The history of a culture, the inner history of a civilization, can sometimes bear suggestive resemblances to the unfolding of an individual human life. In Joseph Campbell’s classic descrip­tion of the archetypal journey of the hero—the liberator, the shaman, the mystic, the creator, the discoverer of new worlds—a dramatic progression takes place that involves certain characteristic stages: a decisive separation from the community, detaching the self from the larger whole in which it has until then been embedded, an experience of the physical and spiritual life of the world as undergoing a great danger, an encroaching shadow, a fall into ruin, and a radical shift of emphasis from external realities to the interior realm, moving “from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside.” There follows a dark night of the soul, an interior descent, bringing a crisis of meaning, a transformative encounter with human suffering and mortality, and a disorienting dissolution of the self’s basic structures of identity and being. Only through such a descent does the hero penetrate to a source of greater knowledge and power opened by a direct experience of the archetypal dimension of life. Along the way of this perilous journey, certain humble clues and anomalies unexpectedly appear that challenge and destabilize the confident knowledge of the old self, yet ultimately point the way to the threshold of another world.

In the dramatic evolution of the Western psyche, which has proved so consequential for the planet, the enduring archetypal patterns visible in the myths of the hero also seem to function with extraordinary potency at the level of history and the collective cultural psyche. But if so, the shift in context from myth to history, and from the individual person to a civilization, has involved a surprising change in the terms of the narrative. For in the history of Western thought and culture, the community and larger whole from which the heroic self was separated was not simply the local tribal or familial matrix, but rather the entire community of being, the Earth, the cosmos itself. Different stages of such a separation, descent, and transformation have taken place in each great epoch of Western cultural history, in what in retrospect appears not unlike a vast evolutionary rite of passage played out on the stage of history and the cosmos and now reaching an especially precarious moment of truth.

We see such a pattern in late antiquity, against the backdrop of classical civilization’s ruinous decline, as the ancient cosmological vision eventually reached an opaque boundary within the overarching fixed structure of the geocentric Ptolemaic-Aristotelian universe. The complexity of the celestial movements was seen as increasingly inscrutable, the power of the planetary spheres over human life increasingly all-determining. The cultural psyche could not penetrate farther under that established set of assumptions and was thereby forced to go within, to move deeply into the interior world of the human soul and spirit and bring forth a new form of being. So it was at this moment, after the intense struggles and epiphanies of late biblical Judaism and early Christianity, Gnosticism, and the mystery religions, amidst the skeptical and religious crisis of the late classical age, that there took place the great interior journey of Saint Augustine, and then of the entire medieval West he so profoundly influenced and anticipated.

So too in the modern world, but on a new scale and with a more radical separation: As the larger implications of the Copernican revolution gradually emerged in the course of the modern era, the impenetrable boundaries of the disenchanted cosmic vision began again to force the cultural psyche to the interior. Pascal was among the first to confront the dark entailments of the new cosmic reality: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.” Kant, though filled with wonder by those same spaces, struggled mightily to overcome the stark disjunction between “the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me,” the realm of science and the realm of religion. Finally Nietzsche, fully recognizing the plight of the modern self in the scientifically revealed cosmos, “straying as through an infinite nothing,” began his paradigmatic descent into the interior depths. Thus he foreshadowed the depth psychology that was conceived and developed in the immediate aftermath of that descent, by Freud and Jung in Europe and, in a different but closely related mode, by William James in America. Against the historical background of the great crises, both inner and outer, that overtook modern civilization, the twentieth century became, as Peter Homans has observed, “the psychological century.”

It was Freud who first recognized the deep affinity and continuity linking the Copernican revolution with the depth-psychology revolution. As the former event had irrevocably transformed the outer cosmos, so the latter irrevocably transformed the inner cosmos, in each case radically overturning humankind’s naïve conviction of its centricity as the price for radically enlarging the compass of its vision. Just as the Copernicans had displaced the Earth from the center of the universe to reveal a much larger unknown cosmos of which the Earth was now but a tiny peripheral fragment, the Freudians displaced the conscious self from the center of the inner universe to reveal the much larger unknown realm of the unconscious. The modern self had to acknowledge that it was not master of its own house, as the confident Cartesian cogito had implied, but was rather a peripheral epiphenomenon of far more powerful processes working unfathomed beyond the boundaries of its awareness.

Both revolutions, cosmological and psychological, were simultaneously decentering and emancipatory. But where Copernicus’s came as the modern self began its great ascent, with Leonardo and Columbus, Luther and Montaigne, Bacon and Galileo, Descartes and Newton, by contrast Freud’s emerged at the other end of the trajectory as the modern self began its great descent, with Nietzsche and Weber, Kafka and Picasso, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Woolf and Beauvoir, Camus and Beckett. The two revolutions heralded, as it were, the dawn and sunset of the modern self’s solar journey: While the Copernican revolution impelled and symbolized the outward-moving ascent and construction of the modern self that began in the Renaissance and brought forth the Enlightenment, the depth psychology revolution reflected the inward-turning descent and deconstruction of the self that commenced at the end of the nineteenth century and brought forth the postmodern era. 

This arc-like symmetry revealed itself in yet another important way. For each revolution was also both disenchanting and spiritually renewing in its effects. But whereas the Copernican awakening of outward ascent began within an ambiance of spiritual exaltation and then moved gradually but inexorably towards the random mechanistic universe of the later modern world view, the unfolding of the depth psychology revolution of inward descent enacted rather the reverse sequence. Freud, by temperament and intellectual commitment, emphasized from the start the disenchant­ing implications of the psychological awakening: all psychic motivation rooted in unconscious biological instinct; all human experience and aspiration, no matter how elevated or sublime, reduced finally to mechanistic impulse. Yet even Freud, in the poetic and mythic cast of his vision and his enduring emotional investment in archaic numinosity (classical mythology, dream interpretation, ancient religious icons, cultic secrecy), betrayed signs of an underlying ambivalence. James and Jung, however, with different sensibilities from Freud’s, pointed decisively to more spiritually expansive potentials of the new discoveries and ultimately to a vaster and more mysterious inner universe than Freud had been able to acknowledge. Like the Copernican revolution, depth psychology resulted from the extraordinary convergence of a multiplicity of intellectual and cultural streams and proved to be just as generative and paradoxical in its developing vision.

***

Of all the fields and disciplines of the modern intellectual world, it was uniquely depth psychology, by the very nature of its historical moment, its cultural sources, and its thera­peutic aims, that located itself at the precise intersection of the two great polarities of the modern sensibility, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. With roots nourished by both streams, depth psychology was a tradition inspired not only by the scientific principles of Newton and Darwin but also by the imaginative aspirations of Goethe and Emerson—hence the promise it held for so many as a via regia for healing the schisms of the modern self. Depth psych­ology took up the enduring passions and concerns of the Romantic project, exploring the depths of conscious­ness and the unconscious, emotion and instinct, memory and imagination, visions, dreams, myth, art, creativity. It pursued introspection to new heights and abysses, examined the psyche’s shadows and pathologies, discerned hidden motivations, ambivalence, and ambiguity. It studied the mysteries of religious experience, ancient rituals and shamanic initiations, mystical revelations and gnostic doctrines, esoteric traditions and divinatory practices, the wisdom and visions of many other cultures and other ages.

All this it did with an Enlightenment commitment to lucid rational analysis and systematic investiga­tion as it sought therapeutically effective knowledge in a context of collective empirical research. Throughout their lives James, Freud, and Jung pressed the scientific mind beyond its conventional limits to engage realities known by visionaries and poets, mystics and initiates. Striving to combine the intellectual rigor of scientific observation with the intuitive insight of the poetic and spiritual imagination, depth psychology attempted to bring the light of reason to the deep mysteries of human interiority, yet often witnessed the converse: the light of reason reevaluated, transformed, and deepened by the very mysteries it sought to illuminate.

Moreover, as especially Jung understood, depth psychology engaged the Enlightenment’s epistemological challenge set by Kant as it attempted to discern the deep structural principles that inform human subjectivity, those enduring patterns and forms that unconsciously permeate and configure human knowledge and experience (hence Jung’s understanding of depth psychology as the direct successor and heir of critical philosophy). Yet contrary to Kant’s narrow list of a priori categories, those underlying forms were repeatedly discovered, beginning with Nietzsche and Freud and above all by Jung and his successors, to be mythic, symbolic, even numinous in nature, pervading and impelling human consciousness from the unconscious depths. Such a discovery fundamentally undermined the Enlighten­ment project to extend rational mastery over the inner world in the same manner it had done, or appeared to have done, so successfully over the outer world. With depth psychol­ogy, reason revealed ever-expanding and deepening interior realities that challenged reason’s compass. The very nature of those disclosures ultimately subverted Freud’s reductionist Enlighten­ment assumptions and moved the modern mind, from James and Jung onward, to engage and assimilate dimen­sions of consciousness and princi­ples of the subjective universe that could no longer be easily accommodated by what James saw as the prematurely “closed universe” of conventional scientific belief.

Just as depth psychology subverted the naïve ortho­doxies of the scientific mind while extending the range of scientific inquiry, so it subverted the naïve orthodoxies of traditional religion while extending the range of spiritual inquiry. The relation­ship of depth psychology to religion was complex. The directions opened by both James and Jung pointed towards the human universality of spiritual aspiration, contrary to the secularist assumptions of much modern thought, and provided new grounds for affirming the religious dimension of life as essential to psychological health and wholeness. Insights into transcultural archetypal structures underlying the world’s religions brought new understanding to the human quest for spiritual meaning. That understanding proved to be both enriching and relativiz­ing. On the one hand, it undermined absolutist claims by various religious traditions to unique spiritual authority, thus freeing many individuals from their dogmatic chains while honoring their spiritual quests. On the other hand, the new insights also made possible for many an unexpected spiritual renewal and deepening of relation­ship to the central symbols of those same traditions, now seen and understood in a larger, less literal, more directly meaningful and experientially vivid light.

Especially affected were those many spiritual seekers whose experience of the sacred no longer readily fit within the structures of their inherited religious tradition, a phenomenon increasingly widespread in the late modern and postmodern era. For these, depth psychology provided new ways of articulating their encounter with the numinous, and affirmed the many fruitful sources of spiritual disclosure from which the human psyche could draw beyond those sanctioned by a particular tradition—nonordinary states of consciousness, creativity, dreams, intimate relationships, sexuality and the body, nature, sacred traditions and transformative practices from other eras and cultures. Like science, religion possessed its own tendencies towards reifying a prematurely closed interpretation of the universe. Depth psychology offered an evolving frame of reference that opened the horizon of authentic religious experience to engage the mysteries of human existence beyond the constraints and mutual antagonisms widely characteristic of the world’s religious traditions.

Given the modern mind's radical divisions between self and world and between conscious and unconscious, the continuing centrality in twentieth-century thought of depth psycho­logy can be recognized as in some sense inevitable. For the radiant emergence of the modern rational self—the highly focused, centered, empowered, detached, objectifying, self-reflective and self-identifying Cartesian consciousness—effectively constellated an “unconscious,” as light creates shadow, which then needed to be theorized, explored, and painstakingly integrated. The discovery of the unconscious was thus significant on many fronts, with multiple implications needing to be addressed—not only psychological and therapeutic but cultural and historical, philosophical and political, existential and spiritual. Jung described that significance in the strongest possible terms: “We have not understood yet that the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization.”

The history of a culture, the inner history of a civilization, can sometimes bear suggestive resemblances to the unfolding of an individual human life. In Joseph Campbell’s classic descrip­tion of the archetypal journey of the hero—the liberator, the shaman, the mystic, the creator, the discoverer of new worlds—a dramatic progression takes place that involves certain characteristic stages: a decisive separation from the community, detaching the self from the larger whole in which it has until then been embedded, an experience of the physical and spiritual life of the world as undergoing a great danger, an encroaching shadow, a fall into ruin, and a radical shift of emphasis from external realities to the interior realm, moving “from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside.” There follows a dark night of the soul, an interior descent, bringing a crisis of meaning, a transformative encounter with human suffering and mortality, and a disorienting dissolution of the self’s basic structures of identity and being. Only through such a descent does the hero penetrate to a source of greater knowledge and power opened by a direct experience of the archetypal dimension of life. Along the way of this perilous journey, certain humble clues and anomalies unexpectedly appear that challenge and destabilize the confident knowledge of the old self, yet ultimately point the way to the threshold of another world.

In the dramatic evolution of the Western psyche, which has proved so consequential for the planet, the enduring archetypal patterns visible in the myths of the hero also seem to function with extraordinary potency at the level of history and the collective cultural psyche. But if so, the shift in context from myth to history, and from the individual person to a civilization, has involved a surprising change in the terms of the narrative. For in the history of Western thought and culture, the community and larger whole from which the heroic self was separated was not simply the local tribal or familial matrix, but rather the entire community of being, the Earth, the cosmos itself. Different stages of such a separation, descent, and transformation have taken place in each great epoch of Western cultural history, in what in retrospect appears not unlike a vast evolutionary rite of passage played out on the stage of history and the cosmos and now reaching an especially precarious moment of truth.

We see such a pattern in late antiquity, against the backdrop of classical civilization’s ruinous decline, as the ancient cosmological vision eventually reached an opaque boundary within the overarching fixed structure of the geocentric Ptolemaic-Aristotelian universe. The complexity of the celestial movements was seen as increasingly inscrutable, the power of the planetary spheres over human life increasingly all-determining. The cultural psyche could not penetrate farther under that established set of assumptions and was thereby forced to go within, to move deeply into the interior world of the human soul and spirit and bring forth a new form of being. So it was at this moment, after the intense struggles and epiphanies of late biblical Judaism and early Christianity, Gnosticism, and the mystery religions, amidst the skeptical and religious crisis of the late classical age, that there took place the great interior journey of Saint Augustine, and then of the entire medieval West he so profoundly influenced and anticipated.

So too in the modern world, but on a new scale and with a more radical separation: As the larger implications of the Copernican revolution gradually emerged in the course of the modern era, the impenetrable boundaries of the disenchanted cosmic vision began again to force the cultural psyche to the interior. Pascal was among the first to confront the dark entailments of the new cosmic reality: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces fills me with dread.” Kant, though filled with wonder by those same spaces, struggled mightily to overcome the stark disjunction between “the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me,” the realm of science and the realm of religion. Finally Nietzsche, fully recognizing the plight of the modern self in the scientifically revealed cosmos, “straying as through an infinite nothing,” began his paradigmatic descent into the interior depths. Thus he foreshadowed the depth psychology that was conceived and developed in the immediate aftermath of that descent, by Freud and Jung in Europe and, in a different but closely related mode, by William James in America. Against the historical background of the great crises, both inner and outer, that overtook modern civilization, the twentieth century became, as Peter Homans has observed, “the psychological century.”

It was Freud who first recognized the deep affinity and continuity linking the Copernican revolution with the depth-psychology revolution. As the former event had irrevocably transformed the outer cosmos, so the latter irrevocably transformed the inner cosmos, in each case radically overturning humankind’s naïve conviction of its centricity as the price for radically enlarging the compass of its vision. Just as the Copernicans had displaced the Earth from the center of the universe to reveal a much larger unknown cosmos of which the Earth was now but a tiny peripheral fragment, the Freudians displaced the conscious self from the center of the inner universe to reveal the much larger unknown realm of the unconscious. The modern self had to acknowledge that it was not master of its own house, as the confident Cartesian cogito had implied, but was rather a peripheral epiphenomenon of far more powerful processes working unfathomed beyond the boundaries of its awareness.

Both revolutions, cosmological and psychological, were simultaneously decentering and emancipatory. But where Copernicus’s came as the modern self began its great ascent, with Leonardo and Columbus, Luther and Montaigne, Bacon and Galileo, Descartes and Newton, by contrast Freud’s emerged at the other end of the trajectory as the modern self began its great descent, with Nietzsche and Weber, Kafka and Picasso, Heidegger and Wittgenstein, Woolf and Beauvoir, Camus and Beckett. The two revolutions heralded, as it were, the dawn and sunset of the modern self’s solar journey: While the Copernican revolution impelled and symbolized the outward-moving ascent and construction of the modern self that began in the Renaissance and brought forth the Enlightenment, the depth psychology revolution reflected the inward-turning descent and deconstruction of the self that commenced at the end of the nineteenth century and brought forth the postmodern era.

This arc-like symmetry revealed itself in yet another important way. For each revolution was also both disenchanting and spiritually renewing in its effects. But whereas the Copernican awakening of outward ascent began within an ambiance of spiritual exaltation and then moved gradually but inexorably towards the random mechanistic universe of the later modern world view, the unfolding of the depth psychology revolution of inward descent enacted rather the reverse sequence. Freud, by temperament and intellectual commitment, emphasized from the start the disenchant­ing implications of the psychological awakening: all psychic motivation rooted in unconscious biological instinct; all human experience and aspiration, no matter how elevated or sublime, reduced finally to mechanistic impulse. Yet even Freud, in the poetic and mythic cast of his vision and his enduring emotional investment in archaic numinosity (classical mythology, dream interpretation, ancient religious icons, cultic secrecy), betrayed signs of an underlying ambivalence. James and Jung, however, with different sensibilities from Freud’s, pointed decisively to more spiritually expansive potentials of the new discoveries and ultimately to a vaster and more mysterious inner universe than Freud had been able to acknowledge. Like the Copernican revolution, depth psychology resulted from the extraordinary convergence of a multiplicity of intellectual and cultural streams and proved to be just as generative and paradoxical in its developing vision.

***

Of all the fields and disciplines of the modern intellectual world, it was uniquely depth psychology, by the very nature of its historical moment, its cultural sources, and its thera­peutic aims, that located itself at the precise intersection of the two great polarities of the modern sensibility, the Enlightenment and Romanticism. With roots nourished by both streams, depth psychology was a tradition inspired not only by the scientific principles of Newton and Darwin but also by the imaginative aspirations of Goethe and Emerson—hence the promise it held for so many as a via regia for healing the schisms of the modern self. Depth psych­ology took up the enduring passions and concerns of the Romantic project, exploring the depths of conscious­ness and the unconscious, emotion and instinct, memory and imagination, visions, dreams, myth, art, creativity. It pursued introspection to new heights and abysses, examined the psyche’s shadows and pathologies, discerned hidden motivations, ambivalence, and ambiguity. It studied the mysteries of religious experience, ancient rituals and shamanic initiations, mystical revelations and gnostic doctrines, esoteric traditions and divinatory practices, the wisdom and visions of many other cultures and other ages.

All this it did with an Enlightenment commitment to lucid rational analysis and systematic investiga­tion as it sought therapeutically effective knowledge in a context of collective empirical research. Throughout their lives James, Freud, and Jung pressed the scientific mind beyond its conventional limits to engage realities known by visionaries and poets, mystics and initiates. Striving to combine the intellectual rigor of scientific observation with the intuitive insight of the poetic and spiritual imagination, depth psychology attempted to bring the light of reason to the deep mysteries of human interiority, yet often witnessed the converse: the light of reason reevaluated, transformed, and deepened by the very mysteries it sought to illuminate.

Moreover, as especially Jung understood, depth psychology engaged the Enlightenment’s epistemological challenge set by Kant as it attempted to discern the deep structural principles that inform human subjectivity, those enduring patterns and forms that unconsciously permeate and configure human knowledge and experience (hence Jung’s understanding of depth psychology as the direct successor and heir of critical philosophy). Yet contrary to Kant’s narrow list of a priori categories, those underlying forms were repeatedly discovered, beginning with Nietzsche and Freud and above all by Jung and his successors, to be mythic, symbolic, even numinous in nature, pervading and impelling human consciousness from the unconscious depths. Such a discovery fundamentally undermined the Enlighten­ment project to extend rational mastery over the inner world in the same manner it had done, or appeared to have done, so successfully over the outer world. With depth psychol­ogy, reason revealed ever-expanding and deepening interior realities that challenged reason’s compass. The very nature of those disclosures ultimately subverted Freud’s reductionist Enlighten­ment assumptions and moved the modern mind, from James and Jung onward, to engage and assimilate dimen­sions of consciousness and princi­ples of the subjective universe that could no longer be easily accommodated by what James saw as the prematurely “closed universe” of conventional scientific belief.

Just as depth psychology subverted the naïve ortho­doxies of the scientific mind while extending the range of scientific inquiry, so it subverted the naïve orthodoxies of traditional religion while extending the range of spiritual inquiry. The relation­ship of depth psychology to religion was complex. The directions opened by both James and Jung pointed towards the human universality of spiritual aspiration, contrary to the secularist assumptions of much modern thought, and provided new grounds for affirming the religious dimension of life as essential to psychological health and wholeness. Insights into transcultural archetypal structures underlying the world’s religions brought new understanding to the human quest for spiritual meaning. That understanding proved to be both enriching and relativiz­ing. On the one hand, it undermined absolutist claims by various religious traditions to unique spiritual authority, thus freeing many individuals from their dogmatic chains while honoring their spiritual quests. On the other hand, the new insights also made possible for many an unexpected spiritual renewal and deepening of relation­ship to the central symbols of those same traditions, now seen and understood in a larger, less literal, more directly meaningful and experientially vivid light.

Especially affected were those many spiritual seekers whose experience of the sacred no longer readily fit within the structures of their inherited religious tradition, a phenomenon increasingly widespread in the late modern and postmodern era. For these, depth psychology provided new ways of articulating their encounter with the numinous, and affirmed the many fruitful sources of spiritual disclosure from which the human psyche could draw beyond those sanctioned by a particular tradition—nonordinary states of consciousness, creativity, dreams, intimate relationships, sexuality and the body, nature, sacred traditions and transformative practices from other eras and cultures. Like science, religion possessed its own tendencies towards reifying a prematurely closed interpretation of the universe. Depth psychology offered an evolving frame of reference that opened the horizon of authentic religious experience to engage the mysteries of human existence beyond the constraints and mutual antagonisms widely characteristic of the world’s religious traditions.

Given the modern mind's radical divisions between self and world and between conscious and unconscious, the continuing centrality in twentieth-century thought of depth psycho­logy can be recognized as in some sense inevitable. For the radiant emergence of the modern rational self—the highly focused, centered, empowered, detached, objectifying, self-reflective and self-identifying Cartesian consciousness—effectively constellated an “unconscious,” as light creates shadow, which then needed to be theorized, explored, and painstakingly integrated. The discovery of the unconscious was thus significant on many fronts, with multiple implications needing to be addressed—not only psychological and therapeutic but cultural and historical, philosophical and political, existential and spiritual. Jung described that significance in the strongest possible terms: “We have not understood yet that the discovery of the unconscious means an enormous spiritual task, which must be accomplished if we wish to preserve our civilization.”

Excerpted from Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View.

New York: Viking Penguin, 2006, pp. 43-47. Copyright © Richard Tarnas

Richard Tarnas is professor emeritus of cultural history and psychology at the California Institute of Integral Studies, where he founded the graduate program in Philosophy, Cosmology, and Consciousness. He has taught courses in the history of ideas, archetypal studies, depth psychology, and religious evolution. He has also frequently lectured on archetypal studies and depth psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and was formerly the director of programs and education at Esalen Institute.

He is the author of The Passion of the Western Mind, a history of the Western world view from the ancient Greek to the postmodern widely used in universities. His second book, Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations of a New World View, received the Book of the Year Prize from the Scientific and Medical Network and is the basis for the just released 10-episode documentary series "The Changing of the Gods". He is a past president of the International Transpersonal Association and long served on the Board of Governors for the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco.