Paradise

Definition

Paradise, in Mario Jacoby’s usage, is an archetype of situation rather than of person. There is no paradise figure to meet in a dream. What the archetype names is a state, the image of a wholeness without conflict, lack or division, together with the process that state sets going in a life: it is held without being known, it is lost, and it is longed for. Jacoby, a Zürich analyst, roots the image in the earliest relation between infant and mother, when there is not yet an ego to separate inner from outer, and reads the paradise myths of many cultures as later symbolic expressions of that preverbal experience. The longing that results can pull backwards, towards merging and the avoidance of conflict, or forwards, towards a wholeness that has to be made consciously.

Two points in that definition matter for the entry. The first is that paradise is known only in retrospect: on Jacoby’s reading of Genesis, the state lasts only as long as nobody is aware of it, so every image of paradise already contains grief at its loss. The second is that the claim is explicitly Jacoby’s, made in his subtitle, and builds on Erich Neumann’s account of the first, uroboric stage of consciousness. Jung himself treated paradise as a symbol, not as an archetype in its own right.

History

The material is ancient: the garden of Genesis 2–3, the golden race of Hesiod’s Works and Days, the Iranian walled garden that gives the word its root. Mircea Eliade, outside the Jungian school, gathered the comparative evidence into a theme he called the nostalgia for paradise, found in archaic religion and especially in the shaman’s ecstatic return to the time before the fall (Myths, Dreams and Mysteries, 1957; English 1960). Jacoby draws on him throughout.

Jung used paradise as one symbol among many. In Aion (1951) he sets out a “Paradise Quaternio”, built on the four rivers of Eden, as one of the fourfold images of the self, and notes that for the alchemists paradise stood for the albedo, the regained state of innocence (CW 9ii ¶372–373). The step towards a developmental reading was Neumann’s. The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949) calls the maternal side of the uroboros paradisal, a state of containment that cannot be lived again in its first form in adult life (1954, p. 15), and holds that the paradisal situation ends when a fully formed ego emerges (pp. 114–115, as quoted in Jacoby). Edward Edinger (1972) read the golden age and Eden as pictures of the same original identity of ego and Self, and of the nostalgia it leaves (pp. 7–8).

Jacoby’s book grew out of lectures at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zürich and was published in German in 1980. He translated it himself; the English edition appeared in 1985 and was reissued in 2006. The preface states its premise:

Symbolic of the goal of happiness, “Paradise” is an archetypal, many-faceted phenomenon of deep and varied significance. — Mario Jacoby, Longing for Paradise (1980; English 1985), preface

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The introduction starts from nostalgia, first as a fashion for the old and then in two homesick patients who longed for a home they had never actually had. Jacoby takes Neumann’s term for the pre-ego phase, “existence in the unitary reality”, and calls the striving for that containment an archetypal pattern necessary to human development, whose intensity rises as early fulfilment falls short (pp. 6–9). Part One surveys the paradise myths, which share immortality, ease, peace with the animals and open traffic between heaven and earth (p. 18, after Eliade), and notes that the Avestan pairi-daēza means a walled enclosure, an image of containment (p. 22). It is careful about the infant: no baby lives among such sophisticated images, which are later symbolic formulations of preverbal states (pp. 25–26). Where maternal care fails, the same phase becomes an “infant hell”, which Jacoby illustrates with René Spitz’s studies of emotionally deprived foundlings (pp. 43–45).

Part Two reads the fall in Genesis as the birth of consciousness, guilt and conscience, and notes why consciousness is resisted: the paradisal state survives only so long as the harsher facts are not seen (pp. 177–178). Part Three turns to paradise as hope, in early Judaism, Christianity and Greek ideas of happiness, and asks whether Jungian individuation is itself a way back to paradise. Jacoby is wary of reading it as a doctrine of salvation, and keeps both readings open:

The symbolism of Paradise can thus be seen both in regressive and in prospective terms. — Mario Jacoby, Longing for Paradise (1980; English 1985), p. 209

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His summing-up gives the archetype three focal points: the place and condition of bliss, past or future; the sorrow of its loss, and the guilt said to have caused it; and the longing to close the gap, the source of every expectation of salvation, religious or secular (pp. 212–215). Those three points are what makes it a process and not a figure.

The debate

The developmental anchor is the weak point, and Jacoby knew it. A footnote records Michael Fordham’s view that Neumann’s account of the first year is overgeneralised, and that the infant is a self from the start whose relation to the mother is never free of conflict. Jacoby replies that his claim concerns conflict-free states, which Fordham himself allowed infants experience from time to time (p. 26; Fordham 1979, p. 27).

Ken Wilber (1980) went further. He had begun from the view, which he attributes to Jungians and to Neumann among others, that the infant’s fusion with the mother is a metaphysically higher state, a lost paradise to be regained in mature form. He came to reject it: infant fusion is paradise only in the sense of not yet knowing, and treating it as the model for adult transcendence confuses what lies below the personal with what lies beyond it. That is a direct challenge to the prospective half of Jacoby’s reading, though Jacoby’s own distinction between regressive and prospective longing partly anticipates it.

A sociological reading competes with the archetypal one. Alois Hahn (1976), whom Jacoby discusses, argued that a society’s images of paradise mirror what it lacks, so that a desert people imagine plentiful water, and that modern societies keep such images only by reworking them symbolically. Jacoby accepts the compensation but rejects the reworking: on his view the symbolic dimension is present in the image from the start (pp. 10–12). Finally, the book’s chapters on maternal behaviour, women’s liberation and motherhood and career make the mother decisive for whether infancy tastes of paradise or hell, a weighting open to the criticism of the archetypal feminine summarised under the Great Mother.

Empirical status

None. No study has tested paradise as an archetype, and no instrument measures it. The nearest mainstream research is on nostalgia, the experience from which Jacoby starts. Wildschut, Sedikides, Arndt and Routledge (2006) found across seven studies that nostalgic memories usually centre on the self among close others, carry more positive than negative feeling, and strengthen social bonds and positive self-regard. That treats nostalgia as an ordinary, often useful emotion and says nothing about an inherited image. Infancy research also bears on the developmental claim: Stern (1985) found no evidence of an initial undifferentiated phase, which removes the literal basis for an infant paradise while leaving the myth untouched.

Appearances

Jacoby’s own examples run across religion and literature: the Garden of Eden and Hesiod’s golden race; the Persian Garden of Yima and the Indian Mount Meru, both paradises on a world mountain; the Zuni afterlife under a lake; the Blessed Isles, the Lotus Land of effortless food and Robinson Crusoe’s island (p. 212); Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and the negative utopias of Huxley and Orwell (pp. 212–214); Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), Schiller and Kant on the fall as humanity’s coming of age (pp. 214–215); the colony at Monte Verità above Ascona and Rousseau’s natural man (pp. 3–4); and the travel agent’s and the shopping centre’s “paradise” (p. 214). Eliade’s shamans, ascending the world tree to restore communication with heaven, are his archaic case (pp. 205–206). In every instance “paradise” is a reading Jacoby brings to the material, and many of the works were written with Genesis or Hesiod in mind rather than with any psychology of the image.

Sources

• Jacoby, M. (1980). Sehnsucht nach dem Paradies: Tiefenpsychologische Umkreisung eines Urbilds. A. Bonz, Fellbach. ISBN 978-3-87089-300-2.
• Jacoby, M. (1985). Longing for Paradise: Psychological Perspectives on an Archetype (M. Jacoby, Trans.). Sigo Press. Reissued as Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts 116, Inner City Books, 2006. ISBN 978-1-894574-17-4. Preface; pp. 6–12, 18–27, 43–45, 177–178, 205–215.
• Neumann, E. (1949). The Origins and History of Consciousness (R. F. C. Hull, Trans., 1954). Princeton Classics ed., 2014. ISBN 978-0-691-16359-8. P. 15; pp. 114–115 as quoted in Jacoby (1985), p. 25.
• Jung, C. G. (1951). Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self. CW 9ii ¶372–373.
• Eliade, M. (1957). Myths, Dreams and Mysteries (P. Mairet, Trans., 1960). Harper Torchbooks. ISBN 978-0-06-131943-3.
• Edinger, E. F. (1972). Ego and Archetype. Putnam, for the C. G. Jung Foundation; Shambhala ed., 1992. ISBN 978-0-87773-576-2. Chapter 1, pp. 7–8.
• Fordham, M. (1979). The self as an imaginative construct. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 24(1), 18–30. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1465-5922.1979.00018.x
• Wilber, K. (1980). The Atman Project: A Transpersonal View of Human Development. Theosophical Publishing House. ISBN 978-0-8356-0532-8. Preface.
• Wildschut, T., Sedikides, C., Arndt, J., & Routledge, C. (2006). Nostalgia: Content, triggers, functions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91(5), 975–993. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.91.5.975
• Stern, D. N. (1985). The Interpersonal World of the Infant. Basic Books; Karnac ed., 1998. ISBN 978-1-85575-200-9. Chapter 1.
• Genesis 2–3. King James Version. Project Gutenberg #10.
• Hesiod. Works and Days, ll. 109–126 (H. G. Evelyn-White, Trans., 1914). Project Gutenberg #348.
• More, T. (1516). Utopia. Project Gutenberg #2130.
• Milton, J. (1667). Paradise Lost. Project Gutenberg #26.