Patrick Harpur, Daimonic Reality:
Modern depth psychology came about because the daimons would no longer be ignored. They made themselves felt in neurotic symptoms, in obsessions and psychoses. Freud and his followers documented the complexes which cried out from within us with alien voices; Jung followed their call into the depths, beyond the personal, beyond even the human, to the world of archetypal psychological principles in which he saw the gods returning in a new guise. Freud could not follow him down. He feared the daimons of the unconscious, demonized them, warning Jung that he must set up a bulwark “against the black tide of mud” of “occultism.” But Jung dared to make his own journey into the collective unconscious and found there something altogether different, something — as we will see — unimaginable. Other schools of psychology became increasingly materialistic and reductive, treating the daimons as if they were purely physiological. Soul was reduced to mind, and mind to brain. The daimons were not so much demonized as medicalized. “The gods have become diseases,” Jung was fond of lamenting.
Why do we rarely hear of sightings of the elder folk here in the United States? The next time you see one of those poor souls taken up by the latest online obsession or some young person so bound by anxiety they can’t leave the house or a successful entrepreneur eating uppers just to keep going one more day or an older man so consumed with anger his kids can’t stand to be around him—perhaps that’s a sighting. Whatever is repressed returns as symptom.