Satori and the unconscious

Jung's engagement with Zen Buddhism produced one of his most careful and honest pieces of comparative psychology — careful because he refused to flatten the difference between East and West, honest because he admitted that the Western psyche had no ready equivalent for what satori accomplishes. The question of how enlightenment and the unconscious relate is not a question Jung answered simply, and the fault-lines in his answer are worth following.

The core of Jung's position is that satori is best understood psychologically as a breakthrough of the non-ego self into a consciousness that has been structured entirely around the ego-form. He writes in Psychology and Religion: West and East:

The occurrence of satori is interpreted and formulated as a break-through, by a consciousness limited to the ego-form, into the non-ego-like self.

This formulation is precise and deliberately modest. Jung is not claiming that satori is individuation, nor that the Zen master and the analysand are doing the same thing. He is claiming that the psychological structure of the event — a supersession of the ego by something larger — is recognizable from within his own framework. The self, as he defines it elsewhere in the same volume, "is always something other than the ego, and inasmuch as a higher insight of the ego leads over to the self, the self is a more comprehensive thing which includes the experience of the ego and therefore transcends it" (CW 11, par. 885). Satori names the moment when that transcendence becomes experiential rather than theoretical.

What makes the koan method psychologically interesting to Jung is precisely its refusal of content. Unlike the Ignatian exercises, which load the meditating mind with sacred images, or Protestant conversion, which depends on a very definite expectation, the koan aims at the complete destruction of rational presuppositions. But — and this is the hinge of Jung's argument — it cannot destroy unconscious presuppositions. The answer that emerges from the koan is therefore not a blank: it is "an answer of Nature, who has succeeded in conveying her reaction direct to the conscious mind" (CW 11, par. 895). The unconscious, in other words, is not emptied by Zen practice; it is given an unobstructed channel. Satori is what happens when the ego's habitual interference is suspended long enough for the unconscious to speak without distortion.

This is where Jung and Suzuki part company, though not sharply. Suzuki's account of satori in the Essays in Zen Buddhism emphasizes the revelation of "a world of entirely new values" — a "twisting" or "screwing" of ordinary modes of thinking that discloses what was always already present. For Suzuki, the emphasis falls on the immediacy and completeness of the disclosure; the psychological machinery behind it is not his concern. Jung accepts the phenomenology but insists on naming the machinery: what is disclosed is the self, and the self is a psychological reality, not a metaphysical one. This is not a reduction — Jung is explicit that treating satori as a psychic fact neither affirms nor denies its metaphysical status — but it is a translation, and translations always lose something.

Von Franz, characteristically, sharpens the comparison by noting what distinguishes Jungian active imagination from Zen: in active imagination, "without judgment, we stoop to pick up every fragment of symbol that our psyche offers us and work with it," whereas the Zen master attempts to shake the student loose from fantasy images as from other ego-attachments, treating them as coverings over the "true nature" rather than as adumbrations of the self (von Franz, 1993). The difference is not trivial. Jungian work is imaginal through and through; the symbol is the medium of transformation. Zen, at least in its Rinzai form, treats the image as an obstacle. Both traditions are refusing the pneumatic bypass — the move toward pure spirit that leaves the soul's actual contents behind — but they refuse it differently. Zen refuses by emptying; depth psychology refuses by descending into the image.

Jung's most honest statement on the matter may be his warning that satori "cannot be anything cheaper or smaller than the whole," and that "the attainment of wholeness requires one to stake one's whole being. Nothing less will do" (CW 11, par. 906). This is not an endorsement of Zen for Western practitioners — he is explicit elsewhere that direct transplantation is neither commendable nor possible — but it is a recognition that the East has been asking the right question for two thousand years, and that Western psychology is only beginning to find its own entrance to the same road.

  • individuation — the lifelong process of becoming a whole self, Jung's term for psychological development
  • the self — the archetype of wholeness, the organizing center of the psyche beyond the ego
  • active imagination — Jung's method of engaging unconscious contents through sustained imaginative dialogue
  • Marie-Louise von Franz — portrait of Jung's closest collaborator and the foremost interpreter of his late work

Sources Cited

  • Jung, C.G., 1958, Psychology and Religion: West and East
  • Suzuki, D.T., 1949, Essays in Zen Buddhism (First Series)
  • von Franz, Marie-Louise, 1993, Psychotherapy