by Maxwell Cynn

Created on: July 29, 2007   Last Updated: September 02, 2008

Almost a century ago Psychology emerged as a new science with Freud, Adler and Jung, among others, putting forth the idea of the unconscious and setting the groundwork for modern psycho therapy. Years later, near the end of his life, Jung saw deep psychological problems with our modern culture and warned of collective psychosis to come. We have done little to heed those warnings and indeed very little new ground has been achieved in the area of psychology. Most of the research in modern psychology has been focused on the mass not the individual and much of that as attempts to control or influence the mass. Millions of dollars go into the psychology of advertising, trying to sell us products, while we are no closer to understanding schizophrenia or even the minor disorders of the mind discovered almost a century ago. Modern psychiatry seems to rely more on the use of drugs to ease their patients symptoms then trying to understand the minds they treat. We are a culture of instant gratification and demand instant cures, not months or years spent investigating the inner workings of our minds. We want a pill to fix it, to make us better, happier, and the doctor gladly obliges.

Jung said that our only hope against the trend of society's focus on the mass, and thus turning us into meaningless parts of the whole, was our religious function. That capacity to experience within ourselves something greater than ourselves is by necessity an individual effort. It can not come from without, but must rise up from within. The State can not give it to us nor can the Church do more than direct us in our journey toward self realization and an intimate relationship with the divine. The demands of the outer world, and of being part of the mass, drown out the inner voice and thus destroy our hopes of individuality. Yet that is the true path to unity, through that relationship with the divine we find the real connectedness of all things. The connection of individual parts in a greater whole not the crushing of the mass into an amalgamation of uniformity.

But our modern psyche, and the collective conscious itself, seems to be taking matters into its own hands. We are seeking and finding "therapy" in the most unlikely places in the most unconventional ways. Our Doctors want to medicate us into a state where we can function within some arbitrary definition of average or "normal" behavior, our governments want to force us into the role of "good patriotic citizens", and our churches want

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