Fasnacht

Fasnacht

A Jungian Psychoanalysis

In the documentary "Carl Jung The Wisdom of The Dream Vol 1 A Life of Dreams", there is a segment on Fasnacht, which festival Jung attended with his students, & in which documentary, through rare video interviews with Jung, his grandson son Dieter & several Jung-trained doctors of psychiatry, the psychologists offer a psychoanalysis of Fasnacht, a transcript from which reads "there is a 2ᶮᵈ entity, a 2ᶮᵈ psychic center in the human psyche…& it's interested in truth…psychological truth is revealed…in rituals like the annual Fasnacht…a Carnival of Truth…it tells us the truth, that the real depths of human psychology…[are] usually hidden…suddenly it breaks out..the truth…an eruption of the national unconscious revealing, perhaps, the true identity of the Swiss…Jung made the psychological observation that in daily life, in every culture, people wear a kind of mask, which he called our Persona…[which, as Jung explains, is] 'partially the result of the demands society has…it is a compromise with what one likes to be…or as one likes to appear…now, this is not the real personality…such a …performance of the persona…is quite alright as long as you know that you are not identical with the way in which you appear'…a ritual like Fasnacht allows the unconscious truth of the individual personality to emerge…at Fasnacht everyone is masked…in their masks they may insult their friends or colleagues by telling them the kinds of truth which for the rest of the year they might suppress…it is the opposite of the mask which we normally wear in order to take our place in the world…[Fasnacht] reflects a lost sense of connection to the environment…to Jung, such ritualized performance express the true primitive unconscious beneath the technocratic persona of Switzerland & of Basel…it’s the ancestral Spirit…the unconscious comes out…it is a reconnection with the…natural past… Fasnacht is an unconscious religion…Fasnacht gives expression to the unconscious truth of the Swiss psyche…unconscious religion is a theme which became prominent in Jung's ideas in later life…by the time Jung had completed his studies in Basel, he had himself experienced the reality of the unconscious psyche & the independent energy of dreams".

Fasnacht segment from start/stop time codes 19:43 to 31:10

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Opinion: The Fasnacht psychoanalysis may offer an insight to the recent strange Fasnacht-like Gotthard base tunnel opening ceremony performances.

Related: "Fasnacht, Carl Jung, The Trickster Archetype and Altered States of Consciousness".