Reason and the Separation from the Instinctual Unconscious

[David Guyatt]

I'm currently reading one of my old Jungian's mentor's books (Anne Maguire - Skin Disease: A Message from the Soul) and came across the following:

Today, in society at large, there is a great and universal sickness of psyche. Although the initial beginnings are partially obscured, the first great and frightening shudder became apparent in Europe in the French Revolution. It was during this time that the goddess of Reason was deified in the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. The rational intellect severed its connections with the instinctual unconscious, and its ascent began then.

This psychic illness has continued to proliferate with devastating momentum, like a vast fulminating malignancy. It now presents itself, two centuries later in the shadows caused by nuclear dust, with every type of savagery, combined with a world crisis of loss of moral conscience, to the astounded and incredulous gaze of the world.

I don't know what others here think, but this struck me as being a quite profound observation.

And just for good orders sake, the implication is not that Reason should be abandoned, but that it should operate in harmony and in conjunction with the instinctual unconscious. The flavour of Jung's work was all about working towards becoming whole rather than becoming ever more fragmented.

(She was a Consultant Dermatologist before becoming a Jungian Analyst btw - hence the dermatological nature of the book).