The first book by or about Carl Jung that I ever read was the illustrated Man and his Symbols. It’s still in print, and worth reading, even if the examples it gives are often decades out of date. It only occurred to me today that I bought this in the little bookshop The Process had at 2 Balfour Place, its near-legendary headquarters in the Mayfair district of London. For the curious, I’ve just posted a recent photo of this six-storey townhouse (seven if you counted the basement).

When I was hanging out around The Process in the 1960s, nobody seemed to have much idea of Jung. Alfred Adler’s school of Individual Psychology was stressed as a major influence, perhaps in part as a way of minimising The Process’ roots in Scientology and Dianetics. Adler’s theories are much more goal-oriented than Jung’s, and thus fit better with The Process’ focus on compulsions and drives. When I gave a copy of Jung’s autohagiography (to steal Crowley’s expression) Memories, Dreams, Reflections to a senior Processean, he found it fascinating, but more from the standpoint of Jung following inner promptings that led to spiritual realisations than from any resemblance between (for example) his stress on the concept of the Quaternio or mandala and The Process’ four gods. The idea of the collective unconscious was an easy one for people living their lives within an intensely active group mind, but the fourfold nature of reality around which Processean theology was based was not, in my recollection, ever compared to Jung’s theorem.

This was mostly because Jung’s modes of self-expression were often woolly (or at least, difficult), and the gods of The Process were experienced as vivid realities, projected and expressed in much of what we did hour to hour and day to day. Patiently waiting on some “Self” to initiate integration of the disparate parts of ourselves into an alchemically harmonised whole was not part of the program. Such a seemingly passive approach was anathema to Processean tenets even if in some respects, it was an underlying factor in the more positive results we achieved.

Similarly, the notion that a Jungian template was used to plan or construct the spiritual ideas of The Process is nonsense. There’s a piece online by Marco Toti, The Proliferation of Post-Modern Religiosity in the Late Sixties which, while making a genuine effort to put The Process into a sensible context, oversteps the line by jumping into the Jung trap. (http://www.cesnur.org/2007/toti.htm)

“It is quite evident that the theology of The Process – especially the belief in four gods –derives from Jungian theories,” Toti states. “According to the Swiss psychoanalyst, the quaternary is an almost universal archetype, that forms ‘the logical basis for any whole judgement,’ while ‘three is not a natural coefficient or order, but an artificial one.’

Significantly, this principle was, in fact, embodied in the history of The Process, which started with a growing awareness of one god, whom it called Jehovah; graduated to include his opposite number Lucifer; and, after those two were established in the group psyche, discovered Satan as the god of extremes, of both Love and Fear, underlying the mental knots, tendencies and conflicts embodied in the Jehovah-Lucifer dichotomy. Christ, in the original scheme, was an outsider, and only promoted (some would argue ‘demoted’) to god status around mid-1971. So it went from a dyad to a trinity and ended up with a quaternity.

But all this was put together through following intuitive links and guidance achieved through suspension of everyday consciousness in favour of subliminal input. The only “theory” the group had at base was its original amalgam of Scientology’s and Adler’s worldviews. Bits and pieces of mystical Christianity, eastern and western mysticism and whatever else was at hand were combined in this, such as reincarnation, karma and different levels of consciousness, but those bits and pieces had to fit the existing schema. That applied with Jung, too.

Jung was little known in English-speaking circles in the 1960s. Memories, Dreams, Reflections had come out in 1961, and Man and his Symbols in 1964. I encountered his ideas first in a book of essays by the English composer Michael Tippett, Moving Into Aquarius, but failed to find anything about the man’s work that seemed really coherent.

Interestingly, Tippett wrote a heavily Jung-influenced opera, The Midsummer Marriage that premiered in 1955, and bombed. Upon its revival in 1968, its reception was much more enthusiastic, and it has been performed periodically ever since. The reality, I suspect, is that, while the psychedelic revolution was one factor that made Jung more coherent to people (Stanley Owsley produced his first batch of illict LSD in California in February 1965), it was groups such as The Process, the plethora of eastern-style religious movements like the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) or Transcendental Meditation, and the hundreds of cults that sprang up and faded between 1965 and 1980 that truly made Jung accessible, and even essential. Both the people looking in at such movements and (especially) those coming out of them again needed some means of comprehending the forces that had gripped and inspired them (or their friends or offspring) during their period of membership.

At this point, the notion of an archetype of the collective unconscious was seen to be, not some dubious middle-European speculation, but a very convincing way of depicting and explaining the intensity of the forces that impelled people on the trajectory of their inner opening, ripening and (so often) fading out. Had those who joined The Process been exposed to that understanding, the group might never have taken off.

But of course, things didn’t happen that way.