Our mental health crisis

Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality: Modern depth psychology came about because the daimons would no longer be ignored. They made themselves felt in neurotic symptoms, in obsessions and psychoses. Freud and his followers documented the complexes which cried out from within us with alien voices; Jung followed their call into the depths, beyond the personal, beyond even the human, to the world of archetypal psychological principles in which he saw the gods returning in a new guise. Freud could not follow him down. He feared the daimons of the unconscious, demonized them, warning Jung that he must set up a bulwark “against the black tide of mud” of “occultism.” But Jung dared to make his own journey into the collective unconscious and found there something altogether different, something — as we will see — unimaginable. Other schools of psychology became increasingly materialistic and reductive, treating the daimons as if they were purely physiological. Soul was reduced to mind, and mind to…