The Dark Night of the Soul
Herrias, David S. “Zosimos Separatio,” 2015
Lightning dazzled as I walked across Hyde Park past the ANZAC memorial on Wednesday. Rain glistened off my suit in the darkness while I looked up at the sandstone memorial. I had no umbrella because I’d set off under azure skies that day without consulting the weather forecast.
I was on my way to an education session on the use of Ketamine for the treatment of depression. I’d been running early so stopped in to a bookstore and picked up three linen hardbacks by Marcus Aurelius, Seneca, and Kirkegard, as well as a paperback by Jung.
You could say that my thoughts were primed to contemplate the Dark Night of the Soul.
To fully understand The Dark Night of the Soul it is important to consider the roots of the concept and how it relates to Jung’s concept of the Self.
Origins of the Dark Night
The phrase “Dark Night of the Soul” comes from a poem by the Spanish mystic St John of the Cross (la noche oscura del alma). It describes the journey of the soul to a mystical union with God, a destination that is unknowable (hence: dark night). To St John of the Cross, the Dark Night was a phase in the purification of the soul.
The Dark Night has become to be known as a crisis of faith or, as Ronald Pies notes “an extremely difficult and painful period in one’s life.” In its common usage today, the Dark Night represents an existential crisis.
Jung borrowed the idea after delving deep into his own Christian roots. He read widely on myth and religion, and eventually came to view myths as expressing deep parts of our Self that are shared across humanity.
He described the Dark Night as a borderline experience between the conscious and unconscious parts of our Self. To him, the Dark Night is about integrating lost parts of the Self, hence the analogy with the original journey described in St John of the Cross’ poem.
Self in Jungian Psychology
To understand this integrating experience, I first need to describe Jung’s concept of the Self.
Jung expanded Freud’s model of the Mind through his investigations of Archetypes. Freud delineated the Mind into Unconscious, Pre-conscious and Conscious parts. Each of these plays an important role:
Conscious: thoughts, feelings, and memories that we’re aware of
Pre-conscious: anything that could potentially be brought into conscious awareness
Unconscious: reservoir of feelings, thoughts, urges, and memories that are outside of our conscious awareness.
Freud also divided the Mind into Id, Ego, and Superego. While the Ego and Superego span all three layers of the Mind, the Id is completely Unconscious. I’ll leave this for another post.
The Unconscious contains anything that is unacceptable or unpleasant, such as feelings of pain, anxiety, or conflict. These drive long-standing patterns of behaviour that may be inexplicable to an individual and may be expressed in dreams. To Freud, the Unconscious was the bulk of the mind.
Though Jung agreed on the importance of the Unconscious, he divided the Unconscious into the Personal Unconscious and the Collective Unconscious. To him, Freud’s Unconscious was the Personal Unconscious, whereas the Collective Unconscious was shared by all of humanity and included instincts and Archetypes described in myths.
Credit: Stein M. “Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction.” Chicago, IL: Open Court Publishing Company; 2003
Jung referred to the complete description as the Psyche rather than the Mind. As a description, it is more a metaphor than a model. I really like Stein’s representation shown above because it shows how the Ego and Self are related to one another, as well as the relationships between Complexes and Archetypes.
I’m still wrapping my head around Archetypes, so I’ll leave them for another post. Besides, I want to focus on how Jung’s model helps us understand the significance of the Dark Night of the Soul.
Suffice to say, the Ego emerges from the Self (an Archetype) in early development. It is an expression of the Self that plays an executive function in an individual’s life and carries their personality. It stands between the inner and outer worlds.
Whilst Freud’s Unconscious Mind contained anything that was unacceptable, to Jung these are pushed into a part of the Ego called the Shadow and into Complexes. The Shadow contains qualities that are opposite to what is in the Ego, but gives depth to the Ego. These conscious-unconscious opposites are tied and compensate for each other.
I hope that makes sense.
The bottom line is that Jung organised his description from the perspective of the Self, whereas Freud organised his model from the perspective of the Ego. So Jung’s description contains a balance of opposites, the light of the Conscious and the dark of the Unconscious.
Navigating the Dark Night
When Jung described the Dark Night of the Soul as a borderline experience, he meant that it was a stage in the integration of the conscious and unconscious parts of the Self. Drawing on the metaphor of Alchemy, the first stage is the “blackening” of a substance by fire for purification (nigredo).
By metaphor with Alchemy, the Dark Night allows for the most basic parts of our Self to emerge. In their song Inside, the band UNKLE sampled a scene from the film Jacob’s Ladder that quotes the medieval German theologan Meister Eckhart neatly capturing the importance of this process:
The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they're not punishing you, they're freeing your soul. If you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away. If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth.
Meister Eckhart
The character in Jacob’s Ladder goes on to advise the protagonist to relax while giving him a deep tissue massage.
I digress, but you can see the many layers to the mythology glowing through.
It is in this first stage that we encounter the Shadow. Jung famously asks us to befriend the Shadow and it is through this befriending that the deeper parts of our Unconscious reveal themselves.
As Jung said “We meet ourselves in a thousand disguises along the path.”
