Abaissement du niveau mental

The closer (one) approaches the (collective unconscious), the more (one) experiences what Janet calls an abaissement du niveau mental: your conscious autonomy begins to disappear, and you get more and more under the fascination of unconscious contents. Conscious autonomy loses its tension and its energy, and that energy reappears in the increased activity of unconscious contents. AP 82

It is a slackening of the tensity of consciousness, which might be compared to a low barometric reading, presaging bad weather.  The tonus has given way, and this is felt subjectively as listlessness, moroseness, and depression.  One no longer has any wish or courage to face the tasks of the day.  One feels like lead, because no part of one’s body seems willing to move, and this is due to the fact that one no longer has any disposable energy.  This well known phenomenon corresponds to the primitive’s loss of soul.  The listlessness and paralysis of will can go so far that the whole personality falls apart, so to speak, and consciousness loses its unity; the individual parts of the personality make themselves independent and thus escape from the control of the conscious mind, as in the case of anaesthetic areas or systematic amnesias.  The latter are well known as hysterical “loss of function” phenomena.  The medical term is analogous to the primitive loss of soul.   A&CU 120

Abaissement du niveau mental can be the result of physical and mental fatigue, bodily illness, violent emotions, and shock, of which the last has a particularly deleterious effect on one’s self-assurance.  The abaissement always has a restrictive influence on the personality as a whole.  It reduces one’s self-confidence and the spirit of enterprise, and, as a result of increasing ego-centricity, narrows the mental horizon.  In the end it may lead to the development of an essentially negative personality, which means that a falsification of the original personality has supervened.  A&CU 120

“Sleep, too, is an abaissement du niveau mental I which leads to more or less complete oblivion of the ego”   (BW page 403 – par 522)  - On THE Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia”. 

Presumably we are dreaming all the time, although we are not aware of it by day because consciousness is much too clear. But at night, when there is that abaissement du niveau mental, the dreams can break through and become visible. AP 87

"If the person doesn't listen to the demands of his own spiritual, and heart, life and insists on a certain program - you're going to have a schizophrenic crackup.  The person has put himself off centre.  The person has aligned themself with a programatic life, and it's not the one the body is interested in at all.  The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves.   Moyers 1 - 28m

At bottom we discover nothing new and unknown in the mentally ill; rather, we encounter the substratum of our own nature.  MDR 127 

There are far more people who are afraid of the unconscious than one would expect. They are even afraid of their own shadow. And when it comes to the anima and animus, this fear turns to panic. For the syzygy does indeed represent the psychic contents that irrupt into consciousness in a psychosis (most clearly of all in the paranoid forms of schizophrenia). AION 33