I f it were possible to personify the unconscious, we might think of
it as a collective human being combining the characteristics of
both sexes, transcending youth and age, birth and death, and,
from having at its command a human experience of one or two
million years, practically immortal. I f such a being existed, it
would be exalted above all temporal change; the present would
mean neither more nor less to it than any year in the hundredth
millennium before Christ; it would be a dreamer of age old dreams
and, owing to its limitless experience, an incomparable
prognosticator. I t would have lived countless times over again the
life of the individual, the family, the tribe, and the nation, and it
would posses a living sense of the rhythm of growth, flowering
and decay. (Jung, CW 8, par. 673).My conception of the soul includes much of which we are not consciously
aware and I am influenced in my conception by both Freud and Jung who have
each contributed immeasurably to the discovery of the true nature of the inner
universe and the inner world of the soul. Freud evokes the image of the soul
frequently in his work. For instance, in The I nterpretation of Dreams, he states that
the dream, and one might infer mythopoeic activity too, “ ... is a result of the
activity of our own soul” and in various places he mentions “ ... the structure of the
soul and the organization of the soul” (Bettelheim, 1983:71). The psyche, of which
the unconscious constitutes the greater part, according to Jung, is soul and for
Freud too, the terms were interchangeable (Bettelheim, 1983:39). However, Jung
insisted repeatedly on the autonomy of the soul. I n other words, the soul is not the
result of causal factors, neither nature, inheritance, or by the environment and
education. The soul is independent, autonomous and cannot, or only conditionally,
be understood via the category of cause and effect (Guggenbuhl-Craig: 1995:31).
I n the mythopoeic sense the word ‘soul’ is often used as a metaphor for an
individual’s innermost being particularly since it evokes so many emotional
connotations. Psyche is frequently depicted in art as young and beautiful and in
many cultures birds and butterflies are symbols that serve to symbolize its
transcendence, fragility, beauty and insubstantiality. I nsubstantial it is not, and it is
not frequently associated with mundane life, but to Jung it was paramount in the
daily life of the individual:
The psyche creates reality every day. The only expression I can
use for this activity is fantasy. Fantasy is just as much feeling as
thinking, as much intuition as sensation. There is no psychic
function that, through fantasy, is not inextricably bound up with
the other psychic functions. Sometimes it appears in primordial
form, sometimes it is the ultimate and boldest product of all our
faculties combined. Fantasy, therefore, seems to me the clearest