The Competitiveness of Nations
in a Global Knowledge-Based Economy
H.H. Chartrand
April 2002
Eric
Neumann
Creative Man:
Five Essays:
C. G. JUNG: 1955
*
Translated from the German by Eugene Rolfe
Bollingen Series LXI-2,
On July 26, the greatest psychologist of our time, C. G.
Jung, will be eighty years old. Although Jung’s significance is still
keenly debated, the influence of his work all over the world and in many
cultural fields outside psychology - for example, in poetry, literary criticism,
anthropology, mythology, etc. - is steadily increasing. To anyone who is fully acquainted with
Jung’s work and has followed its development at close quarters during the last
few decades, it will be obvious that the whole corpus of his later writings has
scarcely begun to make its impact and that it still really belongs to the
future. To some extent, this is due
to the fact that Jung’s scientific investigations have never lost their dynamic
character. With the spirit of an
authentic revolutionary pioneer he has never ceased to make new and startling
discoveries and gains throughout the varied phases of his career. Public acceptance of his work has
therefore inevitably lagged behind.
You would not make yourself particularly popular with
Jung if you were to tell him that he is a revolutionary. His conscious outlook in fact betrays a
certain
* “C. G. Jung: Zum 8o. Geburtstag,”
Merkur (
246
tendency towards conservatism. For example, he regards Nature herself as
essentially a conservative force, so that to be rooted in nature is equivalent
to being linked with the world of the ancestors and of the origins of things.
He thinks and feels in terms of
natural relationships, just as he himself is linked personally with the Swiss
landscape and with his tower on
However, these obvious and basic traits must not blind
us to the fact that, as we now know, Nature - in spite of what used to be said
about her - is actually very fond of leaping, and one of her leaps is Jung
himself. It is true that, in such a
leap as this, Nature overcomes nature and reveals herself to us with a
transparency we have never seen before. However, for the man who represents this
leap in his own person, the process of learning to tolerate himself and of
coming to terms with his own nature and with nature herself in general is a
painful and arduous undertaking. It
is only by continually questioning himself and the nature which he sees around
him that such a man may finally acquire the ability to affirm himself in his own
essential being.
In Jung’s case, we certainly gain the impression that he
is constantly returning to nature, that he is passionately opposed to any kind
of speculation, and that he is never tired of protesting that he is an
empiricist. He is an empiricist, in
fact, for he thinks nothing out for himself, yet at the same time, in a curious
way he fails to recognize his own true quality and is all too easily inclined to
forget that the experience on which he bases his empiricism is nothing humdrum
or commonplace, but that in scope and content it transcends the
experi
247
ence of his contemporaries to a quite extraordinary
degree. It is for this reason that
they regard it as “mystical” and will inevitably continue to see it in that
light until they themselves graduate to that experience of a larger reality
which is beyond their ken at the present time.
When Jung, as a young psychiatrist, joined forces with
Freud in 1908 (during the period when Freud was still being ostracized) and
became the leader of the international psychoanalytical movement, he was as far
ahead of his time and his colleagues as he was five years later, when he parted
company with Freud. We can only
really understand the loneliness into which his path then led him, and to what
extent - as the future will emphasize - he was to blaze new and unexplored
trails for Western man, if we realize that today, more than forty years later,
the view of the world held by the professional psychoanalysts and psychiatrists,
who are still, by and large, very satisfied with themselves, roughly corresponds
to the stage Jung left behind him in 1912. This was in fact the stage
represented by personalistic depth psychology, which follows the destiny of the
individual in the context of the events of his personal development and seeks to
clarify and to change it by so doing.
The next leap, if that is the right word for a process
that has been brewing for a long time and then suddenly bursts upon the
discoverer with the abruptness of an invasion which forces him to mobilize every
ounce of his powers, was the discovery of the collective unconscious, or in
other words, of an unconscious psychic structure which is common to the entire
human race. This discovery, which
Freud first became aware of in
248
his late work Moses and Monotheism, and which is now
gaining acceptance throughout the world of psychoanalysis in the form of the
theory of “great” parental figures, finally shattered the narrow framework of an
existence conceived of in purely bourgeois family terms.
What now emerged was the primal psychic world of
mankind, the world of mythology, the world of primitive man and of all those
myriad forms of religion and art in which man is visibly gripped and carried
away by the suprapersonal power that sustains and nourishes all creative
development. The human psyche stood
revealed as a creative force in the here and now which plays a vital role as a
source of meaning and synthesis in all sorts of diseases and in ongoing healing
processes of every kind.
There is nothing mystical or complicated about those
primordial images of the psyche that are known as archetypes. They are an expression of the simple fact
that every human being comes into the world equipped not only with a typically
human body and nervous system but with a psychic apparatus which is no less
distinctive and characteristic of the human species. And just as every human being - in
contradistinction to other forms of life - sees and hears in a typically human
fashion, so too the way in which he experiences and interprets the world is
decisively affected from the outset by the primordial images of the human
psyche. These inner images are
projected in experience, which means that they appear to primitive man, to
children, and also largely to so-called modern man as “outer,” not as inner,
realities. Among these “dominant”
inner archetypal
249
images are to be found Father and Mother, Lover and
Beloved, Hero, Wise Man, and many others. An archetype of this kind, such as, e.g.,
the image of the Great Mother, which in the history of civilization appears as a
goddess, is normally triggered off by the experience of the personal mother, but
the same primordial image is constitutionally present in every human being and
frequently takes its course quite independently of the person who has triggered
it off. For example, the cause of
an illness in a given subject may be the “Terrible Mother,” even if the
subject’s personal mother was by no means terrible; on the other hand, a poet
may have a lifelong relationship with the Good Mother although his personal
mother may have been insignificant and even apparently
“negative.”
The significance of such archetypal images can scarcely
be exaggerated. Archetypal
dominants have played a vital if not a decisive role, not only in religion and
art and so in the cultural life of mankind, but also in the psychic life (both
normal and pathological) of human beings in all ages and of all
nations.
The significance of Jung’s next basic discovery has
remained largely unrecognized for historical reasons, since it is closely bound
up with the complicated texts and images of medieval alchemy. Jung recognized both the possibility and
the existence of a process of transformation within the personality in which the
personal and the transpersonal layers and structures of the psyche both play an
essential part. In an age of
increasing collectivization, the historical significance of this discovery is
really to be found in the rediscovery of the individual
250
as an essential nucleus of creative activity in human
civilization. A collective attitude
that regarded the psychological development of the individual almost as an
individualistic vice and the agreement of the individual with the recognized
collective values of the period as the highest and indeed the only imperative is
here confronted by the revolutionary counterposition, which insists that a sound
collective ordering of society is only possible when the individual is at
liberty to realize his own inner creative freedom.
In the course of his research into the collective
unconscious, which occupied a period of several decades, Jung did more than
rediscover the world of primitive man as an essential part of the total
personality. He encountered the
ultimate foundation of the psyche itself, which in spite of all typological
differences is the common ground between Western and Eastern man; and in so
doing he created the basis for a new humanism.
In an epoch in which, a psychological preoccupation with
those religious phenomena that have always stirred mankind to its depths has
been mistakenly identified with mysticism, Jung has attempted to lay bare the
universal psychic substrate which underlies Indian, Chinese, and Islamic texts,
Gnostic and alchemical symbolism, and the dogma of the Catholic Church - that
substrate by whose dynamism, whether consciously or unconsciously, the human
race is ultimately motivated.
The record as I have described it so far would be
sufficient in itself to constitute the supreme achievement of a creative
lifetime. Jung, however, was not content to rest on his laurels. In his Answer to Job (written
when
251
he was over 75), he struck a blow, which is still almost
completely misunderstood, against the canon of the entire Western religious
establishment. In a spirit of the
profoundest religious compassion, harrowed by the evil and misery in the world,
Jung leveled an accusation against the old divine image of the God of
righteousness and wrath, which still survives in Christian consciousness in the
form of the God of the Old Testament. He “calls God to witness against God,”
with the same justification as Abraham and Moses when they strove to defend
themselves against God’s arbitrary vengefulness.
There is indeed a justification for such a revolutionary
act. It is not, however, to be
found in theological scholarship, nor in some well-thought-out philosophical or
scientific viewpoint, but rather in a justly merited claim to represent humanity
against the suprapersonal powers.
Anyone who has spent a lifetime in contact with human
beings and has consistently championed their interests has earned the right to
represent their cause before - and against! - God.
There are two Hasidic stories that have always seemed to
me to typify this kind of Jungian “vis-à-vis.” One says, we should always behave as if
in every human being we speak to we are encountering God himself. The other requires of us that whenever
we are confronted with a fellow mortal in need, we should act as if there were
no God and we were alone in all the world with that particular person. In real life, it is of course axiomatic
that no one can possibly fulfill these demands. Yet the fact that Jung comes so close to
doing so - closer than any other human being I know - confirms his right as I
see
252
it to represent suffering humanity before God, as he
does in his Answer to
Job.
It is scarcely to be expected that our contemporaries,
who are usually without a clue, should understand what is really involved in
resistance to this old God-image and in the passionate championing of a new,
hitherto unknown manifestation of the godhead who continually reveals himself
anew. But there are many people who
are at least capable of grasping the fact that the increasing “lack of religion”
of modern man is really no more than an
unconscious process of turning away from the image of a God of righteousness
which has lost all credibility and from the affect-laden, chauvinistic “love” of
this God and towards a humanity which
has been called upon to suffer beyond measure. That Jung still possessed the strength
and courage, in spite of his old age and of the perennial misconception of him as a mystic, to
incur the odium of a new and diametrically opposite misconception of ‘him as an
atheist, is the most convincing proof of the inexhaustible, revolutionary power
of his genius and of the profound seriousness of his sense of
responsibility.
The most recent “leap” taken by the man who is eighty
years old this year is also entirely characteristic of him. Although ostensibly unrelated to Answer to Job, it actually illustrates
Jung’s inability to let anything apparently “negative,” such as his accusation
against the God of Job, stand without some reference ‘to something positive.
The paper “Synchronicity: An
Acausal Connecting Principle” is a scientific attempt to extend modern man’s
view of the world by including in it the dis-
253
covery that certain “chance events” which are
“acausally” or “noncausally” connected with each other are actually meaningful
factors ‘that belong essentially to the totality of the world. This problem, which at first appears so
remote and unintelligible, will prove to be of the greatest significance for
modern man’s future view of the world. If the premise of synchronicity, to which
Jung’s paper is a tentative contribution, can be validated, this would mean no
more nor less than that phenomena which have hitherto been described in
theological terms as “miracles” are in principle contained in the structure of
our world.
It is typical of the quality of Jung’s genius that in
extreme old age, when he was already in a sense beyond the good and evil
represented by the moral judgment of his contemporaries, he dared not merely to
shake the foundations of the traditional Christian image of God, but to open up
at the same time a new and illuminating approach to the possibility of religious
experience for modern man. Jung’s
research has plainly shown that the concept of the self as the center of the
self-regulating system of the psyche points beyond the purely psychic dimension.
But the implications go further
than that. The world in its turn
produces certain strange and uncanny phenomena which, though acausal and
scarcely definable in rational terms, are nevertheless observable events that
tend to recur in certain contexts; such phenomena reveal a secret dimension of
order and meaning which encroaches on the sphere of the human
psyche.
It is still far too early for Jung’s contemporaries to
apprecia.te the full scope of his significance. We live in an age of ever-increasing
specialization. Knowledge is
sub-
254
divided into the most minute compartments, within which
more and more material is accumulated with antlike assiduity. This piling up of material goes hand in
hand with a narrowing of mental horizons, as the distance which separates
speciality from speciality and province from province steadily widens. On the other hand, world developments in
our time, in spite of political splits and iron curtains, are moving in the
direction of a universal humanism; the unity of mankind is becoming more and
more obvious. Not only has C. G.
Jung laid the scientific foundation for our understanding of the essential unity
of human nature and human culture; he is also the first representative of a new
type of humanity that unites East and West, the very modern and the primitive,
science and religion, the collective and the altogether individual, in the
universality of a single person.
C. G. Jung is the only really great man I have met in my
life. As teacher and friend for
more than three decades, he has constantly provided me with new and vital
substance for both love and vexation - like Nature herself, the lover of
leaping, ‘the superior of man. And
when, in this man with all his weaknesses and all his greatness, I struck upon
that which is greater than man, yet in which all human qualities are grounded -
that was for me a decisive and profoundly orientative
experience.
The most important thing about my encounter with Jung
was not what I learned from him about myself, mankind, and the world - though
without all this my life as it is would be inconceivable. Jung’s spontaneity was such that he would
often at first sight give the im-
255
pression he had misunderstood me or that we were talking
at cross-purposes . But what appeared to be his unrelated way of letting himself
go and speaking about himself and the world in general was actually related to
his vis-â-vis on a deeper level than could have been achieved by any willed
effort of the head or the heart by themselves. Subsequently, often years later, it would
dawn upon me how essentially right he had been, and how he had bypassed my ego,
as it were, and had spoken directly to the center of my psyche. This utmost in relatedness, which so many
people have experienced in Jung, is to my mind proof positive of the dynamic impact
of his wholeness, working as it did beyond the range of his knowledge and of all
purely rational understanding. If,
against the background of his social environment, he often has the effect of a
giant among dwarfs, who always has to stoop a little to make himself understood,
this is only another way of saying that his real vis-â-vis is only to be found
where man in his wholeness listens and responds. It was in this way, when I came to him as
a young man, that he gave me, like a gift from a higher power, the courage to be
myself. And later, too, when if he
had been a lesser man differences in temperament and in circumstances would long
ago have created misunderstandings between us, he remained - though at times
closer and at times further away - always a central vis-à-vis in my life. For all these things, now as ever, I
owe him the profoundest
gratitude.
256