"Man cannot stand a meaningless life." -- C.G. Jung
Strange objects have reportedly been seen flying, floating and, at least in one famous incident five centuries ago in Nuremberg, Germany, apparently fighting in our skies for thousands of years. Stunning eye-witness accounts of what happened one early morning above sixteenth-century Nuremberg on April 14, 1561, describe numerous multi-colored spherical "globes," disc-like "plates," blood-red "crosses," larger "rods" or cylindrical "tubes" containing round objects and one massive triangular or spear-shaped black object doing fierce aerial battle for more than an hour until some flew off "into the sun" while others crashed to earth in a cloud of smoke or "steam." Hallucination? Waking vision? If so, it was shared and attested to by many medieval Nuremberg residents that extraordinary day. (See two different artist's renderings around that time of what was witnessed and documented in the Nuremberg
Gazette above and below. Five years later, an almost identical incident allegedly took place in Basel, Switzerland.) While obviously one of the most dramatic and remarkable of such widely reported phenomena, the Nuremberg event is but one of countless sightings of similarly oddly shaped spherical, saucer-like, triangular and cylindrical objects over the past five-hundred years, sometimes by highly credible witnesses such as commercial or military pilots and police officers. What really is it that they are seeing?
In 1958, the year Swiss psychiatrist and depth psychologist
C.G. Jung celebrated his 83rd birthday three years before his death, he published a very controversial work about UFO's, at that time popularly referred to as "flying saucers." Later titled
Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (Princeton University Press, 1979), Jung's concern was less whether or not these UFO's objectively, physically or materially exist than with their subjective, phenomenological inner reality, psychological meaning and spiritual significance. (See
my prior posts on subjective and objective reality.) Jung's emphasis on our fundamental human need for meaning in the face of a seemingly meaningless universe is something he shared with existential analysts like Otto Rank, Viktor Frankl and Rollo May. Meaning and the problem of meaninglessness is one of the ultimate concerns of
existential psychotherapy. Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl felt that we all possess an innate, instinctual "will to meaning": an inherent need to make sense of life, to find some purpose. When this innate need is unmet or frustrated, when we find ourselves living in what Frankl called an "existential vacuum," despair, rage, depression and
embitterment ensue. (See my prior posts on anger disorder.) Indeed, Dr. Frankl proposed the following somewhat simplistic formula: D = S - M. Despair equals suffering without meaning. Meaning makes suffering more bearable. So naturally, we tend to seek meaning in life as much as possible. We want to make sense of the seemingly senseless. Atrribute meaning to the apparently absurd. Assign significance to the insignificant. Both Jung and Rank, unlike their mutual mentor, Sigmund Freud, believed we need meaningful illusions, myths or religious beliefs to improve or preserve mental health. Rollo May, in his last work,
The Cry for Myth (1991), clearly illustrates the vital psychological importance of myths that help give meaning to human existence. Soren Kierkegaard, a philosophical forerunner of existential therapy, felt that life is fundamentally meaningful, and that it is our task to discover that mysterious spiritual meaning. At the same time, like French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, existential therapy recognizes the possibility that life may be basically meaningless except to the extent we bravely imbue it with meaning. That life holds no hidden meaning other than that which we choose to give it. And that without the courageous capacity to tolerate life's partial or complete meaninglessness, we are, as Freud held regarding religious dogma, susceptible to believing almost anything in order to allay our anxiety about the unknown and satisfy our insatiable need for meaning.
Now, more than fifty years following the original publication of Jung's essay about the depth psychology of UFO's, this enigmatic mystery remains both vital and fascinating: If UFO's are objectively real, what does their persisting existence and presence on this planet signify? And if they are not real in any physical sense, mere mirages, misperceptions or misinterpretations, fantastic figments of our fertile and meaning-making imagination, what does this say about us? As Pablo Picasso put it, "Everything you can imagine is real." Could UFO's turn out to be phenomena of our own creation? Deeply embedded archetypal images stored in and stemming from what Jung called our "collective unconscious"? Of course, given the greatly enhanced ability today to capture and document (as well as fake using sophisticated computer programs like Photoshop) such sightings with video and cell phone cameras, and the cumulative collection of photographic and other evidence available, to totally deny their physical existence out of hand seems not merely skeptical, but somewhat naive and defensive. A solipsistic, hyper-psychological, one-sided explanation. On the other hand, their continued elusiveness, evasiveness, rarity and the lack of unequivocal validation requires, much like religion, a significant leap of faith to overcome the absence of irrefutable proof of their reality. Why do some enthusiastically take this leap of faith, while others refuse to do so? Gullibility? Hypersuggestibility? Psychopathology? Desperation for something otherworldly to believe in? And why do we so strongly feel the need to somehow identify and rationally explain these, by definition, unidentified and irrational phenomena? Is it simply human curiosity?
