While I have attempted to refrain from critical comment on Jung's ideas and attitude, it has probably become plain in the course of this book that I have a number of reservations about him. Anthony Storr confesses in the postscript to his own book on Jung: 'It is easy to lose patience with Jung, as I have myself at times'. He goes on to find fault with Jung's preoccupation with the occult, but says that he finds a great deal in Jung's psychology 'profoundly valuable'. I personally have no quarrel whatever with Jung's occultism, since it was all based on personal experience; but I feel extremely dubious about some of his purely psychological theories.
To describe Jung as a romantic is not, of course, in itself a criticism. A romantic is basically a person who feels that the world is full of hidden meanings -- that discovery and adventure lie around every corner. This seems to me a broader, and therefore truer, attitude than that of the pessimist who feels that human life is short, brutal and pointless. The romantic recognizes that the problem lies in our own limitations, in the narrowness of our senses. So when a romantic also happens to be a realist, he is likely to devote a great deal of his life to a search for meaning -- which is synonymous with self-transformation. Jung was such a person; the result is a remarkable body of work that can bear comparison with the oeuvre of any of the major figures of the nineteenth century.
But when a romantic denies strenuously that he is a romantic, the result is likely to be certain inner contradictions. Hegel, for example, tries to present his 'system' as if it sprang out of pure reason and logic; so he flings up a dense verbal smokescreen to make it sound academically respectable. Jung is seldom as obscure as Hegel, but the parallel holds good. Whenever he wishes to speak about something that touches his deepest convictions, he clears his throat and says: 'Speaking purely as a psychologist ... ' Storr points out that Freud has a great advantage over Jung because he writes so clearly and simply, as if he has nothing to hide. By comparison, Jung often seems to be trying to blind the reader with science.
Let us look more closely at Jung's development of the idea of the unconscious.
We have seen that, in the modern sense of the word, the notion was virtually invented by Freud. Freud had been studying with Charcot in Paris, and observed Charcot's remarkable demonstration of hypnosis. A person under hypnosis could be told, for example, that ten minutes after awakening, he would remove one of his shoes and place it on the table. In due course he would do this; and if asked why he had done it, would give some perfectly reasonable explanation. Clearly, the subject of the experiment was two persons, one of whom knew nothing about the other. And this could explain how a patient like the famous 'Anna O' could break off a conversation, climb a tree, come down again, and look astonished if the doctor asked her why she had climbed the tree, having no memory of her action. Freud concluded that the unconscious mind is far more powerful than the conscious mind, and that we are always doing things without really understanding their true motivations. Observation of his patients' 'transferences' to himself convinced Freud that the hidden motive is always sex. In Vienna around 1900, when sex was something respectable people never mentioned, this seemed highly plausible.
The problem with Freud's vision of man is that it is essentially passive. We are mere puppets in the hands of our unconscious minds. The surface of the mind may look calm enough, like a peaceful stretch of countryside with farms and orchards; under the surface there are tremendous forces that can produce earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Jung accepted this notion without question. But he was a romantic optimist by temperament, a man who regarded the universe as an exciting mystery into which, with luck, the poet and the scientist can obtain a few basic insights. So his line of attack on Freudian pessimism and 'reductionism' would have to begin from the notion that the mysterious underground forces are not as dangerous and menacing as Freud believed. He was the son of a clergyman, and his interest in St. Augustine and the early Church Fathers reveals that he believed that the experience of God and religion could not be reduced to disguised sexual impulses. He was a lover of literature, and he certainly did not believe that the states of mind induced by poetry are mere 'escapism'. His problem was to rescue these from Freud. We have seen that it was his reading of a book on mythology that gave him the idea of how this could be done. He invented a still deeper layer of the unconscious, containing the basic myths of mankind. To modern ears, this does not sound implausible. We know, for example, that certain finches were bred for generations on the Galapagos Islands, where they never saw a predator. But when their descendants were taken back to California, they reacted with instant alarm at the sight of a hawk. Obviously, the image of a hawk was somehow encoded in their genes -- or, as Jung would say, in the collective unconscious of the finch species. So why not similar images of heroes, gods, demons and so on in the human mind? The answer is: because it is hard to see any need for them. It mattered to the finch's survival to recognize a hawk. It is hard to see what difference it could make to a human being to think that the wind comes from a tube that hangs down from the sun ...
This is not, of course, to flatly deny Jung's idea of the archetypes. They may well be a reality. But we should understand clearly how Jung came to decide they existed. He had accepted the Freudian view of the unconscious as a vast and mysterious underground realm. So it was natural for him to extend the image, and to imagine descending deeper still, to depths on which he could stake his claim. It is significant that so many of Jung's dreams, from the childhood dream of the phallus on the throne, involve descending into a kind of underworld. And from Jung's 'discovery' of the collective unconscious, his life-task was clear and obvious: to try to map out something of its geography, and to try to find proofs of its existence in mythology and religion. Alchemy was ideal for his purpose, for its baffling documents can be interpreted like dreams. Jung believed that he was proceeding scientifically, but most Freudians remain convinced that he was inventing his own underground realm, rather as Tolkien invented Middle Earth. There is at least an element of truth in this view.
Now before Freud, the picture of the human psyche was simpler. The view implicit in the work of Janet, for example, is that a human being could be compared to an automobile, whose ego is the driver, and whose 'mind' is the engine hidden under the bonnet. But the fact that it is 'hidden' does not make it 'unconscious'. It is at most 'subconscious' -- lying just below consciousness. And just as a driver can find out a great deal about the engine by raising the bonnet, or simply observing closely what happens when he brakes, accelerates and changes gear, so human beings can learn a great deal about the workings of their own minds by introspection.
Of course, there are certain parts of the mind that could be called 'unconscious'. My brain contains every memory I have accumulated since birth, and this library is so enormous that we could never hope to bring it all back to consciousness. But there is nothing particularly mysterious about memory. I might, for example, go into a physics laboratory, and be shown the computer in which all the data of all past experiments is stored. I would not call this the 'unconscious mind' of the laboratory. And if there was another computer containing the results of experiments from all over the world, I would certainly not call it the collective unconscious. They are only computers.
How does neurosis arise? From childhood on, we are subjected to all kinds of fears and dangers. Some are real, some we imagine or exaggerate. Someone might tell me a shocking story about cruelty that engenders a permanently 'nasty feeling' about old houses or overgrown gardens. A bold, cheerful person will explore the world and realize that many of the fears were unwarranted. A timid, shy person may go through life with many childish fears and anxieties still unexorcized. He (or she) will be more likely to become subject to neurosis than the bolder spirit.
According to Janet, the basic condition for neurosis is the abaissement du niveau mental, or lowering of the mind threshold -- a phrase, incidentally, that Jung used throughout his life (so often, indeed, that there is a long entry devoted to it in the index of his collected works). We may recall that Janet believed psychological health to be a matter of 'psychological tension', a sense of motivation and purpose. If this is lowered, by boredom or illness or depression, it constitutes an abaissement du niveau mental, and the person may become a prey to fears and anxieties that would have seemed absurd when he felt healthier. We experience a lowering of our mental threshold during the night, and we are all familiar with the experience of waking in the early hours of the morning and beginning to worry about all kinds of things. This is a simple model of Janet's view of how neurosis works. Then there are further stages -- a narrowing of attention, which leads to a sense of monotony and a still further lowering of the mental threshold. There is a 'vicious circle' effect.
Fundamentally, our problem as living creatures is to adjust to life, and, if possible, to 'get on top of it'. We do this when we have a sense of purpose and motivation. The mind seems to possess an aspect that could be compared to a powerful spring, or to the string of a crossbow. When I am faced with some exciting challenge, I create mental energy by compressing the spring -- or, to use the other image, by pulling back the string of the crossbow. In this battle to 'get on top' of experience, my most valuable weapon is knowledge, particularly self-knowledge. A child is far more vulnerable than an adult because the child's knowledge of the world is so much smaller, and he can easily be intimidated by tales of danger and disaster.
Consider a case recounted by Jung in the fourth chapter of Psychology of the Unconscious. A highly successful American businessman had worked his way up from the bottom, with the result that he was rich enough to retire at 45. But in spite of a marvellous estate and every possible form of amusement, he began to feel at a loose end. He became a hypochondriac and a nervous wreck. He consulted a psychiatrist, who recognized that the problem was lack of work, and recommended him to return to business. The man obeyed, but found to his dismay that business now bored him. When he consulted Jung, he was a 'hopeless moral ruin'. Jung felt he could do nothing for him. 'A case so far advanced can only be cared for until death; it can hardly be cured.'
Jung interpreted this case in terms of 'enantiodromia' -- a powerful emotion turning into its opposite, like St. Paul's conversion on the road to Damascus. There were also traces, he said, of a mother fixation.
But Janet's theory provides a simpler and rather more satisfactory interpretation of the case. The businessman's psychological tension -- and his sense of being 'on top of' his experience -- was connected with his sense of purpose -- of becoming successful. When he became successful and retired, his purpose vanished and his psychological tension collapsed. There was a lowering of the mental threshold. He was suddenly the victim rather than the master of his experience. Like a man lying awake in the middle of the night, he became subject to all kinds of absurd worries; and, never having had to keep himself amused -- his career had always done it for him -- he slipped into a vicious circle of self-pity and discouragement. Going back to work was no answer, for he had worked to be successful, and he was successful. Besides, with his lowered mental threshold, work would be disagreeable -- like an invalid trying to plunge into cold water.
The theoretical solution of the problem would have been to utilize those characteristics of intelligence and ambition that had made him successful. If he could have been made to understand what had happened -- as Janet could have made him understand -- he would have realized that his salvation lay in breaking the vicious circle and seeking until he found one single subject or occupation that could arouse his interest. Above all, he would have to be made conscious that this was a problem that could be solved -- like a bad cold or a headache -- for raising the mental threshold depends on striking a spark of optimism, a conviction that something can be done. Jung's explanations about enantiodromia must have left him confused, bewildered and depressed -- as Freud's explanations about his mother fixation and Oedipus complex would also have done. By approaching the problem with an unnecessarily complicated explanation -- one that was, so to speak, too clever by a half -- Jung had lost all chance of curing the patient.
The same unnecessarily complicated approach can be seen in another of Jung's cases. A teenage girl of good family had fallen into a state of schizophrenia, refusing even to speak. When Jung finally coaxed her into speaking, he discovered that she lived constantly in a fantasy that she was on the moon. It was her task to protect the moon people from a vampire covered in feathers; but when she tried to attack the vampire, he threw off the feathers and revealed himself as a handsome man with whom she fell in love ...
Jung discovered that the girl had been seduced by her brother at the age of fifteen, and had later been sexually assaulted by a schoolmate -- presumably a lesbian. His own explanation was that incest has always been a royal prerogative, and the girl's collective unconscious knew this. So she retreated to the moon -- 'the mythic realm' -- and became alienated from the real world.
Jung tells us that he eventually convinced her that she had to leave the moon and return to earth. At her first attempt to abandon her fantasy world she had a relapse; but she became 'resigned to her fate', and eventually married and had children.
Here again, Janet's explanation would be simple. The incest (which she presumably permitted) filled her with a sense of guilt that made her blush whenever she had to look her parents or teachers in the eyes. The sexual assault by the schoolmate increased her sense that sex is frightening and disgusting, something to be regretted. An adolescent has enough problems of adjustment to physical changes without being burdened with fear and guilt. The girl was clearly of an introverted and imaginative disposition -- the kind who prefers reading or fantasizing to becoming involved in the real world. There was a lowering of the mental threshold, a vicious circle effect of fear and mistrust, and a loss of psychological tension. Her 'reality function' (another Janet concept) became enfeebled until she had no desire for contact with the real world, and retreated into a vivid fantasy. The story of the beautiful vampire reveals that her attitude to sex was by no means wholly negative; it strongly attracted as well as frightened her.
Here the cure was satisfactory because she happened to be female, and Jung could utilize the phenomenon of transference: a handsome young doctor trying to persuade her to return to earth. But the theories about incest and royalty and the mythic realm were totally irrelevant; they did not help Jung to solve the case, and add nothing to our understanding of it. They excite a definite feeling of 'sales resistance' in the reader -- that Jung was determined to drag in his mythic theories whether they fitted or not. This could explain why a surprising number of Jung's cases -- like the businessman, and Sir. Montague Norman -- ended in failure.
In fact, if psychology means understanding the mechanisms of the mind -- what Gurdjieff meant by 'understanding the machine' -- then Jung was not a particularly good psychologist. With his eyes fixed on his sonar gauges, looking for signs of what is going on in the black depths, he overlooks more straightforward mechanisms of neurosis. 'Enantiodromia', for example, seems to be an attempt to characterize what the Viennese psychiatrist Viktor Frankl later identified as 'the law of reverse effort' -- the fact that when we are anxious to do something well, we do it badly. (Frankl's original insight came when he heard about a school play in which a boy who stuttered badly was chosen to play the part of a stutterer -- and found that he spoke quite normally on stage.) But instead of recognizing its universal application, Jung has turned it into some deep psychic resistance that drives us to do the opposite of what we consciously desire: an altogether rarer phenomenon. The law of reverse effort affects all of us a dozen times a day because -- as Thomson Jay Hudson recognized -- we contain two people, and we are at our best when each one plays his own role, and does not interfere with the other. Consider a simple conundrum like: 'Brothers and sisters have I none, but this man's father is my father's son.' Some people find it impossible to work it out because the two people inside them get in one another's way and interfere with one another's efforts. As I write this page, one of the two persons inside me provides the 'insights', the other turns them into words, like a bricklayer and his assistant. If I am too anxious about the result, I strangle the insight. If I am too relaxed and confident, I may devote far too many words to some particular point. The two must try to fall into a comfortable rhythm that suits them both.
But their degree of cooperation depends on another factor. All creatures are partly mechanical; certain functions have been taken over by a kind of robot or automatic pilot. This robot not only drives my car; he arranges the words in my sentences. As a servant, he is indispensable. But if I go for a walk with my dogs, he becomes an unwelcome guest, for I would like to relax and enjoy the scenery, and my robot is still 'driving' me as he drives my car. The more complex my life is, the more efficient my robot needs to become, and the more difficult it is to persuade him to go off duty and allow me to appreciate things simply and directly. Modern man's reliance on alcohol, tobacco and drugs is an attempt to counteract the robot.
When we relax, we experience a sense of reality; we actually hear the birds and notice the trees. What the robot undermines is our reality function. So a modern city is full of people who have paid for their efficiency -- their ability to survive -- with an enfeebled sense of reality. Jung experienced this very clearly when he went to Africa and India, and his own robot realized it could relax its vigilance. But Jung's eyes were too fixed on the mythological archetypes to observe such a simple and obvious explanation for his sense of freedom and intensified reality.
In this situation, modern man finds it easy to slip into neurosis. Mental health depends upon the sense of reality, a constant 'feedback' between the mind and the environment. In this sense, we are like those small bivalves who live by sucking in water and shooting it out again. But, unlike the motion of the heart, this is not an automatic function. As soon as we grow tired or bored, we switch off the pump -- and then wonder why we begin to experience a sense of suffocation. Modern man is continually slipping into this state of non-interaction, which results in a drop in vital energy. This in turn makes him feel that 'nothing is worth the effort', so he leaves the pump switched off. It is, in effect, as if he had forgotten to breathe. Then if problems arise that seem insoluble, he may experience a collapse of the will to live. Neurosis is a damaged will to live. Psychosis is the mind's attempt to compensate for the damaged will to live by providing an 'alternative reality'.
Now we can begin to see that both Freud and Jung had grasped this fundamental insight: that man has 'two selves', and that it is failure of cooperation between the two that causes mental illness. Freud's insight, like Hudson's, sprang from the observation of hypnosis, and the recognition that, when the ego is put to sleep, a non-ego can take over. Hudson called this non-ego 'the subjective mind', and recognized that its powers are far greater than those of the 'objective mind'. Freud called it the unconscious; but he failed to grasp -- what Hudson understood so well -- that in the last analysis, the objective mind is the 'boss'. It is the part of us that recognizes values, that generates a sense of purpose, that sees what has to be done, and which sends a message down to the subjective mind demanding energy. (The subjective mind is in charge of our energy supply -- what the playwright Granville Barker called 'the secret life'.) It is its vigilance, its enthusiasm and determination, that govern our mental health. Whenever we are hurled into purposeful activity, we recognize this clearly. (This is why the philosopher Fichte remarked that man only knows himself in action.) Unfortunately, man spends so much of his time in passivity, or in repetitious acts, that he finds it easy to forget this insight.
Because Freud took it for granted that the objective mind has no power at all, his psychology was essentially negative and pessimistic in character. Neurosis was due to unconscious sexual repression, and the only way to cure the neurosis was for the analyst to uncover the repression and drag it into the light of consciousness. The patient was not in any way encouraged to take a positive attitude towards his problems. The result was that many of Freud's cases dragged on for years, and ended without a cure (for example, the famous 'Wolf man').
Jung felt instinctively that Freud's negative and passive view of the unconscious was wrong. He cured his 'vampire' lady by telling her that she had to come down to earth and stop longing for the moon. He also recognized that Janet had grasped the basic cause of neurosis in his 'lowering of the mental threshold'. But for an ambitious young psychiatrist, the embattled Freud was a far more interesting figure to support than the well-established, middle-aged Janet. So Jung found himself committed to Freud's view of the 'second self' as an unfathomable ocean or some vast underground kingdom. This was certainly a more exciting view than Janet's; besides, Jung saw himself inheriting Freud's position and becoming the lord of this romantic and sinister underworld.
The quarrel with Freud and Jung's own sense of guilt produced tremendous psychological tensions. When psychological tensions persist for too long, the result is exhaustion, and the normal distinction between dreams and waking consciousness disappears. Jung experienced the mythological visions -- Siegfried, Salome, Philemon -- that convinced him that his own interpretation of the unconscious was correct after all. It also meant that he created a psychological theory of 'projections' to explain religion, alchemy, flying saucers and anything else that puzzled him. In fact, it failed to explain the first case he ever encountered -- his cousin Helly's multiple personality. But he dismissed the problem by assuming she was merely a fantasist and a liar. Later, when he encountered genuine mediumship (in Rudi Schneider) and recognized that ghosts are not necessarily 'projections', he took care not to revise his views on Helly Preiswerk.
If, in fact, we recognize Jung's 'confrontation with the unconscious' as a highly abnormal state, in which his 'second self' came to his aid with the reassurance he needed, his theory of projections appears rather more questionable. There is no conceivable reason to believe that hundreds of alchemists, from ancient Greece and China to medieval Europe, all experienced visions that explain their strange images and terminology. It is far more probable that the alchemists were working within a magical tradition (and magic and science were identical in the past) and using its language and images. Jung's essays on Paracelsus show that he was aware that he was dealing with an alien intellectual tradition; but his determination to use it to prove his theory of archetypes and projections made him incapable of entering into its spirit.
The case of the flying saucers offers a more straightforward example of the problem. The possibility that most UFO sightings are 'visions' is obviously remote. Some may be downright lies, some wishful thinking, some honest mistakes; but there remain a number -- when a whole planeload of passengers have seen the craft -- where none of these explanations will fit. Jung's 'projection' theory is far less likely than the notion that the witness saw something -- whether an experimental aircraft, a messenger from another planet, or a visitor from another dimension. But the projection theory happened to fit in with his theory of archetypes and unconscious religious cravings. So the facts could be ignored. His book on UFOs is virtually propaganda for his archetype theory, designed to reach a new and vast audience. From the interview with Lindbergh it is clear that either Jung himself did not believe his own theory, or that he had changed his mind since he wrote the book. In any case, he kept his views a secret. Lindbergh seems to have sensed this when he remarked on the element of charlatanism in Jung.
I have pointed out in the Introduction that Jung's views on the paranormal also contain this element of 'doublethink'. The essay on 'The Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits' interprets them as 'autonomous complexes'. His own experience of the haunted cottage, as well as his seances with Rudi Schneider, must have made him aware that this was simply inadequate as an explanation. (Anyone who wishes to gain an idea of what happened with Schneider should read Thomas Mann's essay 'An Experience with the Occult'. [1] (In a cautious postscript to this essay written in 1948, he tried to qualify his arguments. He had 'confined himself wholly to the psychological side of the problem, and purposely avoided the question of whether spirits exist'. He goes on to tell a lie: that he has had no experience that might prove it one way or the other. The preface to Fanny Moser's book on ghosts reveals that he accepted his experience in the cottage as a genuine haunting: when he learned that the owner had been forced to demolish the cottage 'it gave me considerable satisfaction after my colleague had laughed so loudly at my fear of ghosts'. But this introduction was not printed beside the essay 'On the Psychological Foundations of Belief in Spirits' in Volume Eight of the Collected Works -- where the contradiction would be obvious -- but in the 'miscellaneous' Volume Eighteen.
The important question is obviously: How far do these inconsistencies undermine Jung's total achievement? And this can only be answered in the broader perspective of what he was trying to do -- and not, it must be emphasized, what he wanted his colleagues to believe he was trying to do.
Jung had the temperament to be an artist, a poet or a theologian. If his father had been rich he might, like the Mann brothers, have spent a year or so in Italy, deciding what he wanted to do. As it was he was forced to choose medicine -- far too rigid a discipline for a person of Jung's originality and ambition. Like the young Americans addressed by Horace Greely, ('Go West, young man'), his real desire was to find virgin territory and adventure; but Europe had no Wild West, and Jung chose psychiatry instead.
There is some significance in Jung's belief -- or his occasional claim -- that he was a descendant of Goethe. He was completely out of sympathy with the narrow materialism of nineteenth-century science. In retrospect, it seems a pity he became a Freudian, since it meant he based his life work on Freud's premises about the unconscious. Yet it has to be admitted that, as a follower of Janet, he might not have achieved such remarkable results. In an essay on Wagner, Thomas Mann quoted a dignitary of Seville cathedral, who is supposed to have said to the architect: 'Build me a cathedral so enormous that people of the future will say: the chapter must have been mad to build anything so huge ... ' Mann pointed out that the nineteenth century was full of this spirit of heroic giganticism: Balzac's Human Comedy, Hegel's System, Zola's Rougon Macquart cycle, Wagner's Ring, Tolstoy's War and Peace. Jung's sympathy was all with heroic giganticism. His psychology is built of the same mythological material as Wagner's Ring.
His central insight was the same as Hudson's: that the immense powers of the 'subjective mind' can be utilized for positive as well as negative purposes. Although he insisted that his interest in religion was purely 'psychological' (an assertion that seems absurd in the light of Answer to Job), the basic assumption of his work was identical with that of all the major religions: that the universe is full of meaning, that we are surrounded by unseen powers and forces, and that man can rise above the 'triviality of everydayness' by trying to open his mind and his senses to these meanings and forces.
Freud's negative vision of the unconscious invalidates much of his work; it seems conceivable that, in the future, his psychology will be regarded merely as an intellectual curiosity, like the phlogiston theory of combustion, or Hoerbiger's belief that the moon is a huge lump of ice. Most psychologists would now agree that the sexual theory cannot be regarded as 'scientifically proven'. Jung's archetypes and collective unconscious are in the same dubious position. But Jung's vision of the unconscious is of an enormous wellspring of vital forces. The author of a recent book about him [2] has pointed out the similarities between Jung and Abraham Maslow, whose psychology is based on the notion of 'higher reaches of human nature', and who was more interested in the 'peak experience' -- the sense of sudden affirmation -- than in neurosis. There can be no doubt that Jung's weltanschauung is pervaded by an enormous sense of optimism, of the possibilities of human evolution.
His central concept is, of course, individuation, meaning 'undividedness'. In Answer to Job he has the important comment: 'the more consciousness a man possesses the more he is separated from his instincts (which at least give him an inkling of the hidden wisdom of God) and the more prone he is to error.' Man's problem is that, in the course of evolving consciousness, he has become divided from his unconscious, which contains inklings of the purposes and aims of God. The answer is for consciousness to attempt to achieve contact with the unconscious -- in fact, ideally, to have free access to it. Jung discovered at an early stage that the practice of meditation is one way of achieving contact, and the experience of Africa showed him that man can 'relax into' his unconscious by recognizing the 'dark' side of his nature.
Yet although Jung was attempting to create a dynamic and positive vision of the psyche to replace Freud's passive and negative model, his Freudian training made it difficult for him to emphasize the notion of conscious effort. Towards the end of his life, he was asked by E. H. Philp: 'Is it possible that you depreciate consciousness through an overvaluation of the unconscious?', and replied decisively: 'I have never had any tendency to depreciate consciousness by insisting upon the importance of the unconscious. If such a tendency is attributed to me, it is due to a sort of optical illusion.' Readers of Symbols of Transformation, or even of Aion, must have shaken their heads in startled disbelief. But at least Jung goes on to reveal how far he has come to recognize the importance of consciousness -- and therefore, by implication, of its power of making decisions. 'As a matter of fact the emphasis lies on consciousness as the conditio sine qua non of apperception of unconscious contents, and the supreme arbiter (my italics) in the chaos of unconscious possibilities. My book about Types is a careful study of the empirical structure of consciousness. If we had an inferior consciousness, we should all be crazy. The ego and ego-consciousness are of paramount importance.'
But more than a quarter of a century earlier, in his Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower, Jung had written: 'Now and then it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities ... What did these people do in order to bring about the development that set them free? As far as I could see they did nothing (wu wei) but let things happen.' Again, in the second of the Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (Volume Seven of the Collected Works) there is a chapter dealing with individuation in which Jung identifies it with self-realization. But it is clear that he sees self-realization as springing from the unconscious. He speaks, for example, of lazy people who have ended as neurotics, and says: 'Thanks to the neurosis contrived by the unconscious, they are shaken out of their apathy ... ' A paragraph further on he writes: 'Since it is highly probable that we are still a long way from the summit of absolute consciousness, presumably everyone is capable of wider consciousness, and we may assume accordingly that the unconscious processes are constantly supplying us with contents which, if consciously recognized, would extend the range of consciousness.'
This makes it quite clear that for Jung, the work of individuation -- self-realization -- consists basically in 'listening to' the unconscious, which is trying to push us towards self-realization. So in place of Freud's negative unconscious, which causes so many neuroses, we have a positive unconscious trying to work out our salvation. It is an agreeable notion; but Hudson could have told Jung that he was overestimating the subjective mind. The subjective mind may be far more powerful than its objective counterpart, but in this particular marriage, it is the passive partner. It will place its enormous powers and energies at the disposal of the objective mind -- if the objective mind demands them with enough authority -- but will seldom take the initiative. Hypnosis is so successful because the subjective mind is glad to obey the authoritative voice of the hypnotist. It would obey the objective mind just as readily, if the order was delivered with enough conviction. But most people are possessed by the misapprehension that the ego is supposed to be passive, that their business is to suffer and accept experience rather than initiate it. We might compare the two to a husband and wife team in which the wife has tremendous untapped energies and potentialities. But she is married to a feeble and passive husband. And she has been brought up to believe that the woman is supposed to be docile and obedient. So because the husband never calls upon her untapped resources, she fails to achieve any kind of self-realization. The answer is not for the wife to leave the husband or try to 'do her own thing', but for the husband to recognize that if he can galvanize himself out of his feebleness and laziness, they can transform both their lives.
Let us look more closely at this concept of individuation. Why does Jung regard it as a passive process? Because he sees it as a flow from the unconscious to the conscious. It has to be that way around because the conscious, has, so to speak, no way of clambering down a ladder into the unconscious. And this seems to be one of the fundamental problems. Jung's answer to it consists in creating the right conditions (as Africa and India created them for him), or (in the case of patients) in trying to tease the problems out of the unconscious by the usual methods of psychoanalysis. The therapist is, so to speak, the midwife to the unconscious.
We can clarify the issue if, instead of speaking of the conscious and unconscious, we revert to Hudson's terminology of the objective and subjective mind -- or of the left and right cerebral hemispheres, which seem to bear such a close relation to them. When Sperry was doing his early experiments in split-brain physiology, he discovered that an animal with a split brain cannot pass on something it has just learned to the other half of the brain -- so a split-brain cat that had been taught to press a lever to get food with one eye covered up could not do the same trick with the other eye covered. The purpose of the commissure between the two halves is to pass on such information to the other half of the brain. So there is a mechanism for communication -- for what Jung called the individuation process.
But it is such an inefficient mechanism that, for all practical purposes, we are all split-brain patients. In Biographia Literaria, Coleridge cites a remarkable case of an ignorant servant girl who began speaking Hebrew when she was in delirium. Eventually it was discovered that, as a small girl, she had lived in the house of a clergyman who went around reciting the Bible in Hebrew. Consciously she had never picked up a word of the language; but her subjective mind had stored up everything she had overheard.
So the subjective mind contains everything we have ever seen, heard and experienced. And it will, under certain circumstances, provide us with the information we require. I try to remember a name or a tune without success. I stop trying, and suddenly it 'walks into my head' -- that is, into my objective mind, sent there by the subjective mind. I tell myself I must wake at half past six in the morning, but I have no alarm clock; my subjective mind shakes me awake at precisely six-thirty.
Moreover, when my objective mind is sent to sleep by a hypnotist, my subjective mind will provide all kinds of information on request. It merely needs to be asked properly.
It has another interesting trick. A tune or a smell or a few words can suddenly bring back some fragment of my past with tremendous vividness, so for a moment I am back in the 'den' made of branches I constructed when I was eight, or the school changing room when I was twelve. Proust based his enormous novel on such 'flashes' -- glimpses of the past. In my book The Occult I used the term 'Faculty X' for this ability to conjure up the reality of some other time and place. What Jung means by individuation is closely related to Faculty X.
Is it -- to rephrase the question -- possible to induce flashes of Faculty X, or do we have to wait patiently until they burst upon us? Maslow raised a similar question when he asked whether it is possible to induce the 'peak experience'; he decided that the answer was No: we have to wait for it to happen.
But consider more closely the mechanism of such experiences. In The Idiot, Dostoevsky describes the feelings of a man in front of a firing squad. He is fascinated by a gilded steeple glittering in the sunlight, and feels that in a few moments he will be one with the rays of light. He wonders what would happen if he were reprieved (as, in fact, he is), and thinks 'What an eternity of days, and all mine! How I should grudge and count up every minute of it, so as not to waste a single instant.' The murderer Raskolnikov has a similar insight in Crime and Punishment, when he reflects that he would rather stand on a narrow ledge for ever, in eternal darkness and tempest, than be condemned to die at once.
Crisis makes human beings suddenly aware of what consciousness is for. Its purpose is to control our lives. About to be deprived of it, the prisoner feels that if only he could be reprieved, he would never again waste a single instant.
This enables us to grasp precisely what is wrong with man at this stage in his evolution. We waste consciousness by drifting passively through life. Civilization has separated us from our deep, instinctive will to live, eroded our 'reality function'. As Jung recognized, man has developed too fast, and consciousness has drifted too far from the deep knowledge of the unconscious. So, like an army whose baggage train has fallen too far behind, we are highly vulnerable.
The problem, quite simply, is that consciousness is still too feeble. Crises and problems galvanize us into a sense of values, and make us recognize how hard we ought to be struggling. But the moment the crisis is behind us, we forget this insight, and drift back into a vague state of non-expectation, 'living in the present' and allowing all our vital energy, our psychological tension, to drain away. Molehills turn into mountains. This is why modern man is so prone to neurosis. His ego becomes 'hypnotized' by the trivialities of the present and his vital 'threshold' sinks. In this state he becomes convinced that he is weak and helpless -- although, in fact, he possesses enormous strength, which would respond to the first sign of crisis.
William James had recognized the problem when he wrote that what modern man needs to find is the 'moral equivalent of war'. And in an essay 'The Energies of Man' he stated the problem with unparalleled clarity:
Compared to what we ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible mental and physical resources. In some persons this sense of being cut off from their rightful resources is extreme, and we then get the formidable neurasthenic and psychasthenic conditions, with life grown into one tissue of impossibilities, that so many medical books describe.
Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives usually far within his limits; he possesses powers of various sorts which he habitually fails to use. He energises below his maximum, and he behaves below his optimum.
How can man escape this trap, and release his 'vital reserves'? James's answer is that 'the normal opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy is the will'. 'Excitements, ideas and efforts, in a word, are what carry us over the dam.' Yet James had to admit that he could not actually suggest a 'moral equivalent of war' that would galvanize all men to energize to their maximum.
We could say that Jung picked up the problem where James left off. He also began from the recognition that man contains immense depths of power of which he is normally unaware. And his own solution to the problem was to spend his life directing attention to these depths. He turned his back on his Freudian training, and presented a new and vital image of the psyche. His aim, we could say, was to direct man's attention inward. The philosopher David Hume protested that when he turned his gaze inward, he only perceived ideas and emotions, a 'stream of consciousness' flowing endlessly and automatically. Jung's reply, in effect, is: 'Look deeper still'. Strain the eyes into that realm of dreams and symbols until they become used to the darkness. Gradually, the conscious ego will become aware that it has a far more powerful partner, that it is not alone. Man will begin to catch glimpses of his own strength. The process of individuation will begin, like an alchemical transformation. What will eventually emerge is the philosopher's stone.
Let us raise the question that Jung leaves unexplored: what would it be like to experience individuation? What would it be like if the conscious mind had unlimited access to the unconscious -- if the objective mind could explore the subjective mind at will?
It would mean, to begin with, that the enormous powers of the subjective mind would become accessible to the ego. It contains, for example, all the memories of a lifetime. Because consciousness is so narrow, we are trapped in a tiny prison cell of the present. So our view of ourselves is also narrow and limited. When Proust's hero tasted the cake dipped in tea, he said: 'I had ceased to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.' Faust, on the point of suicide, is recalled to life by the Easter bells, and remembers how, in childhood,
An unbelievably sweet yearning
Drove me to roam through wood and lea,
Crying, and as my eyes were burning,
I felt a new world grow in me.
What we glimpse in such moments is that if consciousness could move beyond its normal limitations, we could easily experience a kind of chain reaction into mystical ecstasy. The delight, the sense of meaning, of other realities, other times and places, releases an immense surge of optimism and purpose. This in turn is enough to raise us permanently to a higher level of vital drive and determination -- for, like a man who has glimpsed heaven, nothing less can now ever satisfy us.
Then there are the other powers of the subjective mind: its apparently paranormal powers, its powers to heal and renew the body, its ability to induce synchronicities, its fathomless creative powers. All these, it seems, are there for the asking, if only we could start the chain reaction by some immense effort of will and optimism -- or, as Jung suggests, by inducing the unconscious to make the effort.
This is the essence of Jung's vision, his glimpse of the philosopher's stone. It is, of course, necessary to recognize that Jung himself failed to achieved the philosopher's stone, and that this was probably because his life was a little too comfortable, and because he became a little too accustomed to getting his own way. We might say that the crucible never became hot enough. This is no denigration of his formidable achievement: only a recognition of an element on which he failed to place sufficient emphasis: conscious effort.
But then, we judge a man of genius by his central insight. Jung's central insight was a development of the vision of his youth, and it was a message of hope for his fellow men. He achieved what he set out to achieve -- an epitaph good enough for any man.
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Notes:
1. Discussed in my book The Occult (1971), pp. 219-20.
2. John-Raphael Staude: The Adult Development of C.G. Jung (1981).