The Competitiveness of Nations in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
Carl Gustav Jung
The Undiscovered Self *
in
Civilization in Transition2nd Edition, Bollingen Series XX,
Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1970,
284 – 292.
5. THE
PHILOSOPHICAL AND THE PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO LIFE
549 Our ideas
have, however, the unfortunate but inevitable tendency to lag behind the changes
in the total situation. They can
hardly do otherwise, because, so long as nothing changes in the world, they
remain more or less adapted and therefore function in a satisfactory way. There is then no cogent reason why
they should be changed and adapted anew. Only when conditions have altered so
drastically that there is an unendurable rift between the outer situation and
our ideas, now become antiquated, does the general problem of our
Weltanschauung, or philosophy of life, arise, and with it the question of
how the primordial images that maintain the flow of instinctive energy are to be
reoriented or readapted. They
cannot simply be replaced by a new rational configuration, for this would be
moulded too much by the outward situation and not enough by man’s biological
needs. Moreover, not only would it
build no bridge to the original man, but it would block the approach to him
altogether. This is in keeping with
the aims of Marxist education, which seeks, like God himself, to remake man, but
in the image of the State.
550 Today, our basic convictions are becoming increasingly rationalistic. Our philosophy is no longer a way of life, as it was in antiquity; it has turned into an exclusively intellectual and academic exercise. Our denominational religions with their archaic rites and conceptions - justified enough in themselves - express a view of the world which caused no great difficulties in the Middle Ages but has become strange and unintelligible to modern man. Despite this conflict with the modern scientific outlook, a deep instinct bids him hang on to ideas which, if taken literally, leave out of account all the mental developments of the last five hundred years. The obvious purpose of this is to prevent him from falling into the abyss of nihilistic despair. But
* [Written in spring 1956 and first published as
Gegenwart und Zukunft, supplement to Schweizer Monatshefte
(Zurich), March 1957; issued as a book (paperback) later in 1957
(Zurich). Translated from the
original ms. by R. F. C. Hull. A
section of the translation was published as “God, The Devil, and the Human
Soul,” The Atlantic Monthly (Boston), CC:5 (Nov. 1957;
Centennial Issue); the entire translation, with revisions by the American
editors, was published in book form as The Undiscovered Self (Boston and
London, 1958), carrying the note: “This book was prompted by conversations
between Dr. Jung and Dr. Carleton Smith, director of the National Arts
Foundation, which brought it to the attention of the editors of the Atlantic
Monthly Press,” and a dedication: “To my friend Fowler McCormick.” The present text is a further revision of
the original translation.—EDITORS]
284
even when, as a rationalist, he feels impelled to
criticize denominational religion as literalistic, narrow-minded, and
obsolescent, he should never forget that it proclaims a doctrine whose symbols,
although their interpretation may be disputed, nevertheless possess a life of
their own by virtue of their archetypal character. Consequently, intellectual understanding
is by no means indispensable in all
cases, but is called for only when evaluation through feeling and intuition does
not suffice, that is to say, in the case of people for whom the intellect
carries the prime power of conviction.
551 Nothing is
more characteristic and symptomatic in this respect than the gulf that has
opened out between faith and knowledge: The contrast has become so enormous
that one is obliged to speak of the incommensurability of these two categories
and their way of looking at the world. And yet they are concerned with the same
empirical world in which we live, for even the theologians tell us that faith is
supported by facts that became historically perceptible in this known world of
ours - namely that Christ was born as a real human being, worked many
miracles and suffered his fate, died under Pontius Pilate, and rose up in the
flesh after his death. Theology
rejects any tendency to take the assertions of its earliest records as written
myths and, accordingly, to understand them symbolically. Indeed, it is the
theologians themselves who have recently made the attempt - no doubt as a
concession to “knowledge” - to “demythologize” the object of their faith while
drawing the line quite arbitrarily at the crucial points. But to the critical intellect it is only
too obvious that myth is an integral component of all religions and therefore
cannot be excluded from the assertions of faith without injuring
them.
552 The rupture
between faith and knowledge is a symptom of the split consciousness which
is so characteristic of the mental disorder of our day. It is as if two different persons were
making statements about the same thing, each from his own point of view, or as
if one person in two different frames of mind were sketching a picture of his
experience. If for “person” we
substitute “modern society,” it is evident that the latter is suffering from a
mental dissociation, i.e., a neurotic disturbance. In view of this, it does not help
matters at all if one party pulls obstinately to the right and the other to the
left. This is what
hap-
285
pens in every neurotic psyche, to its own deep distress,
and it is just this distress that brings the patient to the
analyst.
553 As I stated above
in all brevity - while not neglecting to mention certain practical details whose
omission might have perplexed the reader - the analyst has to establish a
relationship with both halves of his patient’s personality, because only
from them can he put together a whole and complete man, and not merely from one
half by suppression of the other half. But this suppression is just what the
patient has been doing all along, for the modern Weltanschauung leaves
him with no alternative. His
individual situation is the same in principle as the collective situation. He is a social microcosm, reflecting on
the smallest scale the qualities of society at large, or conversely the smallest
social unit cumulatively producing the collective dissociation. The latter possibility is the more likely
one, as the only direct and concrete carrier of life is the individual
personality, while society and the State are conventional ideas and can claim
reality only in so far as they are represented by a conglomeration of
individuals.
554 Far too little
attention has been paid to the fact that, for all our irreligiousness, the
distinguishing mark of the Christian epoch, its highest achievement, has become
the congenital vice of our age: the supremacy of the word, of the Logos,
which stands for the central figure of our Christian faith. The word has literally become our god and
so it has remained, even if we know of Christianity only from hearsay. Word like “Society” and “State” are so
concretized that they are almost personified. In the opinion of the man in the street,
the “State,” far more than any king in history, is the inexhaustible giver of
all good; the “State” is invoked, made responsible, grumbled at, and so on and
so forth. Society is elevated to
the rank of a supreme ethical principle; indeed, it is even credited with
positively creative capacities. No
one seems to notice that this worship of the word, which was necessary at a
certain phase of man’s mental development, has a perilous shadow side. That is to say, the moment the word, as
a result of centuries of education, attains universal validity, it severs its
original connection with the divine Person. There is then a personified Church, a
personified State; belief in the word becomes credulity, and the word itself an
infernal slogan capable of any deception. With credulity
286
come propaganda and advertising to dupe the citizen with
political jobbery and compromises, and the lie reaches proportions never known
before in the history of the world.
555 Thus the word,
originally announcing the unity of all men and their union in the figure of the
one great Man, has in our day become a source of suspicion and distrust of all
against all. Credulity is one of
our worst enemies, but that is the makeshift the neurotic always resorts to in
order to quell the doubter in his own breast or to conjure him out of existence.
People think you have only to
“tell” a person that he “ought” to do something in order to put him on the right
track. But whether he can or will
do it is another matter. The
psychologist has come to see that nothing is achieved by telling, persuading,
admonishing, giving good advice. He must acquaint himself with all the
particulars and have an authentic knowledge of the psychic inventory of his
patient. He has therefore to relate
to the individuality of the sufferer and feel his way into all the nooks and
crannies of his mind, to a degree that far exceeds the capacity of a teacher or
even of a directeur de conscience. His scientific objectivity, which
excludes nothing, enables him to see his patient not only as a human being but
also as an anthropoid, who is bound to his body like an animal. His training directs his medical interest
beyond the conscious personality to the world of unconscious instinct dominated
by sexuality and the power drive (or self-assertion), which correspond to the
twin moral concepts of Saint Augustine: concuiscentia and superbia.
The clash between these two
fundamental instincts (preservation of the species and self-preservation) is the
source of numerous conflicts. They
are, therefore, the chief object of moral judgment, whose purpose it is to
prevent instinctual collisions as far as possible.
556 As I
explained earlier, instinct has two main aspects: on the one hand, that of
dynamism and compulsion, and on the other, specific meaning and intention. It is highly probable that all man’s
psychic functions have an instinctual foundation, as is obviously the case with
animals. It is easy to see that in
animals instinct functions as the spiritus rector of all behaviour. This observation lacks certainty only
when the learning capacity begins to develop, for instance in the higher apes
and in man. In animals, as a result
of their learning capacity, instinct under-
287
goes numerous modifications and differentiations, and in
civilized man the instincts are so split up that only a few of the basic ones
can be recognized with any certainty in their original form. The most important are the two
fundamental instincts already mentioned and their derivatives, and these have
been the exclusive concern of medical psychology so far. But in following up the ramifications of
instinct investigators came upon configurations which could not with certainty
be ascribed to either group. To
take but one example: The discoverer of the power instinct raised the question
whether an apparently indubitable expression of the sexual instinct might not be
better explained as a “power arrangement,” and Freud himself felt obliged to
acknowledge the existence of “ego instincts” in addition to the overriding
sexual instinct - a clear concession to the Adlerian standpoint. In view of this uncertainty, it is hardly
surprising that in most cases neurotic symptoms can be explained, almost without
contradiction, in terms of either theory.
This perplexity does not mean that one or the other standpoint is
erroneous or that both are. Rather, both are relatively valid and, unlike
certain one-sided and dogmatic tendencies, admit the existence and competition
of still other instincts. Although,
as I have said, the question of human instinct is a far from simple matter, we
shall probably not be wrong in assuming that the learning capacity, a quality
almost exclusive to man. is based on the instinct for imitation found in
animals. It is in the nature of
this instinct to disturb other instinctive activities and eventually to modify
them, as can be observed, for instance, in the songs of birds when they adopt
other melodies.
557 Nothing estranges
man more from the ground-plan of his instincts than his learning capacity which
turns out to be a genuine drive for progressive transformation of human modes of
behaviour. It, more than anything
else, is responsible for the altered conditions of his existence and the need
for new adaptations which civilization brings. It is also the ultimate source of those
numerous psychic disturbances and difficulties which are occasioned by man’s
progressive alienation from his instinctual foundation, i.e., by his
uprootedness and identification with his conscious knowledge of himself, by his
concern with consciousness at the expense of the unconscious. The result is that modern man knows
himself only in so far as he can become con-
288
scious of himself - a capacity largely dependent on
environmental conditions, knowledge and control of which necessitated or
suggested certain modifications of his original instinctive tendencies. His consciousness therefore orients
itself chiefly by observing and investigating the world around him, and it is to
the latter’s peculiarities that he must adapt his psychic and technical
resources. This task is so
exacting, and its fulfilment so profitable, that he forgets himself in the
process, losing sight of his instinctual nature and putting his own conception
of himself in place of his real being. In this way he slips imperceptibly into a
purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity
progressively take the place of reality.
558 Separation from
his instinctual nature inevitably plunges civilized man into the conflict
between conscious and unconscious, spirit and nature, knowledge and faith, a
split that becomes pathological the moment his consciousness is no longer able
to neglect or suppress his instinctual side. The accumulation of individuals who have
got into this critical state starts off a mass movement purporting to be the
champion of the suppressed. In
accordance with the prevailing tendency of consciousness to seek the source of
all ills in the outside world, the cry goes up for political and social changes
which, it is supposed, would automatically solve the much deeper problem of
split personality. Hence it is that
whenever this demand is fulfilled, political and social conditions arise which
bring the same ills back again in altered form. What then happens is a simple reversal:
the underside comes to the top and the shadow takes the place of the light, and
since the former is always anarchic and turbulent, the freedom of the
“liberated” underdog must suffer Draconian curtailment. The devil is cast out with Beelzebub.
All this is unavoidable, because
the root of the evil is untouched and merely the counterposition has come to
light.
559 The Communist
revolution has debased man far lower than democratic collective psychology has
done, because it robs him of his freedom not only in the social but in the moral
and spiritual sphere. Aside from
the political difficulties, this entailed a great psychological disadvantage for
the West that had already made itself unpleasantly felt in the days of German
Nazism: we can now point a finger at the shadow. He is clearly on the other side of the
political frontier, while we are on the side of
289
good and enjoy the possession of the right ideals. Did not a well-known statesman recently
confess that he had “no imagination for evil”?’ In the name of the multitude he was
expressing the fact that Western man is in danger of losing his shadow
altogether, of identifying himself with his fictive personality and the world
with the abstract picture painted by scientific rationalism. His spiritual and moral opponent, who is
just as real as he, no longer dwells in his own breast but beyond the
geographical line of division, which no longer represents an outward political
barrier but splits off the conscious from the unconscious man more and more
menacingly. Thinking and feeling
lose their inner polarity and where religious orientation has grown ineffective,
not even a god can check the sovereign sway of unleashed psychic
functions.
560 Our rational
philosophy does not bother itself with whether the other person in us,
pejoratively described as the “shadow,” is in sympathy with our conscious plans
and intentions. Evidently it still
does not know that we carry in ourselves a real shadow whose existence is
grounded in our instinctual nature. No one can overlook either the dynamism
or the imagery of the instincts without the gravest injury to himself. Violation or neglect of instinct has
painful consequences of a physiological and psychological nature for whose
treatment medical help, above all, is required.
561 For more
than fifty years we have known, or could have known, that there is an
unconscious counterbalance to consciousness. Medical psychology has furnished all the
necessary empirical and experimental proofs of this. There is an unconscious psychic reality
which demonstrably influences consciousness and its contents. All this is known, but no practical
conclusions have been drawn from this fact. We still go on thinking and acting as
before, as if we were simplex and not duplex. Accordingly, we
imagine ourselves to be innocuous, reasonable, and humane. We do not think of distrusting our
motives or of asking ourselves how the inner man feels about the things we do in
the outside world. But actually it
is frivolous, superficial, and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically
unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the unconscious. One
1. Since these words were written, the shadow has
followed up this overbright picture hotfoot with the Charge of the Light Brigade
to Suez.
290
can regard one’s stomach or heart as unimportant and
worthy of contempt, but that does not prevent overeating or overexertion from
having consequences that affect the whole man. Yet we think that psychic mistakes and
their consequences can be got rid of with mere words, for “psychic” means less
than air to most people. All the
same, nobody can deny that without the psyche there would be no world at all,
and still less a human world. Virtually everything depends on the human
psyche and its functions. It should
be worthy of all the attention we can give it, especially today, when everyone
admits that the weal or woe of the future will be decided neither by the threat
of wild animals, nor by natural catastrophes, nor by the danger of world-wide
epidemics, but simply and solely by the psychic changes in man. It needs only an almost imperceptible
disturbance of equilibrium in a few of our rulers’ heads to plunge the world
into blood, fire, and radioactivity. The technical means necessary for this
are present on both sides. And
certain conscious deliberations, uncontrolled by any inner opponent, can be put
into effect all too easily, as we have seen already from the example of one
“Leader.” The consciousness of
modern man still clings so much to external objects that he makes them
exclusively responsible, as if it were on them that the decision depended. That the psychic state of certain
individuals could ever emancipate itself from the behaviour of objects is
something that is considered far too little, although irrationalities of this
sort are observed every day and can happen to everyone.
562 The forlorn
state of consciousness in our world is due primarily to loss of instinct, and
the reason for this lies in the development of the human mind over the past
aeon. The more power man had over
nature, the more his knowledge and skill went to his head, and the deeper became
his contempt for the merely natural and accidental, for all irrational data -
including the objective psyche, which is everything that consciousness is not.
In contrast to the subjectivism of
the conscious mind the unconscious is objective, manifesting itself mainly in
the form of contrary feelings, fantasies, emotions, impulses, and dreams, none
of which one makes oneself but which come upon one objectively. Even today psychology is still, for the
most part, the science of conscious contents, measured as far as possible by
collective standards. The
individual psyche has become a mere
291
accident, a marginal phenomenon, while the unconscious,
which can manifest itself only in the real, “irrationally given” human being,
has been ignored altogether. This
was not the result of carelessness or of lack of knowledge, but of downright
resistance to the mere possibility that there could be a second psychic
authority besides the ego. It seems
a positive menace to the ego that its monarchy could be doubted. The religious person, on the other hand,
is accustomed to the thought of not being sole master in his own house. He believes that God and not he himself
decides in the end. But how many of
us would dare to let the will of God decide, and which of us would not feel
embarrassed if he had to say how far the decision came from God
himself?
563 The
religious person, so far as one can judge, is directly influenced by the
reaction of the unconscious. As a
rule, he calls this the operation of conscience. But since the same psychic background
produces reactions other than moral ones, 2 the believer is measuring his
conscience by the traditional ethical standard and thus by a collective value,
in which endeavour he is assiduously supported by his Church. So long as the individual can hold fast
to his traditional beliefs, and the circumstances of his time do not demand
stronger emphasis on individual autonomy, he can rest content with the
situation. But the situation is
radically altered when the worldly-minded man who is oriented to external
factors and has lost his religious beliefs appears en masse, as is the
case today. The believer is then
forced onto the defensive and must catechize himself on the foundation of his
beliefs. He is no longer sustained
by the tremendous suggestive power of the consensus omnium and is keenly
aware of the weakening of the Church and the precariousness of its dogmatic
assumptions. To counter this, the
Church recommends more faith, as if this gift of grace depended on man’s good
will and pleasure. The seat of
faith, however, is not consciousness but spontaneous religious experience, which
brings the individual’s faith into immediate relation with
God.
564 Here each of us
must ask: Have I any religious experience and immediate relation to God, and
hence that certainty which will keep me, as an individual, from dissolving in
the crowd?
2. [Cf. infra, pars. 826ff.—EDIT0RS.)
292
565
To this question there is a positive answer only when the individual is willing to fulfil the demands of rigorous self-examination and self-knowledge. If he does this, he will not only discover some important truths about himself but will also have gained a psychological advantage: he will succeed in deeming himself worthy of serious attention and sympathetic interest. He will have set his hand, as it were, to a declaration of his own human dignity and taken the first step towards the foundations of his consciousness - that is, towards the unconscious, the only available source of religious experience. This is certainly not to say that what we call the unconscious is identical with God or is set up in his place. It is simply the medium from which religious experience seems to flow. As to what the further cause of such experience may be, the answer to this lies beyond the range of human knowledge. Knowledge of God is a transcendental problem.566
The religious person enjoys a great advantage when it comes to answering the crucial question that hangs over our time like a threat: he has a clear idea of the way his subjective existence is grounded in his relation to “God.” I put the word “God” in quotes in order to indicate that we are dealing with an anthropomorphic idea whose dynamism and symbolism are filtered through the medium of the unconscious psyche. Anyone who wants to can at least draw near to the source of such experiences, no matter whether he believes in God or not. Without this approach it is only in rare cases that we witness those miraculous conversions of which Paul’s Damascus experience is the prototype. That religious experiences exist no longer needs proof. But it will always remain doubtful whether what metaphysics and theology call God and the gods is the real ground of these experiences. The question is idle, actually, and answers itself by reason of the subjectively overwhelming numinosity of293
the experience. Anyone who has had it is seized by
it and therefore not in a position to indulge in fruitless metaphysical or
epistemological speculations. Absolute certainty brings its own
evidence and has no need of anthropomorphic proofs.
567
In view of the general ignorance of and bias against psychology it must be accounted a misfortune that the one experience which makes sense of individual existence should seem to have its origin in a medium that is certain to catch everybody’s prejudices. Once more the doubt is heard: “What good can come out of Nazareth?” The unconscious, if not regarded. outright as a sort of refuse bin underneath the conscious mind, is at any rate supposed to be of “merely animal nature.” In reality, however, and by definition it is of uncertain extent and constitution, so that overvaluation or undervaluation of it is pointless and can be dismissed as mere prejudice. At all events, such judgments sound very queer in the mouths of Christians, whose Lord was himself born on the straw of a stable, among the domestic animals. It would have been more to the taste of the multitude if he had got himself born in a temple. In the same way, the worldly-minded mass man looks for the numinous experience in the mass meeting, which provides an infinitely more imposing background than the individual soul. Even Church Christians share this pernicious delusion.568
Psychology’s insistence on the importance of unconscious processes for religious experience is extremely unpopular, no less with the political Right than with the Left. For the former the deciding factor is the historical revelation that came to man from outside; to the latter this is sheer nonsense, and man has no religious function at all, except belief in the party doctrine, when suddenly the most intense faith is called for. On top of this, the various creeds assert quite different things, and each of them claims to possess the absolute truth. Yet today we live in a unitary world where distances are reckoned by hours and no longer by weeks and months. Exotic races have ceased to be peepshows in ethnological museums. They have become our neighbours, and what was yesterday the private concern of the ethnologist is today a political, social, and psychological problem. Already the ideological spheres begin to touch, to interpenetrate, and the time may not be far off when the question of mutual understanding will become acute. To make oneself un294
derstood is certainly impossible without far-reaching
comprehension of the other’s standpoint. The insight needed for this will have
repercussions on both sides. History will undoubtedly pass over those
who feel it is their vocation to resist this inevitable development, however
desirable and psychologically necessary it may be to cling to what is essential
and good in our own tradition.
Despite all the differences, the unity of mankind will assert itself
irresistibly. On this card Marxist
doctrine has staked its life, while the West hopes to achieve its aim with
technology and economic aid. Communism has not overlooked the enormous
importance of the ideological element and the universality of basic principles.
The coloured races share our
ideological weakness and in this respect are just as vulnerable as we
are.
569 The
underestimation of the psychological factor is likely to take a bitter revenge.
It is therefore high time we caught
up with ourselves in this matter. For the present this must remain a pious
wish, because self-knowledge, as well as being highly unpopular, seems to be an
unpleasantly idealistic goal, reeks of morality, and is preoccupied with the
psychological shadow, which is normally denied whenever possible or at least not
spoken of. The task that faces our
age is indeed almost insuperably difficult. It makes the highest demands on our
responsibility if we are not to be guilty of another trahison des clercs.
It addresses itself to those
leading and influential personalities who have the necessary intelligence to
understand the situation our world is in. One might expect them to consult their
consciences. But since it is a
matter not only of intellectual understanding but of moral conclusions, there is
unfortunately no cause for optimism. Nature, as we know, is not so lavish with
her boons that she joins to a high intelligence the gifts of the heart
also. As a rule, where one capacity
is present the other is missing and where one capacity is present in perfection
it is generally at the cost of all the others The discrepancy between intellect and
feeling, which get in each other’s way at the best of times, is a particularly
painful chapter in the history of the human psyche.
570
There is no sense in formulating the task that our age has forced upon us as a moral demand. We can, at best, merely make the psychological world situation so clear that it can be295
seen even by the myopic, and give utterance to words and
ideas which even the hard of hearing can hear. We may hope for men of understanding and
men of good will, and must therefore not grow weary of reiterating those
thoughts and insights which are needed. Finally, even the truth can spread and
not only the popular lie.
571
With these words I should like to draw the reader’s attention to the main difficulty he has to face. The horror which the dictator States have of late brought upon mankind is nothing less than the culmination of all those atrocities of which our ancestors made themselves guilty in the not so distant past. Quite apart from the barbarities and blood baths perpetrated by the Christian nations among themselves throughout European history, the European has also to answer for all the crimes he has committed against the coloured races during the process of colonization. In this respect the white man carries a very heavy burden indeed. It shows us a picture of the common human shadow that could hardly be painted in blacker colours. The evil that comes to light in man and that undoubtedly dwells within him is of gigantic proportions, so that for the Church to talk of original sin and to trace it back to Adam’s relatively innocent slip-up with Eve is almost a euphemism. The case is far graver and is grossly underestimated.572
Since it is universally believed that man is merely what his consciousness knows of itself, he regards himself as harmless and so adds stupidity to iniquity. He does not deny that terrible things have happened and still go on happening, but it is always “the others” who do them. And when such deeds belong to the recent or remote past, they quickly and conveniently sink into the sea of forgetfulness, and that state of chronic woolly-mindedness returns which we describe as “normality.” In shocking contrast to this is the fact that nothing has finally disappeared and nothing has been made good. The evil, the guilt, the profound unease of conscience, the dark foreboding, are there before our eyes, if only we would see. Man has done these things; I am a man, who has his share of human nature; therefore I am guilty with the rest and bear unaltered and indelibly within me the capacity and the inclination to do them again at any time. Even if, juristically speaking, we were not accessories to the crime, we are always, thanks to our human nature, potential criminals. In296
reality we merely lacked a suitable opportunity to be
drawn into the infernal mélée. None
of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow. Whether the crime occurred many
generations back or happens today, it remains the symptom of a disposition that
is always and everywhere present – and one would therefore do well to possess
some “imagination for evil”, for only the fool can permanently disregard the
conditions of his own nature. In
fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil.
Harmlessness and naïveté are as
little helpful as it would be for a cholera patient and those in his vicinity to
remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease. On the contrary, they lead to projection
of the unrecognized evil into the “other.” This strengthens the opponents position
in the most effective way, because the projection carriers carries the fear which we involuntarily and secretly
feel for our own evil over to the other side and considerably increases the
formidableness of his threat. What
is even worse, our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with
evil. Here, of course,
we come up against one of the main prejudices of the Christian tradition, and
one that is a great stumbling block to our policies. We should, so we are told, eschew evil
and, if possible, neither touch nor mention it. For evil is also the thing of ill omen,
that which is tabooed and feared. This apotropaic attitude towards evil,
and the apparent circumventing of it, flatter the primitive tendency in us to
shut our eyes to evil and drive it over some frontier or other, like the Old
Testament scapegoat, which was supposed to carry the evil into the
wilderness.
573 But if one can no
longer avoid the realization that evil, without man’s ever having chosen it, is
lodged in human nature itself, then it bestrides the psychological stage as the
equal and opposite partner of good. This realization leads straight to a
psychological dualism, already unconsciously prefigured in the political world
schism and in the even more unconscious dissociation in modern man himself.
The dualism does not come from this
realization; rather, we are in a split condition to begin with. It would be an insufferable thought that
we had to take personal responsibility for so much guiltiness. We therefore prefer to localize the evil
in individual criminals or groups of criminals, while washing our hands in
innocence and ignoring the general proclivity to evil. This sanctimoniousness cannot
be
297
kept up in the long run, because the evil, as experience
shows, lies in man - unless, in accordance with the Christian view, one is
willing to postulate a metaphysical principle of evil. The great advantage of this view is that
it exonerates man’s conscience of too heavy a responsibility and foists it off
on the devil, in correct psychological appreciation of the fact that man is much
more the victim of his psychic constitution than its inventor. Considering that the evil of our day puts
everything that has ever agonized mankind in the deepest shade, one must ask
oneself how it is that, for all our progress in the administration of justice,
in medicine and in technology, for all our concern with life and health,
monstrous engines of destruction have been invented which could easily
exterminate the human race.
574
No one will maintain that the atomic physicists are a pack of criminals because it is to their efforts that we owe that peculiar flower of human ingenuity, the hydrogen bomb. The vast amount of intellectual work that went into the development of nuclear physics was put forth by men who dedicated themselves to their task with the greatest exertion and self-sacrifice, and whose moral achievement could therefore just as easily have earned them the merit of inventing something useful and beneficial to humanity. But even though the first step along the road to a momentous invention may be the outcome of a conscious decision, here, as everywhere, the spontaneous idea - the hunch or intuition - plays an important part. In other words, the unconscious collaborates too and often makes decisive contributions. So it is not the conscious effort alone that is responsible for the result; somewhere or other the unconscious, with its barely discernible goals and intentions, has its finger in the pie. If it puts a weapon in our hand, it is aiming at some kind of violence. Knowledge of the truth is the foremost goal of science, and if in pursuit of the longing for the light we stumble upon immense danger, then one has the impression more of fatality than of premeditation. It is not that present-day man is capable of greater evil than the man of antiquity or the primitive. He merely has incomparably more effective means with which to realize his propensity to evil. As his consciousness has broadened and differentiated, so his moral nature has lagged behind. That is the great problem before us today. Reason alone no longer suffices.298
575
In theory, it lies within the power of reason to desist from experiments of such hellish scope as nuclear fission if only because of their dangerousness. But fear of the evil which one does not see in one’s own bosom but always in somebody else’s checks reason every time, although everyone knows that the use of this weapon means the certain end of our present human world. The fear of universal destruction may spare us the worst, yet the possibility of it will nevertheless hang over us like a dark cloud so long as no bridge is found across the world-wide psychic and political split - a bridge as certain as the existence of the hydrogen bomb. If only a world-wide consciousness could arise that all division and all fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know where to begin. But if even the smallest and most personal stirrings of the individual psyche - so insignificant in themselves - remain as unconscious and unrecognized as they have hitherto, they will go on accumulating and produce mass groupings and mass movements which cannot be subjected to reasonable control or manipulated to a good end. All direct efforts to do so are no more than shadow boxing, the most infatuated by illusion being the gladiators themselves.576
The crux of the matter is man’s own dualism, to which he knows no answer. This abyss has suddenly yawned open before him with the latest events in world history, after mankind had lived for many centuries in the comfortable belief that a unitary God had created man in his own image, as a little unity. Even today people are largely unconscious of the fact that every individual is a cell in the structure of various international organisms and is therefore causally implicated in their conflicts. He knows that as an individual being he is more or less meaningless and feels himself the victim of uncontrollable forces, but, on the other hand, he harbours within himself a dangerous shadow and adversary who is involved as an invisible helper in the dark machinations of the political monster. It is in the nature of political bodies always to see the evil in the opposite group, just as the individual has an ineradicable tendency to get rid of everything he does not know and does not want to know about himself by foisting it off on somebody else.577
Nothing has a more divisive and alienating effect upon society than this moral complacency and lack of responsibility,299
and nothing promotes understanding and rapprochement
more than the mutual withdrawal of projections. This necessary corrective demands
self-criticism, for one cannot just tell the other person to withdraw them.
He does not recognize them for what
they are any more than one does oneself. We can recognize our prejudices and
illusions only when, from a broader psychological knowledge of ourselves and
others, wee prepared to doubt the absolute rightness of our assumptions and
compare them carefully and conscientiously with the objective facts. Funnily enough, “self-criticism” is an
idea much in vogue in Marxist countries, but there it is subordinated to
ideological considerations and must serve the State, and not truth and justice
in men’s dealings with one another. The mass State has no intention of
promoting mutual understanding and the relationship of man to man; it strives,
rather, for atomization, for the psychic isolation of the individual. The more unrelated individuals are, the
more consolidated the State becomes, and vice versa.
378
There can be no doubt that in the democracies too the distance between man and man is much greater than is conducive to public welfare, let alone beneficial to our psychic needs. True, all sorts of attempts are being made to level out glaring social contrasts by appealing to people’s idealism, enthusiasm, and ethical conscience; but, characteristically, one forgets to apply the necessary self-criticism, to answer the question: Who is making the idealistic demand? Is it, perchance, someone who jumps over his own shadow in order to hurl himself avidly on some idealistic programme that offers him a welcome alibi? How much respectability and apparent morality is there, cloaking in deceptive colours a very different inner world of darkness? One would first like to be assured that the man who talks of ideals is himself ideal, so that his words and deeds are more than they seem. To be ideal is impossible, and remains therefore an unfulfilled postulate. Since we usually have keen noses in this respect, most of the idealisms that are preached and paraded before us sound rather hollow and become acceptable only when their opposite is also openly admitted. Without this counterweight the ideal exceeds our human capacity, becomes incredible because of its humourlessness, and degenerates into bluff, albeit a well-meant one. Bluff is an illegitimate way of300
overpowering and suppressing others and leads to no
good.
579
Recognition of the shadow, on the other hand, leads to the modesty we need in order to acknowledge imperfection. And it is just this conscious recognition and consideration that are needed whenever a human relationship is not based on differentiation and perfection, for these only emphasize the differences or call forth the exact opposite; it is based, rather, on imperfection, on what is weak, helpless and in need of support - the very ground and motive for dependence. The perfect have no need of others, but weakness has, for it seeks support and does not confront its partner with anything that might force him into an inferior position and even humiliate him. This humiliation may happen only too easily when high idealism plays too prominent a role.580
Reflections of this kind should not be taken as superfluous sentimentalities. The question of human relationship and of the inner cohesion of our society is an urgent one in view of the atomization of the pent-up mass man, whose personal relationships are undermined by general mistrust. Wherever justice is uncertain and police spying and terror are at work, human beings fall into isolation, which, of course, is the aim and purpose of the dictator State, since it is based on the greatest possible accumulation of depotentiated social units. To counter this danger, the free society needs a bond of an affective nature, a principle of a kind like caritas, the Christian love of your neighbour. But it is just this love of one’s fellow man that suffers most of all from the lack of understanding wrought by projection. It would therefore be very much in the interest of the free society to give some thought to the question of human relationship from the psychological point of view, for in this resides its real cohesion and consequently its strength. Where love stops, power begins, and violence and terror.581
These reflections are not intended as an appeal to idealism, but only to promote a consciousness of the psychological situation. I do not know which is weaker: the idealism or the insight of the public. I only know that it needs time to bring about psychic changes that have any prospect of enduring. Insight that dawns slowly seems to me to have more lasting effect than a fitful idealism, which is unlikely to hold out for long.301
7. THE MEANING OF
SELF-KNOWLEDGE
582
What our age thinks of as the “shadow” and inferior, part of the psyche contains more than something merely negative. The very fact that through self-knowledge, that is, by exploring our own souls, we come upon the instincts and their world of imagery should throw some light on the powers slumbering in the psyche, of which we are seldom aware so long as all goes well. They are potentialities of the greatest dynamism, and it depends, entirely on the preparedness and attitude of the conscious mind whether the irruption of these forces, and the images and ideas associated with them, will tend towards construction or catastrophe. The psychologist seems to be the only person who knows from experience how precarious the psychic preparedness of modern man is, for he is the only one who sees himself compelled to seek out in man’s own nature those helpful powers and ideas which over and over have enabled him to find the right way through darkness and danger. For this exacting work the psychologist requires all his patience; he may not rely on any traditional oughts and musts, leaving the other person to make all the effort and contenting himself with the easy role of adviser and admonisher. Everyone knows the futility of preaching about things that are desirable, yet the general helplessness in this situation is so great, and the need so dire, that one prefers to repeat the old mistake instead of racking one’s brains over a subjective problem. Besides, it is always a question of treating one single individual only and not ten thousand, when the trouble one takes would ostensibly have more impressive results, though one knows well enough that nothing has happened at all unless the individual changes.583
The effect on all individuals, which one would like to see realized, may not set in for hundreds of years, for the spiritual transformation of mankind follows the slow tread of the cen-302
turies and cannot be hurried or held up by any rational
process of reflection, let alone brought to fruition in one generation. What does lie within our reach, however,
is the change in individuals who have, or create for themselves, an opportunity
to influence others of like mind. I
do not mean by persuading or preaching - I am thinking of the well-known fact
that anyone who has insight into his own actions, and has thus found access to
the unconscious, involuntarily exercises an influence on his environment. Th e deepening and broadening of his
consciousness produce the kind of effect which the primitives call “mana”. It is an unintentional influence on the
unconscious of others, a sort of unconscious prestige, and its effect lasts only
so long as it is not disturbed by conscious intention.
584
Nor is the striving for self-knowledge altogether without prospects of success, since there exists a factor which, though completely disregarded, meets our expectations halfway. This is the unconscious Zeitgeist. It compensates the attitude of the conscious mind and anticipates changes to come. An excellent example of this is modern art: though seeming to deal with aesthetic problems, it is really performing a work of psychological education on the public by breaking down and destroying their previous aesthetic views of what is beautiful in form and meaningful in content. The pleasingness of the artistic product is replaced by chill abstractions of the most subjective nature which brusquely slam the door on the naïve and romantic delight in the senses and on the obligatory love for the object. This tells us, in plain and universal language, that the prophetic spirit of art has turned away from the old object-re1ationship towards the – for the time being – dark chaos of subjectivisms. Certainly art, so far as we can judge of it, has not yet discovered in this darkness what it is that could hold all men together and give expression to their psychic wholeness. Since reflection seems to be needed for this purpose, it may be that such discoveries are reserved for other fields of endeavour.585
Great art till now has always derived its fruitfulness from myth, from the unconscious process of symbolization which continues through the ages and, as the primordial manifestation of the human spirit, will continue to be the root of all creation in the future. The development of modern art with its seemingly nihilistic trend towards disintegration must be303
understood as the symptom and symbol of a mood of universal destruction and renewal that has set its mark on our age. This mood makes itself felt everywhere, politically, socially, and philosophically. We are living in what the Greeks called the kairos
[HHC - original Greek not reproduced] – the right moment – for a “metamorphosis of the gods”, of the fundamental princip1es and symbols. This peculiarity of our time, which is certainly not of our conscious choosing, is the expression of the unconscious man within us who is changing. Coming generations will have to take account of this momentous transformation if humanity is not to destroy itself through the might of its own technology and science.586
As at the beginning of the Christian era, so again today we are faced with the problem of the general moral backwardness which has failed to keep pace with our scientific, technical, and social progress. So much is at stake and so much depends on the psychological constitution of modern man. Is he capable of resisting the temptation to use his power for the purpose of staging a world conflagration? Is he conscious of the path he is treading, and what the conclusions are that must be drawn from the present world situation and his own psychic situation? Does he know that he is on the point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner man which Christianity has treasured up for him? Does he realize what lies in store should this catastrophe ever befall him? Is he even capable of realizing that this would in fact be a catastrophe? And finally, does the individual know that he is the makeweight that tips the scale?587
Happiness and contentment, equability of mind and meaningfulness of life - these can be experienced only by the individual and not by a State, which, on the one hand, is nothing but a convention agreed to by independent individuals and, on the other, continually threatens to paralyse and suppress the individual. The psychiatrist is one of those who know most about the conditions of the soul’s welfare, upon which so infinitely much depends in the social sum. The social and political circumstances of the time are certainly of considerable significance, but their importance for the weal or woe of the individual has been boundlessly overestimated in so far as they are taken for the sole deciding factors. In this respect all our social goals commit the error of overlooking the psychology of the304
person for whom they are intended – very often – of
promoting only his illusions.
588
I hope, therefore, that a psychiatrist, who in the course of a long life has devoted himself to the causes and consequences of psychic disorders, may be permitted to express his opinion, in all the modesty enjoined upon him as an individual, about the questions raised by the world situation today. I am neither spurred on by excessive optimism nor in love with high ideals, but am merely concerned with the fate of the individual human being - that infinitesimal unit on whom a world depends, and in whom, if we read the meaning of the Christian message aright, even God seeks his goal.305