David Tacey explores Ego and Soul in Australian Experience
Some people say we will never be able to understand the Aboriginal Dreaming because it operates at a level of reality we cannot comprehend. David does not agree with this statement and believes it may be possible for Westerners to understand the Dreaming, if we are prepared to do some inner work and shift our habitual patterns of thought.
The ego has become foundational to Western civilisation, and has brought with it many benefits, such as intellectual enlightenment and an explosion of knowledge. But it has been allowed to dominate the personality and society at great cost. For indigenous cultures, however, the soul is more important than the ego. The soul values tradition above innovation, pattern thinking above technical thinking, and eternity above time.
The development of the ego was available and possible for Aboriginal cultures, but they chose not to take this pathway.
‘We have been that [primal] mind’, Jung wrote, ‘but we have never known it. We got rid of it before understanding it.’ [i]
Jung said: ‘Every civilised human being, however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.’ [ii]
[i] Jung, ‘Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams’ (1961), CW 18, § 591.
[ii] C. G. Jung, ‘Archaic Man’ (1931), CW 10, § 104-147.
David Tacey is an Australian public intellectual, writer and interdisciplinary scholar. He works across the fields of spirituality, religion, analytical psychology, literature and philosophy.
David is a specialist in Jungian studies and is the author of How to Read Jung; Jung and the New Age; Remaking Men: Jung, Spirituality and Social Change; Gods and Diseases; and The Darkening Spirit: Jung, Spirituality, Religion. His most recent book, The Postsecular Sacred: Jung, Soul and Meaning in an Age of Change, was published by Routledge in 2020. His books have been translated into Chinese, Korean, Spanish, Turkish, Russian, Portuguese and French. He taught courses at the summer school of the Jung Institute in Zürich from 2001 to 2010. He is Emeritus Professor of Humanities at La Trobe University, Melbourne, where he taught Jung’s Cultural Psychology.
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Date: 12 July 2024 at 7.00
Venue: Zoom
Cost: Members $Free Non-Members $20 Non-Member
Concession $15
*Psychotherapists and other practitioners can obtain credit, upon request, for Professional Development hours recognised by PACFA and ACA for this presentation.