BOUNDARIES OF THE SOUL

emotions, and perhaps it also includes that consciousness of the blood and body
that Malouf, Keneally and Lawrence have spoken of. The soul also is “ ... naturaliter
religiosa”, that is, it possesses a religious function (Jung, CW 12, par. 12). Carl
Jung, following the alchemists, called the soul Anima Media Natura, suggesting that
the soul is in the middle between opposing natures; it is the medium, the conductor
of both light and darkness, the bond between formless eternal light and the
darkness of earth and underworld. I n this sense it parallels Corbin’s I maginal
Realm; “ ... the world through which spirits are embodied, and bodies spiritualised”
(Corbin, 1969:xiii) and interestingly, the Jungian psychotherapist Robert Bosnak
sees the soul as hermaphroditic, both male and female (in Spiegelman and
Jacobson, 1986:33). The soul's relationship with the imperceptible may be of more
importance than that with the perceptible, particularly when it is considered that the
soul is both receiver and transmitter, that is, it perceives unconscious contents and
conveys them to consciousness by means of symbols (Jung, CW, 6, par. 424).
Ulanov proposes that the soul exists midway between the ego and the primordial
unconscious, the latter expressing itself through the archetypal images that the soul
receives, creates and transmits (Ulanov, 1999:21). I n other words, the soul has
archaic and instinctive roots, an important concept in this thesis. Jung also
suggested that in its lower reaches, the psyche or soul loses itself in the organic-
material substrate (place), and in its upper reaches resolves itself into spiritual form
(I maginal Realm) (Jung, CW, 8, par. 380). Besides its archaic nature it is
immediate, insistent and commanding, manifesting in intra-subjective space where
its effect is that of animating the ego to feel earnestly alive in a process of creative
living that gives sense to life lived in the material physical world.
We recognize in the individual an organization of the soul that is interpolated
between the stimulation of the senses and the perception of bodily needs on the
one hand, and the imaginal on the other, and which mediates between them for a
particular purpose. Sigmund Freud suggested that we call this organization the ‘I ’.
Besides the ‘I ’, we recognize also another region of the soul, the unconscious, more
extensive, grander, and more obscure than the I , and this we call the it (Bettleheim
2001:61). The unconscious is one of the most profound constituents of the human
psyche, from a Jungian perspective, in both its personal and collective
manifestations. Jung provides a rather beautiful and mythopoeic description of it,
thus: