Two Essays on Analytical Psychology Essay 2 Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious

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Two Essays on Analytical Psychology Essay 2 Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious

Author: Carl G. Jung Publisher: New Jersey, NJ: Princeton University Press. Publish Date: 1956 Review Date: Status:💥

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PART ONE ️

THE EFFECTS OF THE UNCONSCIOUS UPON CONSCIOUSNESS

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III

THE PERSONA AS A SEGMENT OF THE COLLECTIVE PSYCHE

205

in the analysis of the personal unconscious the first things to be added to consciousness are the personal contents, and I suggested that these contents, which have been repressed but are capable of becoming conscious, should be called the personal unconscious. I also showed that to annex the deeper layers of the unconscious, which I have called the collective unconscious, produces an enlargement of the personality leading to the state of inflation. This state is reached by simply continuing the analytical work,

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By continuing the analysis we add to the personal consciousness certain fundamental, general, and impersonal characteristics of humanity, thereby bringing about the inflation1 I have just described, which might be regarded as one of the unpleasant consequences of becoming fully conscious.

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1 This phenomenon, which results from the extension of consciousness, is in no sense specific to analytical treatment. It occurs whenever people are overpowered by knowledge or by some new realization. “Knowledge puffeth up,” Paul writes to the Corinthians, for the new knowledge had turned the heads of many, as indeed constantly happens. The inflation has nothing to do with the kind of knowledge, but simply and solely with the fact that any new knowledge can so seize hold of a weak head that he no longer sees and hears anything else. He is hypnotized by it, and instantly believes he has solved the riddle of the universe. But that is equivalent to almighty self-conceit. This process is such a general

205

[244] From this point of view the conscious personality is a more or less arbitrary segment of the collective psyche. It consists in a sum of psychic facts that are felt to be personal. The attribute “personal” means: pertaining exclusively to this particular person.

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[245] This arbitrary segment of collective psyche—often fashioned with considerable pains—I have called the persona. The term persona is really a very appropriate expression for this, for originally it meant the mask once worn by actors to indicate the role they played.

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If we endeavour to draw a precise distinction between what psychic material should be considered personal, and what impersonal, we soon find ourselves in the greatest dilemma, for by definition we have to say of the persona’s contents what we have said of the impersonal unconscious, namely, that it is collective. It is only because the persona represents a more or less arbitrary and fortuitous segment of the collective psyche that we can make the mistake of regarding it in toto as something individual. It is, as its name implies, only a mask of the collective psyche, a mask that feigns individuality, making others and oneself believe that one is individual, whereas one is simply acting a role through which the collective psyche speaks.

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[246] When we analyse the persona we strip off the mask, and discover that what seemed to be individual is at bottom collective; in other words, that the persona was only a mask of the collective psyche. Fundamentally the persona is nothing real: it is a compromise between individual and society as to what a man should appear to be. He takes a name, earns a title, exercises a function, he is this or that. In a certain sense all this is real, yet in relation to the essential individuality of the person concerned it is only a secondary reality, a compromise formation, in making which others often have a greater share than he. The persona is a semblance, a two-dimensional reality, to give it a nickname.

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[247] It would be wrong to leave the matter as it stands without at the same time recognizing that there is, after all, something individual in the peculiar choice and delineation of the persona, and that despite the exclusive identity of the ego-consciousness with the persona the unconscious self, one’s real individuality, is always present and makes itself felt indirectly if not directly. Although the ego-consciousness is at first identical with the persona—that compromise role in which we parade before the community—yet the unconscious self can never be repressed to the point of extinction. Its influence is chiefly manifest in the special nature of the contrasting and compensating contents of the unconscious. The purely personal attitude of the conscious mind evokes reactions on the part of the unconscious, and these, together with personal repressions, contain the seeds of individual development in the guise of collective fantasies. Through the analysis of the personal unconscious, the conscious mind becomes suffused with collective material which brings with it the elements of individuality.

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NEGATIVE ATTEMPTS TO FREE THE INDIVIDUALITY FROM THE COLLECTIVE PSYCHE

ON THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

PSYCHOANALYSIS

III

THE OTHER POINT OF VIEW: THE WILL TO POWER

man also has a shadow-side to him, consisting not just of little weaknesses and foibles, but of a positively demonic dynamism. The individual seldom knows anything of this; to him, as an individual, it is incredible that he should ever in any circumstances go beyond himself. But let these harmless creatures form a mass, and there emerges a raging monster; and each individual is only one tiny cell in the monster’s body, so that for better or worse he must accompany it on its bloody rampages and even assist it to the utmost. Having a dark suspicion of these grim possibilities, man turns a blind eye to the shadow-side of human nature.

A dim premonition tells us that we cannot be whole without this negative side, that we have a body which, like all bodies, casts a shadow, and that if we deny this body we cease to be three-dimensional and become flat and without substance. Yet this body is a beast with a beast’s soul, an organism that gives unquestioning obedience to instinct. To unite oneself with this shadow is to say yes to instinct, to that formidable dynamism lurking in the background.

From this the ascetic morality of Christianity wishes to free us, but at the risk of disorganizing man’s animal nature at the deepest level.

Has anyone made clear to himself what that means—a yea-saying to instinct? That was what Nietzsche desired and taught, and he was in deadly earnest. With a rare passion he sacrificed himself, his whole life, to the idea of the Superman—to the idea of the man who through obedience to instinct transcends himself.

And what was the course of that life? It was as Nietzsche himself prophesied in Zarathustra, in that foreboding vision of the fatal fall of the rope-dancer, the man who would not be “surpassed.” To the dying rope-dancer Zarathustra says: “Thy soul will sooner be dead than thy body!” and later the dwarf says to Zarathustra, “O Zarathustra, stone of wisdom! High thou flingest thyself, but every stone that is flung must fall! Condemned to thyself and to thine own stoning: O Zarathustra, far indeed thou flingest the stone—but upon thyself will it fall.” And when he cried his “Ecce Homo” over himself, again it was too late, as once before when this saying was uttered, and the crucifixion of the soul began before the body was dead.

We forget that this is only one of the possible directions of instinct. There exists not only the instinct for the preservation of the species, but also the instinct of self-preservation.

It is of this last instinct, the will to power, that Nietzsche obviously speaks. Whatever else is instinctual only follows, for him, in the train of the will to power.

From the standpoint of Freud’s sexual psychology, this is an error of the most glaring kind, a misconception of biology, the bungling of a decadent neurotic. For it is a very simple matter for any adherent of sexual psychology to prove that everything lofty and heroic in Nietzsche’s view of life and the world is nothing but a consequence of the repression and misunderstanding of that other instinct which this psychology regards as fundamental.

The case of Nietzsche shows, on the one hand, the consequences of neurotic one-sidedness, and, on the other hand, the dangers that lurk in this leap beyond Christianity. Nietzsche undoubtedly felt the Christian denial of animal nature very deeply indeed, and therefore he sought a higher human wholeness beyond good and evil. But he who seriously criticizes the basic attitudes of Christianity also forfeits the protection which these bestow upon him. He delivers himself up unresistingly to the animal psyche. That is the moment of Dionysian frenzy, the overwhelming manifestation of the “blond beast,”1 which seizes the unsuspecting soul with nameless shudderings. The seizure transforms him into a hero or into a godlike being, a superhuman entity. He rightly feels himself “six thousand feet beyond good and evil.”

The psychological observer knows this state as “identification with the shadow,” a phenomenon which occurs with great regularity at such moments of collision with the unconscious. The only thing that helps here is cautious self-criticism. Firstly and before all else, it is exceedingly unlikely that one has just discovered a world-shattering truth, for such things happen extremely seldom in the world’s history. Secondly, one must carefully inquire whether something similar might not have happened elsewhere—for instance Nietzsche, as a philologist, could have adduced a few obvious classical parallels which would certainly have calmed his mind. Thirdly, one must reflect that a Dionysian experience may well be nothing more than a relapse into a pagan form of religion, so that in reality nothing new is discovered and the same story only repeats itself from the beginning. Fourthly, one cannot avoid foreseeing that this joyful intensification of mood to heroic and godlike heights is dead certain to be followed by an equally deep plunge into the abyss.

These considerations would put one in a position of advantage: the whole extravaganza could then be reduced to the proportions of a somewhat exhausting mountaineering expedition, to which succeed the eternal commonplaces of day. Just as every stream seeks the valley and the broad river that hastens towards the flatlands, so life not only flows along in commonplaces, but makes everything else commonplace. The uncommon, if it is not to end in catastrophe, may steal in alongside the commonplace, but not often.

If heroism becomes chronic, it ends in a cramp, and the cramp leads to catastrophe or to neurosis or both. Nietzsche got stuck in a state of high tension. But with this ecstasy he could just as well have borne up under Christianity. Not that this answers the question of the animal psyche in the least—for an ecstatic animal is a monstrosity. An animal fulfils the law of its own life, neither more nor less. We can call it obedient and “good.” But the ecstatic by-passes the law of his own life and behaves, from the point of view of nature, improperly.

This impropriety is the exclusive prerogative of man, whose consciousness and free will can occasionally loose themselves contra naturam from their roots in animal nature. It is the indispensable foundation of all culture, but also of spiritual sickness if exaggerated. Man can suffer only a certain amount of culture without injury. The endless dilemma of culture and nature is always a question of too much or too little, never of either-or.

The case of Nietzsche faces us with the question: What did the collision with the shadow, namely the will to power, reveal to him? Is it to be regarded as something bogus, a symptom of repression? Is the will to power genuine or merely secondary? If the conflict with the shadow had let loose a flood of sexual fantasies, the matter would be perfectly clear; but it happened otherwise. The “Kern des Pudels” was not Eros but the power of the ego. From this we would have to conclude that what was repressed was not Eros but the will to power. There is in my opinion no ground for the assumption that Eros is genuine and the will to power bogus. The will to power is surely just as mighty a daemon as Eros, and just as old and original.

A life like Nietzsche’s, lived to its fatal end with rare consistency in accordance with the underlying instinct for power, cannot simply be explained away as bogus. Otherwise one would make oneself guilty of the same unfair judgment that Nietzsche passed on his polar opposite, Wagner: “Everything about him is false. What is genuine is hidden or decorated. He is an actor, in every good and bad sense of the word.” Why this prejudice? Because Wagner embodies that other elemental urge which Nietzsche overlooked, and upon which Freud’s psychology is built.

If we inquire whether Freud knew of that other instinct, the urge to power, we find that he conceived it under the name of “ego-instinct.” But these “ego-instincts” occupy a rather pokey little corner in his psychology compared with the broad, all too broad, development of the sexual factor. In reality human nature bears the burden of a terrible and unending conflict between the principle of the ego and the principle of instinct: the ego all barriers and restraint, instinct limitless, and both principles of equal might. In a certain sense man may count himself happy that he is “conscious only of the single urge,” and therefore it is only prudent to guard against ever knowing the other.

But if he does learn to know the other, it is all up with him: he then enters upon the Faustian conflict. In the first part of Faust Goethe has shown us what it means to accept instinct and in the second part what it means to accept the ego and its weird unconscious world. All that is insignificant, paltry, and cowardly in us cowers and shrinks from this acceptance—and there is an excellent pretext for this: we discover that the “other” in us is indeed “another,” a real man, who actually thinks, does, feels, and desires all the things that are despicable and odious.

In this way we can seize hold of the bogey and declare war on him to our satisfaction. Hence those chronic idiosyncrasies of which the history of morals has preserved some fine examples. A particularly transparent example is that already cited—”Nietzsche contra Wagner, contra Paul,” etc. But daily life abounds in such cases. By this ingenious device a man may save himself from the Faustian catastrophe, before which his courage and his strength might well fail him.

A whole man, however, knows that his bitterest foe, or indeed a host of enemies, does not equal that one worst adversary, the “other self” who dwells in his bosom. Nietzsche had Wagner in himself, and that is why he envied him Parsifal; but, what was worse, he, Saul, also had Paul in him. Therefore Nietzsche became one stigmatized by the spirit; like Saul he had to experience Christification, when the “other” whispered the “Ecce Homo” in his ear. Which of them “broke down before the cross”—Wagner or Nietzsche?

Fate willed it that one of Freud’s earliest disciples, Alfred Adler, should formulate a view of neurosis2 based exclusively on the power principle. It is of no little interest, indeed singularly fascinating, to see how utterly different the same things look when viewed in a contrary light. To take the main contrast first: with Freud everything follows from antecedent circumstances according to a rigorous causality, with Adler everything is a teleological “arrangement.” Here is a simple example: A young woman begins to have attacks of anxiety. At night she wakes up from a nightmare with a blood-curdling cry, is scarcely able to calm herself, clings to her husband and implores him not to leave her, demanding assurance that he really loves her, etc. Gradually a nervous asthma develops, the attacks also coming on during the day.

THE PERSONAL AND THE COLLECTIVE (OR TRANSPERSONAL) UNCONSCIOUS

“primordial” image belonging not to the domain of personal memory but to the secrets of the mental history of mankind.

There are present in every individual, besides his personal memories, the great “primordial” images, as Jacob Burckhardt once aptly called them, the inherited possibilities of human imagination as it was from time immemorial. The fact of this inheritance explains the truly amazing phenomenon that certain motifs from myths and legends repeat themselves the world over in identical forms. It also explains why it is that our mental patients can reproduce exactly the same images and associations that are known to us from the old texts.

a deeper layer of the unconscious where the primordial images common to humanity lie sleeping. I have called these images or motifs “archetypes,” also “dominants” of the unconscious.

This discovery means another step forward in our understanding: the recognition, that is, of two layers in the unconscious. We have to distinguish between a personal unconscious and an impersonal or transpersonal unconscious. We speak of the latter also as the collective unconscious,4 because it is detached from anything personal and is common to all men, since its contents can be found everywhere, which is naturally not the case with the personal contents.

The personal unconscious contains lost memories, painful ideas that are repressed (i.e., forgotten on purpose), subliminal perceptions, by which are meant sense-perceptions that were not strong enough to reach consciousness, and finally, contents that are not yet ripe for consciousness. It corresponds to the figure of the shadow so frequently met with in dreams.5

as can easily be seen in those philosophical or Gnostic systems which rely on perception of the unconscious as the source of knowledge. The idea of angels, archangels, “principalities and powers” in St. Paul, the archons of the Gnostics, the heavenly hierarchy of Dionysius the Areopagite, all come from the perception of the relative autonomy of the archetypes.

[104] The primordial images are the most ancient and the most universal “thought-forms” of humanity. They are as much feelings as thoughts; indeed, they lead their own independent life rather in the manner of part-souls,6

We have now found the object which the libido chooses when it is freed from the personal, infantile form of transference. It follows its own gradient down into the depths of the unconscious, and there activates what has lain slumbering from the beginning. It has discovered the hidden treasure upon which mankind ever and anon has drawn, and from which it has raised up its gods and demons, and all those potent and mighty thoughts without which man ceases to be man.

the idea of the conservation of energy. Robert Mayer, the real creator of this idea,

I have often been asked where the archetypes or primordial images come from. It seems to me that their origin can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity.

One of the commonest and at the same time most impressive experiences is the apparent movement of the sun every day. We certainly cannot discover anything of the kind in the unconscious, so far as the known physical process is concerned. What we do find, on the other hand, is the myth of the sun-hero in all its countless variations. It is this myth, and not the physical process, that forms the sun archetype. The same can be said of the phases of the moon.

The archetype is a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas. Hence it seems as though what is impressed upon the unconscious were exclusively the subjective fantasy-ideas aroused by the physical process. We may therefore assume that the archetypes are recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions.11

Naturally this assumption only pushes the problem further back without solving it. There is nothing to prevent us from assuming that certain archetypes exist even in animals, that they are grounded in the peculiarities of the living organism itself and are therefore direct expressions of life whose nature cannot be further explained.

Not only are the archetypes, apparently, impressions of ever-repeated typical experiences, but, at the same time, they behave empirically like agents that tend towards the repetition of these same experiences. For when an archetype appears in a dream, in a fantasy, or in life, it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or a fascinating effect, or impels to action.

The images contain not only all the fine and good things that humanity has ever thought and felt, but the worst infamies and devilries of which men have been capable. Owing to their specific energy—for they behave like highly charged autonomous centres of power—they exert a fascinating and possessive influence upon the conscious mind and can thus produce extensive alterations in the subject. One can see this in religious conversions, in cases of influence by suggestion, and particularly at the onset of certain forms of schizophrenia.12

the characteristic effect of the archetype: it seizes hold of the psyche with a kind of primeval force and compels it to transgress the bounds of humanity. It causes exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude (inflation), loss of free will, delusion, and enthusiasm in good and evil alike. This is the reason why men have always needed demons and cannot live without gods,

The idea of God is an absolutely necessary psychological function of an irrational nature, which has nothing whatever to do with the question of God’s existence. The human intellect can never answer this question, still less give any proof of God.

Moreover such proof is superfluous, for the idea of an all-powerful divine Being is present everywhere, unconsciously if not consciously, because it is an archetype. There is in the psyche some superior power, and if it is not consciously a god, it is the “belly” at least, in St. Paul’s words.

I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously; for, if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropriate and stupid such as only an “enlightened” intellect could hatch forth.

Our intellect has long known that we can form no proper idea of God, much less picture to ourselves in what manner he really exists, if at all. The existence of God is once and for all an unanswerable question. The consensus gentium has been talking of gods for aeons and will still be talking of them aeons hence. No matter how beautiful and perfect man may believe his reason to be, he can always be certain that it is only one of the possible mental functions, and covers only that one side of the phenomenal world which corresponds to it.

But the irrational, that which is not agreeable to reason, rings it about on all sides. And the irrational is likewise a psychological function—in a word, it is the collective unconscious; whereas the rational is essentially tied to the conscious mind.

The conscious mind must have reason, firstly to discover some order in the chaos of disorderly individual events occurring in the world, and secondly to create order, at least in human affairs. We are moved by the laudable and useful ambition to extirpate the chaos of the irrational both within and without to the best of our ability. Apparently the process has gone pretty far. As a mental patient once told me: “Doctor, last night I disinfected the whole heavens with bichloride of mercury, but I found no God.” Something of the sort has happened to us as well.

Old Heraclitus, who was indeed a very great sage, discovered the most marvellous of all psychological laws: the regulative function of opposites. He called it enantiodromia, a running contrariwise, by which he meant that sooner or later everything runs into its opposite.

Thus the rational attitude of culture necessarily runs into its opposite, namely the irrational devastation of culture.13 We should never identify ourselves with reason, for man is not and never will be a creature of reason alone, a fact to be noted by all pedantic culture-mongers. The irrational cannot be and must not be extirpated. The gods cannot and must not die.

I said just now that there seems to be something, a kind of superior power, in the human psyche, and that if this is not the idea of God, then it is the “belly.” I wanted to express the fact that one or other basic instinct, or complex of ideas, will invariably concentrate upon itself the greatest sum of psychic energy and thus force the ego into its service. As a rule the ego is drawn into this focus of energy so powerfully that it identifies with it and thinks it desires and needs nothing further. In this way a craze develops, a monomania or possession, an acute one-sidedness which most seriously imperils the psychic equilibrium.

Without doubt the capacity for such one-sidedness is the secret of success—of a sort, for which reason our civilization assiduously strives to foster it. The passion, the piling up of energy in these monomanias, is what the ancients called a “god,” and in common speech we still do the same. Do we not say, “He makes a god of this or that”? A man thinks that he wills and chooses, and does not notice that he is already possessed, that his interest has become the master, arrogating all power to itself. Such interests are indeed gods of a kind which, once recognized by the many, gradually form a “church” and gather a herd of believers about them. This we then call an “organization.” It is followed by a disorganizing reaction which aims to drive out the devil with Beelzebub. The enantiodromia that always threatens when a movement attains to undisputed power offers no solution of the problem, for it is just as blind in its disorganization as it was in its organization.

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The only person who escapes the grim law of enantiodromia is the man who knows how to separate himself from the unconscious, not by repressing it—for then it simply attacks him from the rear—but by putting it clearly before him as that which he is not.

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The patient must learn to differentiate what is ego and what is non-ego, i.e., collective psyche. In this way he finds the material to which he will henceforth have to accommodate himself. His energy, until now laid up in unserviceable and pathological forms, has come into its proper sphere. It is essential, in differentiating the ego from the non-ego, that a man should be firmly rooted in his ego-function; that is, he must fulfil his duty to life, so as to be in every respect a viable member of the community. All that he neglects in this respect falls into the unconscious and reinforces its position, so that he is in danger of being swallowed up by it.

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But the penalties for this are heavy. As Synesius opined of old, it is just the “inspired soul” ( ) that becomes god and demon, and as such suffers the divine punishment of being torn asunder like Zagreus. This was what Nietzsche experienced at the onset of his malady. Enantiodromia means being torn asunder into pairs of opposites, which are the attributes of “the god” and hence also of the godlike man, who owes his godlikeness to overcoming his gods.

101

As soon as we speak of the collective unconscious we find ourselves in a sphere, and concerned with a problem, which is altogether precluded in the practical analysis of young people or of those who have remained infantile too long. Wherever the father and mother imagos have still to be overcome, wherever there is a little bit of life still to be conquered, which is the natural possession of the average man, then we had better make no mention of the collective unconscious and the problem of opposites.

101

But once the parental transferences and the youthful illusions have been mastered, or are at least ripe for mastery, then we must speak of these things. We are here outside the range of Freudian and Adlerian reductions; we are no longer concerned with how to remove the obstacles to a man’s profession, or to his marriage, or to anything that means a widening of his life, but are confronted with the task of finding a meaning that will enable him to continue living at all—a meaning more than blank resignation and mournful retrospect.

102

Our life is like the course of the sun. In the morning it gains continually in strength until it reaches the zenith-heat of high noon. Then comes the enantiodromia: the steady forward movement no longer denotes an increase, but a decrease, in strength. Thus our task in handling a young person is different from the task of handling an older person. In the former case, it is enough to clear away all the obstacles that hinder expansion and ascent; in the latter, we must nurture everything that assists the descent.

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An inexperienced youth thinks one can let the old people go, because not much more can happen to them anyway: they have their lives behind them and are no better than petrified pillars of the past. But it is a great mistake to suppose that the meaning of life is exhausted with the period of youth and expansion; that, for example, a woman who has passed the menopause is “finished.” The afternoon of life is just as full of meaning as the morning; only, its meaning and purpose are different.14

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Man has two aims: the first is the natural aim, the begetting of children and the business of protecting the brood; to this belongs the acquisition of money and social position. When this aim has been reached a new phase begins: the cultural aim. For the attainment of the former we have the help of nature and, on top of that, education; for the attainment of the latter, little or nothing helps.

102

Often, indeed, a false ambition survives, in that an old man wants to be a youth again, or at least feels he must behave like one, although in his heart he can no longer make believe. This is what makes the transition from the natural to the cultural phase so terribly difficult and bitter for many people; they cling to the illusion of youth or to their children, hoping to salvage in this way a last little scrap of youth.

102

One sees it especially in mothers, who find their sole meaning in their children and imagine they will sink into a bottomless void when they have to give them up. No wonder that many bad neuroses appear at the onset of life’s afternoon. It is a sort of second puberty, another “storm and stress” period, not infrequently accompanied by tempests of passion—the “dangerous age.”

102

But the problems that crop up at this age are no longer to be solved by the old recipes: the hand of this clock cannot be put back. What youth found and must find outside, the man of life’s afternoon must find within himself. Here we face new problems which often cause the doctor no light headache.

103

The transition from morning to afternoon means a revaluation of the earlier values. There comes the urgent need to appreciate the value of the opposite of our former ideals, to perceive the error in our former convictions, to recognize the untruth in our former truth, and to feel how much antagonism and even hatred lay in what, until now, had passed for love.

103

Not a few of those who are drawn into the conflict of opposites jettison everything that had previously seemed to them good and worth striving for; they try to live in complete opposition to their former ego. Changes of profession, divorces, religious convulsions, apostasies of every description, are the symptoms of this swing over to the opposite. The snag about a radical conversion into one’s opposite is that one’s former life suffers repression and thus produces just as unbalanced a state as existed before, when the counterparts of the conscious virtues and values were still repressed and unconscious. Just as before, perhaps, neurotic disorders arose because the opposing fantasies were unconscious, so now other disorders arise through the repression of former idols.

103

It is of course a fundamental mistake to imagine that when we see the non-value in a value or the untruth in a truth, the value or the truth ceases to exist. It has only become relative. Everything human is relative, because everything rests on an inner polarity; for everything is a phenomenon of energy. Energy necessarily depends on a pre-existing polarity, without which there could be no energy. There must always be high and low, hot and cold, etc., so that the equilibrating process—which is energy—can take place.

103

Therefore the tendency to deny all previous values in favour of their opposites is just as much of an exaggeration as the earlier one-sidedness. And in so far as it is a question of rejecting universally accepted and indubitable values, the result is a fatal loss. One who acts in this way empties himself out with his values, as Nietzsche has already said.

104

The point is not conversion into the opposite but conservation of previous values together with recognition of their opposites. Naturally this means conflict and self-division. It is understandable enough that one should shrink from it, philosophically as well as morally; hence the alternative sought, more often than conversion into the opposite, is a convulsive stiffening of the previous attitude. It must be admitted that, in the case of elderly men, this is a phenomenon of no little merit, however disagreeable it may be: at least they do not become renegades, they remain upright, they do not fall into muddle-headedness nor yet into the mud; they are no defaulters, but are merely dead wood or, to put it more politely, pillars of the past.

104

But the accompanying symptoms, the rigidity, the narrow-mindedness, the stand-offishness of these laudatores temporis acti are unpleasant, not to say harmful; for their method of espousing a truth or any other value is so inflexible and violent that their unmannerliness repels more than the truth attracts, so that the result is the opposite of the intended good.

104

The fundamental cause of their rigidity is fear of the problem of opposites: they have a foreboding and secret dread of the “sinister brother of Medardus.” Therefore there must be only one truth and one guiding principle of action, and that must be absolute; otherwise it affords no protection against the impending disaster, which is sensed everywhere save in themselves.

104

But actually the most dangerous revolutionary is within ourselves, and all must realize this who wish to pass over safely into the second half of life. Certainly this means exchanging the apparent security we have so far enjoyed for a condition of insecurity, of internal division, of contradictory convictions. The worst feature of all is that there appears to be no way out of this condition. Tertium non datur, says logic—there is no middle way.

105

The practical necessities of treatment have therefore forced us to look for ways and means that might lead out of this intolerable situation. Whenever a man is confronted by an apparently insurmountable obstacle, he draws back: he makes what is technically called a regression. He goes back to the times when he found himself in similar situations, and he tries to apply again the means that helped him then. But what helped in youth is of no use in age. What good did it do that American business man to return to his former position? It simply wouldn’t work. So the regression continues right back into childhood (hence the childishness of many elderly neurotics) and ends up in the time before childhood. That may sound strange, but in point of fact it is not only logical but altogether possible.

106

We mentioned earlier that the unconscious contains, as it were, two layers: the personal and the collective. The personal layer ends at the earliest memories of infancy, but the collective layer comprises the pre-infantile period, that is, the residues of ancestral life. Whereas the memory-images of the personal unconscious are, as it were, filled out, because they are images personally experienced by the individual, the archetypes of the collective unconscious are not filled out because they are forms not personally experienced. When, on the other hand, psychic energy regresses, going beyond even the period of early infancy, and breaks into the legacy of ancestral life, the mythological images are awakened: these are the archetypes.15

106

An interior spiritual world whose existence we never suspected opens out and displays contents which seem to stand in sharpest contrast to all our former ideas. These images are so intense that it is quite understandable why millions of cultivated persons should be taken in by theosophy and anthroposophy. This happens simply because such modern gnostic systems meet the need for expressing and formulating the wordless occurrences going on within ourselves better than any of the existing forms of Christianity, not excepting Catholicism. The latter is certainly able to express, far more comprehensively than Protestantism, the facts in question through its dogma and ritual symbolism.

106

But neither in the past nor in the present has even Catholicism attained anything like the richness of the old pagan symbolism, which is why this symbolism persisted far into Christianity and then gradually went underground, forming currents that, from the early Middle Ages to modern times, have never quite lost their vitality. To a large extent they vanished from the surface; but, changing their form, they come back again to compensate the one-sidedness of our conscious mind with its modern orientation.16

106

Our consciousness is so saturated with Christianity, so utterly moulded by it, that the unconscious counter-position can discover no foothold there, for the simple reason that it seems too much the antithesis of our ruling ideas. The more one-sidedly, rigidly, and absolutely the one position is held, the more aggressive, hostile, and incompatible will the other become, so that at first sight there would seem to be little prospect of reconciling the two.

106

But once the conscious mind admits at least the relative validity of all human opinion, then the opposition loses something of its irreconcilable character. In the meantime the conflict casts round for appropriate expression in, for instance, the oriental religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism. The syncretism of theosophy goes a long way towards meeting this need, and that explains its numerous successes.

107

Through these periphrastic interpretations the authentic experience is replaced by images and words borrowed from a foreign source, and by views, ideas, and forms that have not grown on our soil and have no ties with our hearts, but only with our heads. Indeed, not even our thought can clearly grasp them, because it never invented them. It is a case of stolen goods that bring no prosperity. Such substitutes make men shadowy and unreal; they put empty words in the place of living realities, and slip out of the painful tension of opposites into a wan, two-dimensional, phantasmal world where everything vital and creative withers and dies.

108

The wordless occurrences which are called forth by regression to the pre-infantile period need no substitutes; they demand to be individually shaped in and by each man’s life and work. They are images sprung from the life, the joys and sorrows, of our ancestors; and to life they seek to return, not in experience only, but in deed. Because of their opposition to the conscious mind they cannot be translated straight into our world; hence a way must be found that can mediate between conscious and unconscious reality.

II. Anima and Animus

III. The Technique of Differentiation between the Ego and the Figures of the Unconscious

109

THE SYNTHETIC OR CONSTRUCTIVE METHOD

109

The process of coming to terms with the unconscious is a true labour, a work which involves both action and suffering. It has been named the “transcendent function”1 because it represents a function based on real and “imaginary,” or rational and irrational, data, thus bridging the yawning gulf between conscious and unconscious. It is a natural process, a manifestation of the energy that springs from the tension of opposites, and it consists in a series of fantasy-occurrences which appear spontaneously in dreams and visions.

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four functions

109

The natural process by which the opposites are united came to serve me as the model and basis for a method consisting essentially in this: everything that happens at the behest of nature, unconsciously and spontaneously, is deliberately summoned forth and integrated into the conscious mind and its outlook. Failure in many cases is due precisely to the fact that they lack the mental and spiritual equipment to master the events taking place in them. Here medical help must intervene in the form of a special method of treatment.

110

As we have seen, the theories discussed at the beginning of this book rest on an exclusively causal and reductive procedure which resolves the dream (or fantasy) into its memory components and the underlying instinctual processes. I have indicated above the justification as well as the limitation of this procedure. It breaks down at the point where the dream symbols can no longer be reduced to personal reminiscences or aspirations, that is, when the images of the collective unconscious begin to appear.

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ANIMA AND ANIMUS

🔮 The Cosmos

Two Essays on Analytical Psychology Essay 2 Relations Between the Ego and the Unconscious

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