Jung and the Ancestors: Beyond Biography, Mending the Ancestral Web

The psyche might be that existence in which the hereafter or the land of the dead is located.

For example, at the personal level the image of mother is formed out of our personal experiences of mother. At the familial level, she is the long line of mothers in our ancestral lineage. At the cultural level, she is depicted in movies, art, and literature in a variety of forms.

For Freud, it was the recovery of lost and repressed memories for the sake of healing and the adaptation of the instincts to the requirements of civilization. For C. G. Jung, it was facing and integrating the personal and collective pieces of the shadow in service to a sense of wholeness.

The unconscious is a universal aspect of the psyche shared by all of us. It connects us with the origins of our being and intimately binds us together in our families, nations, and with all of creation.

Bernstein uses the term “‘transrational’ to refer to . . . observable phenomena and connections that do not ‘make sense’ by generally accepted scientific and rational criteria.”

passage: “The past is really the earth; all the past has sunk into the earth, as those primitives say. The ancestors . . . went underground.”

What the ancients did for their dead! You seem to believe that you can absolve yourself from the care of the dead, and from the work that they so greatly demand, since what is dead is past. . . . Do you think that the dead do not exist because you have devised the impossibility of immortality? . . . The dead produce effects, that is sufficient.1 —

By the time Jung writes his autobiography, his observations have led him to conclude that the figures of the unconscious are often indistinguishable from the “spirits of the departed.”

and “the ephemeral conditions of the present.”