ABSTRACT
In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung openly confesses that his confrontation with the unconscious persuasively convinced him of the objectivity of the psyche. It is closer, however, to the true spirit of Jung's experience, to its phenomenology, to speak about the autochthonous character of the psyche rather than its objectivity, because the latter term still carries the baggage of a Cartesian metaphysics which splits subject and object and leads to a psychology of projection. Jung' encounter with the figure of Philemon is a good example of the autochthonous character of psyche. A “pagan [who] brought with him an Egypto-Hellenistic atmosphere with a Gnostic coloration,” Philemon is not a projection of Jung's psyche; rather, he is an inhabitant of the land of soul. In ecology, autochthonous describes an indigenous plant or animal, and in its Greek origins the word contains the suffix “khthon” meaning earth. Thus, an “autokhthon” is “one sprung from the land itself” (Morris 1981: 89). Philemon, then, is indigenous to the psyche, one who from the earliest times belongs to the soil of the soul, part of the tribe of that country there before our time of colonization, that time of ego-consciousness when we have already taken possession of the soul. The soul is another country, as different from mind as it is from matter, and in this sense it makes perfect sense for Jung to say that Philemon “brought home to me the crucial insight that there are things in the psyche which I do not produce, which produce themselves and have their own life.” Philemon taught Jung a most significant and profound lesson when he said to him that he (Jung) mistakenly "treated thoughts as if [he] generated them,” and in contrast to this view Philemon said to Jung that “thoughts were like animals in the forest, or people in a room, or birds in the air.” He then added, “if you should see people in a room, you would not think that you had made those people or that you were responsible for them” (Jung 1965:183).
