo a recategorizing whereby they are linked to archetypal patterns of recognition and behavior that have been inherited with our DNA. He believes evolution “freed [us] from the tie to [our] phylogenetic past to some degree” when it provided us with a huge and complex cortex. This freedom, however, gives us the further burden of having to reintegrate the archetypal with the personal. Panksepp says something very similar, “The REM system may now allow ancient emotional impulses [“pre-programmed emotional subroutines”] to be integrated with the newer cognitive skills of the more recently evolved brain waking systems” (1998: 135). This corresponds precisely with Jung's idea that emotional realities of archetypal origin are subsequently “clothed” with associations from our autobiographical memory (personal unconscious). Consequently, universal patterns appear in our dreams under the guise of familiar people, settings, and activities.

          In Panksepp's thinking, there appear to be two separate systems for information processing: the waking state, which is highly critical, conceptual, and differentiated, and the REM state, which is highly emotional and processes at a more primitive level. He speculates that what we now know as REM sleep may originally have been a form of waking consciousness, in a world where “emotionality was more important than reason in competition for resources.” As evolution proceeded into mammals and primates, that ancient form of consciousness “may have come to be actively suppressed” so as to enable a more analytic process of evaluation and planning (1998: 128). At that point in evolution, REM-style processing moved into the “background,” where emotional reactions of archetypal shape and intensity remain unconscious until we fall asleep and dream. The integration of these ancient emotional urges with memories derived from waking life brings about a reshuffling of our memories that lines them up in accordance with our inherited tendencies on the one hand and that simultaneously personalizes those archetypal patterns on the other. As archaic patterns are integrated with everyday experience, we come to function more adequately in confronting the challenges of tomorrow and next week (Ibid., 135). From this point of view, dreams maintain a running dialogue with consciousness even when we do not remember them.

What dreaming accomplishes. The experimentally demonstrated fact that animals deprived of REM sleep fail to remember from one day to the next new tasks they have been working on strongly supports the notion that dreams are processing new memories (Fox, 1989: 179). Furthermore, it is known that the sleeping brain manufactures proteins at a faster rate than the waking brain (Lewis-Williams, 2002: 191). Thus it appears that memories are not only being organized, but synapses are being fortified with the new proteins and habitual long-term pathways being constructed. Evidence for such claims come from rats learning mazes and humans learning video games. Human participants in the experiments report intrusive gaming imagery at the onset of sleep; and both human and rat brains show activation during sleep of the same brain areas that had been used in the learning trials the day before (Hobson, 2002: 128). Much of such research from games and mazes is related to learning new motor patterns. But it is also clear that visual discrimination improves after REM sleep, and is best if neither REM nor SWS is disturbed (Ibid., 124f). Hobson says that dreams enable us to keep track of important relationships and events in our lives through “an emotionally-driven shorthand” (Ibid., 22, 132).

          It must also be emphasized, however, that dreaming is a highly introverted activity in which the brain speaks exclusively to itself, and that it will do so even when there are no new outer-worldly experiences to integrate. Dreaming shows that the brain is able to create its own energy and information (Hobson, 1988: 131). The most striking instance of the brain dreaming up its own organization and structure occurs in the human embryo, which at about six months gestation, is spending nearly twenty-four hours a day in the REM state. By the day of its birth, however, the infant's REM sleep has declined to twelve or sixteen hours a day. Constant dreaming thus progressively gives way to extraverted sensory and motor operations as an infant matures and gradually learns to orient itself to the outer world (Hobson, 2002: 77). Such findings support the claim that REM develops the brain and helps it structure the mind of a well-adapted animal, preparing it to function as a “prediction machine,” a tool to derive conclusions from prior experience that will enhance survival skills in the future.

          REM activities also support Jung's notion that dreams emerge from our larger being (the self) to compensate for the inadequacies of our waking attitudes. In this sense, they constitute the majority voice on the unconscious side of the running dialogue between ego and self. Hobson notes (1988: 291) that basic brain circuits that have not been used recently in waking life are regularly fired up during REM sleep. He speculates that this is a maintenance operation, on the principle that circuits have to be used regularly or they will be abandoned and die. This is likely true; but in the process circuits neglected by the proto-ego of waking consciousness become parts of the proto-ego of REM dreaming. They achieve balance in the organism as a whole. This is the sense in which Jung's self may be said to “speak” to us in our dreams. Furthermore, if REM tends to “rest the neurons most sensitive to fatigue,” as Hobson claims, and “activate[s] non-fatigable brain circuits,” Jung's observations of a century ago are supported: “directed thinking” tires us out and is replaced by “association thinking” from the unconscious which does not tire us.

Dreams and the brain's seeking system. Panksepp has advanced a notion that ties together a number of the common characteristics of dreaming: its frequently bizarre hallucinatory character, the jumps that occur between “scenes,” the similarity of dreams and schizophrenic symptoms, and the importance of emotional values in dreams. The key to his theory is the similarity of brain activation when it is seeking for something (prey, water, sex, etc.) and when it is in REM sleep.

          Panksepp has identified a behavioral pattern that he calls the SEEKING system (he always capitalizes the whole word, we will not). It manifests when an animal forages, explores, investigates, or is otherwise curious. It drives an animal “eagerly to pursue the fruits of [its] environment” (1998: 145); and it has a characteristic feeling tone of “intense interest, engaged curiosity, or eager anticipation” (Ibid., 149). It is a state of aroused longing, and it vanishes when the animal finds what it is looking for. Along the way of its quest, an animal will automatically take stock of everything it comes across, evaluate its relevance for the object of the quest, and generate sufficiently stable neural networks to produce memories that may be useful for future quests (Ibid., 147).

          The brain circuits employed by the seek archetype are principally located in “the extended lateral hypothalamic corridor,” a ribbon of neuropil located mostly along the floor and either side of the brain's third ventricle. When in seeking mode, the brain generates highly synchronous theta rhythms in the lateral hypothalamus that are much slower and more regular than the beta rhythms that predominate in most waking states (Ibid., 151). Indeed, theta rhythms characterize deep meditative states. Seeking, therefore, appears as a sort of trance state, an alternative to ordinary consciousness -- more focused and avid; and the same patterns are produced in REM-state dreaming (Ibid., 129). These findings should not seem surprising, for are we not usually avid in our dreams? Dreams are typically charged with powerful emotions and a sense of anticipation or dread.

          In waking life, what triggers the seeking response is always some form of organic imbalance such as hunger, thirst or lust (Ibid., 145). According to Jung's theory of compensation, the impetus for developing a running dialogue with the unconscious is always some form of imbalance, when the dynamics of the whole organism have been thrown off due to the narrowness of the ego's attitudes and pursuits. Dreams are about sniffing out something new in the mind-adjusting world of dreamscape, when some overlooked or avoided psychic necessity has made itself known. The solution lies in our “Amfortas wound,” the neglected aspects of our self. Developing the neural networks required to master these facets of our being and integrating them with the rest of our autobiographical narrative brings the psyche back into balance. Dreaming, too, is a quest.

Dreaming and dopamine. Panksepp says that the seeking system has left its “electrophysiological fingerprint” on our dreaming. Whether we are dreaming by night or questing by day, neurons that use dopamine as their neurotransmitter fire two or three spikes, with declining amplitude and growing duration in their action potentials. This pattern keeps the seeking system poised and ready for action at a moment's notice, and it is so regular that the spikes may well serve us as the ticking of an internal clock. The condition of poised regularity is interrupted by a “bursting pattern” of spikes when some apparently salient object has been encountered. Now the system is aroused, and a rapid series of action potentials promotes dopamine release into the synaptic fields of the neural networks involved in the discovery of the salient object. Subjectively, the more rapid firing may speed up our internal time sense while it heightens the eagerness of our seeking behavior, the sharpness of our feelings of anticipation, and the intensity of our dreams (Ibid., 156).

The desires and aspirations of the human heart are endless. It is foolish to attribute them all to a single brain system. But they all come to a standstill if certain brain systems, such as the dopamine circuits arising from midbrain nuclei [the extended hypothalamic corridor] are destroyed. . . . Ascending dopamine tracts lie at the heart of powerful, affectively valenced neural systems that allow people and animals to operate smoothly and efficiently in all of their day-to-day pursuits. These circuits appear to be major contributors to our feelings of engagement and excitement . . . (Ibid., 144).

          In the REM state, dopamine is not delivered to the cortex in abundance -- very much in contrast with the quantities of acetylcholine that switch our brains into dreaming mode. The relatively small amount of dopamine contributed by the hypothalamus has a disproportionately large effect in the REM state because in the sleeping brain dopamine encounters no interfering neurotransmitters -- such as the norepinephrine and serotonin that switch on and predominate in the waking state (Hobson, 2005: 75).

          Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that drives the appetitive system; it mediates “wanting,” rather than “enjoying” (Panksepp, 1998: 155). The eager anticipation with which we greet the people, objects and events that are potentially relevant to our search often causes us to overemphasize their meaningfulness. In fact, we are vulnerable to a “confirmation bias,” the propensity to see causal connections everywhere (Ibid., 145). For example, pigeons that learn to expect a feeding after a light has been switched on in their cage will begin to peck at the light when they want to be fed. They erroneously “assume” there is a causal connection between the illumination of the bulb and the delivery of food. In a sense, they are “delusional” on this point; and the connection with dopamine is proven by the fact that their “delusional” thinking will be reduced when they are given dopamine blocking agents (Ibid., 161).

          Panksepp takes these findings to indicate that paranoid thinking, in general, may be due to “overactivation of the mesolimbic dopamine system.” Arousal of the seeking response, therefore seems to facilitate the spontaneous construction of “insights” on the basis of perceived causality. By this mechanism, a paranoid individual will find evidence everywhere that his enemies are after him. The most incidental details in his surroundings will be seized upon as evidence that “They” have been going through his files, tampering with his car, tapping his phone. Evidently his seeking system is out of control; for it will continue to find “confirmatory evidence” even when he tries his best not to worry, not to look for proof, not to see anything suspicious.

          Confirmation bias may also lie behind the gullibility we manifest while dreaming: what Janet describes as “immediate unreflective belief” and what Jung and Hobson have called the “psychotic” quality of dreaming. Panksepp notes that a schizophrenic episode usually begins with a night's sleep in which the REM state is markedly elevated. “This suggests that emotional `energies' that are aroused during the initial florid phase of schizophrenia may be released during the dreaming process” (Ibid., 127). In the normal waking brain, the firing of the neurons of the serotonin system oppose the action and effects of dopamine. In the REM state, the serotonin system is shut down by the brain-stem nuclei that switch REM on, which allows the dopamine system to gain the upper hand. Thus the preponderance of dopamine in the dreaming state bears some resemblance to the schizophrenic brain -- and also to the psychedelic brain, for LSD is an excellent serotonin blocker (Ibid., 142).

Dreaming and mythmaking. We have found that several researchers believe that our dreams express inherited patterns -- even that they correlate recent waking experience with primal patterns. While in REM-space, however, we are rarely bothered by the hallucinatory quality of what we experience, and how the dreamscape jerks from one scene to another with each PGO spike. We are riveted and mesmerized by the imaginal events that entangle us. Panksepp believes (although he cannot prove) that schizophrenic process, the emotional discharges of REM sleep, and the electrochemical discharges of seeking behavior are related; they use the same brain tracts, AM wave patterns, and neurotransmitters. Very likely, too, they account for the symbolic character of dream images. Seeing ephemeral things with emotional urgency and fervent conviction lies at the heart of symbol-making; for a symbol, in Jung's view, points to something that is partly known, but mostly unknown. [24] The neural foundation of symbol-making and world construction, therefore, appears to be closely related to the seeking/dreaming/paranoid complex Panksepp has described.

          The world we live in is very much the world as we interpret it with a brain that has been formed by our prior interactions with it. While awake, we have to act on faith, construct a world riddled with gaps and inconsistencies that we constantly gloss over in the interests of imposing consistency upon our experience and ourselves. Every night, when the brain switches off the systems that interact with the external world, it enters a hallucinatory dreamscape where the contradictions are even more outrageous. To judge from the dreams we recall upon waking, we make some enormous leaps of faith while in the REM state, as our seeking system imposes a narrative form on the improbable collection of neural networks that fire up when there is no challenge from the outer world to guide them.

          In dreams we make improbable associations that may baffle our waking ego, but we may also surprise ourselves with important insights and ideas. It appears that retiring from the world and processing our memories in new ways is enhanced by the irrational juxtapositions that become plausible when the action of dopamine is unchecked and the doors of outer preoccupation are closed. Hobson says, “The brain [is] so inexorably bent upon the quest for meaning that it attributes and even creates meaning where there is little or none to be found in the data it is asked to process” (1988: 15). The brain is apparently very much like the ego it makes possible. It will find meaning, however improbable. The fact that meaning is sought and will be found is what joins ego and unconscious in the running dialogue of individuation.

 

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1. Over and above the twenty-one volumes of the Collected Works, volumes of seminars and other writings are still being published.
   
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2. C. A. Meier (1968:83) traces the origin of this test, which Jung adapted to his own purposes, to the Father of Experimental Psychology, Wilhelm Wundt.
   
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3. The first edition of Symbols has been reissued as CW B (supplementary volume, B, of the Collected Works). Although it more accurately reflects Jung's thinking as it was in 1912, we shall follow the 1950 revision (CW 5) because we are interested in the mature idea of individuation.
   
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4. This was the woman's real name, though Jung may have believed it to be a pseudonym. He never met her but acquired her dreams, fantasies, and poems from his mentor in Geneva, Theodore Flournoy. The accuracy of Jung's diagnosis has been dealt a blow by Shamdasani (1990).
   
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5. Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes. Berlin, 1904, p. 30.
   
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6. Types distinguishes extraverted and introverted attitudes, each of which engages with the world through four “functions”: thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition. Thus, there may be both introverted thinking and extraverted thinking, introverted feeling and extraverted feeling, and so on, adding up to eight types; and these can be further differentiated depending on which “auxiliary function” assists the “dominant function.”
   
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7. This is how Jung reinterprets Freud's incest principle: it is not a desire to enter our personal mother sexually; it is the need to enter our phylogenetic mother, psyche's unconscious process, symbolically.
   
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8. “The path of the [energy] gradient.” (¶ 78).
   
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9. Clearly this language privileges heterosexuality. In my opinion the gender differences between anima and animus have been far too often the focus of attention -- by Jungian analysts as well as by the general public. I think it is a mistake to emphasize gender when, in fact, the function of anima is in large part the same as that of the animus. Both mediate between ego and self. If we focus on this central function, it is not so hard to accommodate the psychological dynamics of homosexual individuals. It will not be hard to accept that the alluring or frightening mediator of the realm of the gods might be of the same gender as the dreamer.
   
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10. Apparently motivated by a desire for simplicity -- male chauvinism cannot be ruled out -- , Jung frequently writes only of the anima when he clearly means to describe the role that is played by both anima and animus.
    
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11. E.g., CW 12: ¶ 44, 310; CW 13: ¶ 457; CW 14: ¶ 41.
    
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12. Janet's first book, Automatisme psychologique (1889), perhaps the most significant contribution to the literature of the dissociation school, was his dissertation in philosophy. He began medical school on completing it.
    
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13. Some of the most commonly repeated notions in Jung's works are (a) Janet's expression for a drop in ego-function (abaissement du niveau mental), (b) Janet's expression for the work of the ego (fonction du réel), and (c) Janet's distinction between the “higher” and “lower” psychic functions, which Jung identifies, respectively, with the personal psyche and the collective unconscious (parties supérieures et inférieures).
    
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14. Jung does not say where he got the expression, individuation; but it is likely not Janet, since there are no references to the term in Janet (1903) or earlier, for Janet (1903) is the latest of his publications cited by Jung in the Collected Works.
    
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15. This book, represented by its publication date of 2000, was jointly authored by Edelman with Giulio Tononi. For convenience in this section of the present volume on the dynamic core, Tononi's name is eliminated. Elsewhere it will be cited in full as Edelman & Tononi, 2000.
    
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16. When brain scientists speak of “nuclei,” they mean a cluster of neurons that all have the same function.
    
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17. This detail inserted into Searle's argument, borrowed from Damasio (1999: 228).
    
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18. PET = positron emission tomography (weakly radioactive tracers were added to glucose; more of the radioactive glucose was used in those regions of the cortex that were being employed for the task; and as a result those regions glowed with the increased radioactivity).
    
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19. I refer to Jung's practice in handling dreams. As for his speeches in defense of Freud at this time in his career, we find him defending the manifest/latent distinction and the idea of “dream work.” After breaking with Freud, he says he decided just to listen to the dreams and see what they had to say (Jung, 1961: 170f); but the astute reader will see that that was what he had been doing all along.
    
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20. I encountered a strange response of this type from another Harvard professor when a depressed patient of mine asked me to contact the psychopharmacologist who prescribed her antidepressant medication. I did so; but he refused to talk to me, claiming that, speaking with a Jungian analyst could be grounds for his being dismissed from the Harvard faculty. On the other hand, I have for years been invited to a monthly Harvard meeting on the history of psychology. Clearly, when Jung's name comes up, strong emotional reactions abound.
    
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21. Elsewhere he gets the names and spellings right (Hobson, 1988: 66).
    
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22. For instance, PET scans on men who explored a virtual town with a joystick showed elevated activity in the brain's hippocampus during SWS. This “reflects the processing of memory traces, which eventually leads to an improvement in performance the next day.” B. Bower, “Wayfaring Sleepers: Brain Area Linked to Slumber-Aided Recall,” in Science News (11/6/04): 294.
    
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23. PGO stands for the three brain regions involved: Pons, lateral Geniculate bodies, and Occipital cortex.
    
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24. “Every view which interprets the symbolic expression as an analogue or an abbreviated designation for a known thing is semiotic. A view which interprets the symbolic expression as the best possible formulation of a relatively unknown thing, which for that reason cannot be more clearly or characteristically represented, is symbolic ” (CW 6: ¶815).