Information and Psychoogy

INFORMATION AND PSYCHOLOGY: CARL JUNG

The Illusion of Rational Communication

 

 

by Kristo Ivanov, Umeå University


(February 2013, version 240309-1625)

 

 

 

CONTENTS:

 

LINK TO A GENERAL DISCLAIMER

INTRODUCTION

QUOTATIONS WITH COMMENTARIES

CONCLUSION

APPENDIX: REFERENCES TO COLLECTED WORKS

 

 

INTRODUCTION

 

Those who worked with computers in the early seventies could experience, as I did, that there were as there are ongoing "religious wars" about the relative merits of different brands of computers and especially of programming languages, not to mention methods of systems development or maintenance or IT-management or whatever new buzzword is daily invented. During the defense of my Ph.D. dissertation on Quality-Control of Information (1972) at the Royal Institute of Technology and Stockholm University I was, in particular, attacked by an extra opponent who was an enthusiast of the Prolog logic programming language. It impressed me to the point of prompting me to study the source of the "religiousness" of those strong emotions, the relationship between psychology and logic and furthermore the place of logic in scientific inquiry, as well as the meaning of science. My path took me from the particular brand of dialectical pragmatism that characterized the advisor of my doctoral thesis West Churchman along the lines of his The Design of Inquiring Systems (1971) into the philosophy of science and technology as expressed in my later work such as a review of Trends in Philosophy of Technology. During this trip I came to be led by references to study the limitations of systems thinking and its historical roots such as the Bible, the Chinese Confucian "bible" I Ching (The Book of Changes) and Carl Jung's analytical psychology in the totality of his Collected Works. The latter programmatically defines and considers the nature of consciousness and the relation between thinking and sensation typifying logic and empiricism in routine science, plus feeling and intuition of hypothesizing and discovery, while acknowledging the importance and psychological meaning of religion.

 

In the meantime and especially in the latter years I witnessed the rise of computers and computer applications beyond logic and empiricism, based on aesthetic human-computer interaction, involving edutainment and computer gaming. Systems development shifted its emphasis from hard or soft systems thinking to  "design", from economics and politics towards postmodernity and hedonistic aesthetization. I tried to understand the changes in the way of thinking in society in general and research in particular, as computer technology became ubiquitous and extended its ambitions beyond buzzwords such as artificial intelligence and conquered everybody's daily social life by means of mobile applications and social media. I repeat that I sensed a change in the way of thinking and about the role of rationality. This went on in parallel with the rise of movements such as feminism and LBTQ, so complex that it could only be grasped by an acronym. I finally considered that wisdom, understanding, and pedagogy have since the time of Plato and of the Bible been related to Eros. Ultimately my review of a book about phenomena characterized by the controversial term Political Correctness convinced me of the necessity and possibility of finding an explicative "common denominator" by applying analytical psychology to the whole of phenomena that had puzzled me.

 

In doing so I realized that the complexity of the task would be overwhelming if I had the ambition of embracing the whole body of analytical psychology, its evolution and the criticism to which it has been submitted, a body that is known for not being systematized. The more so about embracing all phenomena I had in mind as being candidates for analysis. An ideal solution could have been to start with writing a sort of summary of the analytical psychology I needed in order to cover my analysis. Such summaries have already been attempted showing the they need the writing of a whole book, one of the best being Jolande Jacoby's The Psychology of C.G. Jung (1942/1968.) It would have been a doubtful meta-project to try to form a partial summary akin to that summary. My readers may profitably choose to start first reading Jacoby's book in order to better understand what follows or, at its minimum to check the links in my text to the explanation of key concepts in the hypothesized structure of the human psyche, such as ego, unconscious, persona, anima-animus, and the self. Because of reasons of space I have not dwelled on the related concept of shadow.

 

For the purpose of this investigation I reached a compromise by singling out one main relevant original volume, volume 7 among Jung's collected works. I do not enter here in polemics about its validity and I only hypothesize it in order to go on and show its possible relevance in terms of observable consequences that can be draw logically from its conceptions. I do this in the spirit of my skepticism for "debates" that have addressed in my weblog as the meaning of debate oneliners, and eventually in a whole paper on the issue of debate. The situation, to which I return to in my conclusions, is such that any debate or dialogue can be immediately suffocated by scandalizing anybody who has opposing views. For instance, Carl Jung, may be immediately scandalized by referring to one-liners or ten-liners with claims that he was anti-semite, or womanizer, or occultist, or whatever, and this without having studied his life and work in his own words about the issue, or read anything like, for instance, Jung and Politics or The Freud/Jung Letters. But anybody can freely access the literature that has been critical of Jung, such as the most rabid Richard Noll's The Jung Cult (1994) or The Aryan Christ (1997), or Ernest Gellner's The Cunning of Unreason (really aiming at Sigmund Freud), and to ignore others like Edmund D. Cohen's C.G. Jung and the scientific attitude or Peter Homans' Jung in Context. For the rest I realize that those who deride or do not want to know about psychoanalysis or analytical psychology are also those who do not want or do not dare to know the meaning of what is going on in finance or politics, or in their own or others' bedrooms, as described, for instance in books like the relatively bland Sex and the Psyche: The Truth about Our most Secret Fantasies (2007), not to mention the extremes of a blunt classic like Psychopathia Sexualis (1886). And not the mention the silences about the meaning of these matters in all scandalizing mass media amind the criminalization of pedophilia, rape, and such, seldom illuminated by humble insights like those in a Letter from a simple Catholic priest.

 

Therefore I will pedagogically ignore disputes about Jung in secondary literature and proceed by quoting pieces of Jung's original text in (my) italics and with his own occasional italics in bold italics. They are followed by my own comments, with occasional conscious pedagogical repetitions, written in a regular font. The Collected Works' volume 7 has the general title of Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, the first essay (pp. 3-119) being "On the Psychology of the Unconscious", and the second (pp. 123-241) "The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious". In volume 7 they are followed by appendices displaying earlier published editions of these essays prior to their final form. And now I go over to selections from the original text by Carl Jung, followed by my summarizing conclusions.

 

QUOTATIONS WITH COMMENTARIES

 

(Page 3) I regard the problem of the unconscious as so important that it would, in my opinion, be a great loss if this question , which touches each one of us so closely, were to disappear from the orbit of the educated lay public by being banished to some inaccessible technical journal, there to lead a shadowy paper-existence on the shelves of libraries. The psychological concomitants of the present war [written 1916] - above all the incredible brutalization of public opinion, the mutual slandering, the unprecedented fury of destruction, the monstrous flood of lies [...] This war has pitilessly revealed to civilized man that he is still a barbarian, and has at the same time shown what an iron scourge lies in store for him if ever again he should be tempted to make his neighbor responsible for his own evil qualities.

 

One should initially clarify that Jung's conception of the unconscious has been basically influenced by the work of Eduard von Hartmann, even if he occasionally refers to Hans Ganz's dissertation on Leibniz's theory of the unconscious. He displays familiarity with philosophy related to his quest such as, marginally, Johann Georg Hamann who is occasionally referred to (Jung's Collected Works, vol. 5, §§ 12n, 14n.) For the rest, while I am transcribing this I think that this very same day (30 January 2013) I happened to listen to the retransmission of a program of the Swedish Radio about hate on the net ("Vad Betyder Hatet" - What does the hate mean? - in the series "Nya Vågen”), an issue that is increasingly being "industrialized" in both mass media and academic research, reaching the present peak in the age of blogs and social media on the Internet. The are outbursts of hate associated with matters of immigration and multiculturalism, and on the track of feminist involvement in what some perceive as gender wars in the spirit of SCUM Manifesto (Society for Cutting Up Men), leading to mutual threats of murder in the context of a still affluent welfare society where there are no wars going on. What is this - if not a pitiless revealing to civilized man that he is still a barbarian, making his neighbor, be he foreigner, Jew, or the opposite sex responsible for his own evil qualities? So, if a theater play's enactment of SCUM and its general hate of men generates counter-hate against the enacting feminists and their supporters both parties will accuse each other for having started  the escalating generation of hate.

 

 

(Page 20) We also know today that it is by no means the animal nature alone that is at odds with civilized constraints; very often it is new ideas which are thrusting upwards from the unconscious and are just as much out of harmony with the dominating culture as the instincts. For instance, we could easily construct a political theory of neurosis in so far as the man of today is chiefly excited by political passions to which the "sexual question" was only an insignificant prelude. It may turn out that politics are but the forerunner of a far deeper religious convulsion. Without being aware of it, the neurotic participates in the dominant currents of his age and reflects them in his own conflict.

 

This can be seen as related to the feminist charge that "men are animals" because of their aggressive sexual behavior. It will be my contention in this essay that the main issue is not this particular brand of sexual passion but that its politics is the forerunner, or should I say, afterrunner of a far deeper psychological and religious convulsion. More on this below.

 

(Page 32f., 40) The case of Nietzsche shows, on the one hand, the consequences of neurotic one-sidedness, and, on the other hand, the dangers that lurk in this leap beyond Christianity. Nietzsche undoubtedly felt the Christian denial of animal nature very deeply indeed, and therefore he sought a higher human wholeness beyond good and evil. But he who seriously criticizes the basic attitudes of Christianity also forfeits the protection which these bestow upon him. He delivers himself up unresistingly to the animal psyche. This is the moment of Dionysian frenzy, the overwhelming manifestation of the "blond beast" [editors' note, ref. Jung "The Role of the Unconscious", 13] which seizes the unsuspecting soul with nameless shudderings. The seizure transforms him into a hero or into a godlike being, a superhuman entity. He rightly feels himself "six thousand feet beyond good and evil." [...] One must reflect that a Dionysian experience may well be nothing more than a relapse into a pagan form or religion, so that in reality nothing new is discovered and the same story only repeats itself from the beginning.

 

Beyond good and evil also may be equated to the belief that man or the "people" are capable to decide by themselves or "democratically" what is good or evil in every situation, which in turn leads to the supposed authority to define oneself as being good. Or, as in the Bible:  And the LORD God commanded the man, "You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die." (Genesis, 2. 16-17.) And it is problematic to claim, as Jung does, to postulate the Christian denial of animal nature, depending upon what is to be meant by this term. If it is the "body" or "flesh" then it is interesting to compare this with my review of Trends in Philosophy of Technology where the Christian doctrine of the God's incarnation in Christ is taken as a paradoxically secular argument for denouncing the abuses of technology. A reference to Jung's approach is also found in elsewhere in my reference to Nietzsche in the context of Wagner Faddism. "A higher human wholeness" recalls the heritage of German cultural tradition as also displayed in anthroposophical tradition that I have addressed elsewhere in the context of "shortcomings of the flesh". But I read in the quoted text above what happens today in Western society is the postmodern "Dionysian frenzy", this time not in the form of the blond beast of war, but in the form of unmanageable, postmodern full expression of sensual feelings, be they focusing on, say, the genius of "design", computer-supported edutainment, or legitimized unbridled sexuality.

 

 

(Page 69ff.) [The archetypes or primordial images] can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity.[...] Owing to their specific energy - for they behave like highly charged autonomous centres of power - they exert a fascinating and possessive influence upon the conscious mind and can thus produce extensive alterations in the subject. One can see this in religious conversions, in cases of influence by suggestions and particularly at the onset of certain forms of schizophrenia. Now, if the patient is unable to distinguish the personality of the doctor [cf. - of an important partner] from these projections, all hope of an understanding is finally lost and a human relationship becomes impossible. But if the patient avoids this Charybdis, he is wrecked on the Scylla of introjecting these images - in other words, he ascribes their peculiarities not to the doctor but to himself. This is just as disastrous. In projection he vacillates between an extravagant and pathological deification of the doctor, and a contempt bristling with hatred. In introjection, he gets involved in a ridiculous self-deification, or else in moral self-laceration. The mistake he makes in both cases comes from attributing to a person the contents of the collective unconscious. In this way he makes himself or his partner either god or devil. Here we see the characteristic effect of the archetype: it seizes hold of the psyche with a kind of primeval force and compels it to transgress the bounds of humanity. It causes exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude (inflation), loss of free will, delusion, and enthusiasm in good and evil alike. This is the reason why men have always needed demons and cannot live without gods, except for a few particularly clever specimen of homo occidentalis who lived yesterday of the day before, supermen for whom "God is dead" because they themselves have become gods - but tin-gods with thick skulls and cold hearts. [...] I therefore consider it wiser to acknowledge the idea of God consciously; for if we do not, something else is made God, usually something quite inappropriate and stupid such as only an "enlightened" intellect could hatch forth.

 

I think that this dynamics of the human psyche at a point where Jung introduces the concepts of the unconscious and archetypes, may explain the reason for the present time's conflicts between generations or old vs. young people, parents and children or the gender-wars that I have addressed mainly in my popularization of research in my weblog. Jung himself applies this to the relation between patient and doctor, while it is easy to see that children initially regard their parents as "doctors" who will solve their life-problems, as lovers are tempted to regard each other as curing and caring doctors. In doing so without self-knowledge and account of the limits of their understanding they fall between the Scylla and Charybdis of the deification or contempt of themselves or of their partner. When archetypal forces take hold of masses of people in the name of more or less democratic consensus then this means wars between nations and persecutions of witches, Jews, foreigners, would-be rapists or whatever. This passage also exemplifies the particular serious appreciation of religion that is equated to psychology, and regardless the occasional criticism that is leveled against, among others, Christianity, and which may be discussed. A symptomatic exquisite expression by Jung in this respect deserves special attention: "[A] man can can know even less about God than an ant can know of the contents of the British Museum." (p. 235n.)

 

 

(Page 94f., 97) Only in the age of enlightenment did people discover that the gods did not really exist, but were simply projections. Thus the gods were disposed of. But the corresponding psychological function was by no means disposed of; it lapsed into the unconscious, and men were thereupon poisoned by the surplus of libido that had once been laid up in the cult of divine images. The devaluation and repression of so powerful a function as the religious function naturally have serious consequences for the psychology of the individual. The unconscious is prodigiously strengthened by this reflux of libido, and, through its archaic collective contents, begins to exercise a powerful influence on the conscious mind. The period of the Enlightenment closed, as we know, with the horrors of the French Revolution. And at the present time, too, we are once more experiencing this uprising of the unconscious destructive forces of the collective psyche. The result has been mass-murder on an unparalleled scale. [Author's note: written in 1916; superfluous to remark that it is still true today, 1943.] This is precisely what the unconscious was after. Its position had been immeasurably strengthened beforehand by the rationalism of modern life, which, by depreciating everything irrational, precipitated the function of the irrational into the unconscious. But once this function finds itself in the unconscious, it works unceasing havoc, like an incurable disease whose focus cannot be eradicated because it is invisible. Individual and nation alike are then compelled to live the irrational in their own lives, even devoting their loftiest ideals and their best wits to expressing its madness in the most perfect form. [...] On account of their affinity with physical phenomena, the archetypes usually appear in projection; and, because projections are unconscious, they appear on persons in the immediate environment, mostly in the form of abnormal over- or undervaluations which provoke misunderstandings, quarrels, fanaticism, and follies of every description. [...] In this way, too, there grow up modern myth-formations, i.e. fantastic rumours, suspicions, prejudices. [... F]ear is a primitive dread of the contents of the collective unconscious.

 

Passing over our contemporary "mass murders" in the form of would-be legitimate wars on terrorism by the bombing and invasion of foreign territories on the other side of the globe, or serial killings, we have other unnoticed wars, persecution, mobbing or discrimination as in gender wars as staged by (separatist) radical feminism. They have been resepresented by particular sites on the web such as the RadFem hub, also criticized. As I have noted elsewhere they have come to the extreme of endorsing the educational advantage of the previously mentioned SCUM Manifesto, and I try to show how this phenomenon matches Jung's text above: Individual and nation alike are then compelled to live the irrational in their own lives, even devoting their loftiest ideals and their best wits to expressing its madness in the most perfect form. In Sweden it is possible to witness how critics of feminism have got involved in a spiral of escalating hate that indiscriminately classifies them as guilty of hate speech. At the same time legislation about rising fear of rape (cf. about fear related to prejudice, as primitive dread of the collective unconscious), driven by feminists, has got entangled in new definitions of rape as related to consent, evidencing absurd ambiguities and difficulties ("madness in the most perfect form") such as "Morning-After Regret" in the admissibility of evidence for judicial resolution of escalating disputes. It should be obvious that there may be an altogether different agenda behind these phenomena, and it has been exposed in my review of a book on political correctness by organizational psychologist Howard Schwartz. The net result of all this is that public debate is made impossible, a phenomenon that I also tried to address in terms of the meaning of debate one-liners. For the rest, the "precipitated function of the irrational into the unconscious" can also have an explicative value for the phenomena of addiction to the fantasy world of computer gaming where the addicts are "compelled to live the irrational in their own lives."

 

 

(p. 100) [In discussing the case of a dream by a woman patient.]  Her powers of fantasy are a symptom of illness in that she revels in them far too much and allows real life to slip by. Any more mythology would be exceedingly dangerous for her, because a great chunk of external life stands before her, still unlived. She had too little hold upon life to risk all at once a complete reversal of standpoint. The collective unconscious has fallen upon her and threatens to bear her away from a reality whose demands have not been adequately met. Accordingly, as the dream indicates, the collective unconscious had to be presented to her as something dangerous, otherwise she would have been only too ready to make it a refuge from the demands of life.

 

If we consider the possibility that Xenophobia, mobbing, hate speech, separatist feminism and such be "mythological" narratives, they can be socially dangerous, as dangerous as the living in cyberspace or gaming with computer games. Mythologically colored gender wars can be a threat that bears away from a reality whose demands have not been adequately met, such as marriage and emotional commitments of adult life to marriage partners, common children, relatives. Eternal recurrent youth is enacted by means of repeated new starts of life with new partners, new children, and new jobs. The projection of unconscious contents upon partners makes them menacing and dangerous motivating repeated breaking of relationships, disappointments ending in divorces and changes of careers regardless of the real problems of unemployment and economic crisis.

 

 

(Page 104ff.) [In discussing the case of a dream by a young man a little over twenty] As in nearly all cases of this kind, he had a particularly close tie with his mother [...] which expresses itself consciously, perhaps, only in the retarded development of character, i.e., in a relative infantilism. The developing personality naturally veers away from such an unconscious infantile bond [...] for nothing is more obstructive to development than persistence in an unconscious - we could also say, a psychically embryonic - state. For this reason instinct seizes on the first opportunity to replace the mother by another object. It it is to be a real mother substitute, this object must be , in some sense, an analogy of her. [...] Hence the enthusiasm with which his childish imagination took up the idea of the Church; for the Church is, in the fullest sense, a mother. [...] The Church represent a higher spiritual substitute for the purely natural, or "carnal", tie to the parents. Consequently it frees the individual from an unconscious natural relationship. [...T]he Church is simply the latest, and specifically Western, form of an instinctive striving [...] that can be found in the most varied forms among all primitive peoples [...] I mean the institution or rite of initiation into manhood [...] where he is systematically alienated from his family. [...T]he longing for a man's leadership continued to grow in the boy, taking the form of homosexual leanings - a faulty development that might never come about had a man been there to educate his childish fantasies. [...] Viewed in this light, the homosexuality of adolescence is only a misunderstanding of the otherwise very appropriate need for a masculine guidance. One might also say that the fear of incest which is based on the mother-complex extends to women in general; but in my opinion an immature man is quite right to be afraid of women, because his relations with women are generally disastrous.

 

The description above is apt to convey the dynamism of what happens in contemporary Western society where children, both boys and girls tend often to grow up in families without fathers, be it because of the phenomenon of single mothers and absent father, not the least after early divorces, which in turn are an expression for both partners' longing for their mothers or for a motherly caring attitude. This process was analyzed in my previously mentioned review of a book about political correctness as well in a weblog item on "parents, adult children, childish adults." If the boys, then, get leanings toward homosexuality this can be interpreted as a search for the father, the same happening for the girls becoming immature women who are "quite right to be afraid of men" because their relations with men are generally disastrous. They can in turn search for a woman as a mother-substitute, or search for the modern analog of the Church, which is the feminist movement, the difference being that while feminism appears as a "religion" it has not the spiritual content of the Christian Church. This approach, oversimplified as it may appear in our impoverished rendering of the original text, has the advantage of simultaneously accounting for both homosexuality and feminism in the ongoing disaggregation of the original Western family. I also have already noted elsewhere that futile erotic revolts for "freedom" are consistent with the sexualization of societies that are controlled by a strong and controlling "benevolent" state, be it in post-revolutionary enlightened France andunder the label of a Swedish state individualism. The feminist battles for the so called liberation of women has impinged on the role and icon of the traditional mother who tends to be perceived as a single mother with the right of abortion seen as control over her own body. Children grow up with consciousness of their increasing dependence upon a single mother while the mother's role - not to mention the often absent father's - is being increasingly transferred to child care institutions, and it is felt as a matter of chance that they have not been aborted. Infantile fear of the opposite sex also implies possible mutual aggression and spiraling hate, a psychic correspondent to the physiology of fight-or-flight response, that feds upon the energy of the unconscious archetypes activated in the situation, beyond the important question of relation between power and violence considered by Hannah Arendt in On Violence. Compare with the above mentioned phenomenon of hate on the net or cyber hate involving mass response to feminist activism. In the Western world women in general and feminist activists in particular feel terrorized by expressions of brutal hate, not the least in the form of verbal abusive behavior whose source and motivation is not understood. In such a situation it is even more puzzling that many people involved in the debate, including Gran Lambertz, member of the Swedish supreme court in a television debate (SVT1, 7 February 2013), as well as the director of the Swedish Data Inspection Board claims that - disregarding causes, costs and financial priorities for the limited resources in the police and judicial system - it is required to further criminalize and persecute thousands of daily cases of hate on the net. Lambertz himself must have had later in 2021 an occasion to reconsider his support for easier criminalization when he himself was accused of rape by a female student but denied wrongdoing and was released from jail on March 23rd after an investigation. [And he had the motivation of commenting the end of the adventure in his personal blog on 18 April 2021, long after the rest of this text was written]. The few who, like Oscar Swartz (in the website SVT-Debatt 7 February 2013) and Paulina Neuding (Svenska Dagbladet 9 February 2013) feel the need to problematize the source and process of escalation of hate as well as this sort of solutions to the problem, are occasionally visible but in clear minority. A main reason for this development, besides general cultural decay, can be the extreme Swedish tradition of legal positivism (related to legal realism in the "confusion between legal and moral") that I myself among many other preceding me, denounced in a book Systems Development and Rule of Law (1986, in Swedish, pdf-format 66 MB.) Besides all that, there is the question of other deeper causes behind the increase of complaints of harassment and offences that I have addressed in my weblog.

 

 

(Page 145ff.) [T]ranspersonal contents are not just inert or dead matter that can be annexed at will. Rather they are living entities which exert and attractive force upon the conscious mind. Identification with one's office or one's title is very attractive indeed, which is precisely why so many men are nothing more than the decorum accorded to them by society. In vain would one look for a personality behind the husk. Underneath all the padding one would find a very pitiable little creature. That is why the office - or whatever this outer husk may be - is so attractive: it offers easy compensation for personal deficiencies. -- Outer attractions, such as offices, titles, and other social regalia are not the only things that cause inflation. These are simply impersonal quantities that lie outside in society, in the collective consciousness. But just as there is a society outside the individual, so there is a collective psyche outside the personal psyche, namely the collective unconscious, concealing [...] elements that are no whit less attractive. And just as a man may suddenly step into the world on his professional dignity [...], so another may disappear out of it equally suddenly when it is his lot to behold one of those mighty images that put a new face upon the world. These are the magical representations collectives which underlie the slogan, the catchword, and, on a higher level, the language of the poet and mystic. [...] Just as one man may disappear in his social role, so another may be engulfed in an inner vision and be lost to his surroundings. Many fathomless transformations of personality, like sudden conversions and other far reaching changes of mind, originate in the attractive power of a collective image, which [...] can cause such a high degree of inflation that the entire personality is disintegrated. This disintegration is a mental disease, of a transitory or a permanent nature, a "splitting of the mind" or "schizophrenia", in Bleuler's term. The pathological inflation naturally depends on some innate weakness of the personality against the autonomy of collective unconscious contents. [...T]he individual who annexes the unconscious heritage of the collective psyche to what has accrued to him in the course of his ontogenetic development, as though it were part of the latter, enlarges the scope of his personality in an illegitimate way and suffers the consequences. [...] It has the effect of crushing and devaluing the personality. This shows itself in the [...] stifling of self-confidence or else in an unconscious heightening of the ego's importance to the point of pathological will to power.

 

It is possible that identification with one's office or title is equivalent to the identification with membership in an organization, political party or social movement that lends dignity and importance while compensating for personal deficiencies. This may be legitimate, like membership in labor unions when they do not mainly express collective egoism. Membership in the German national socialistic party was experienced by Germans as regaining dignity after unjust consequences of war disasters, or joining feminist movements is experienced as lending dignity and powers (cf. the "will to power", above) for vindication of those who feel oppressed or just unsatisfied, experiencing personal deficiencies in emotional or social life, family or work life. If not, it is difficult to seriously understand the motivations and behavior of such extreme movements like Femen or "The Feminist International" (Le Monde 18 February 2012.) If this is combined with energy of activated archetypes in the collective unconscious, such as the Demeter-Kore archetypes I suggested in my already referenced review of political correctness, this can be overpowering "schizophrenic", and explain the spiraling reciprocal hate as experienced lately in the collective anonymity of computer supported Internet-mail and social media, referred above as net-hate or cyber-hate. In one review of the onslaught of technology and its disruptive effects I did refer to the symbolic loss of initiation and ritual for sexual approach. Combined with the effect of early dismissiveness or absence of an unconditionally loving mother (not to mention the disparaged father that I did analyze elsewhere) it leads to fear of intimate relationships, brutality, battering, so called hate crimes, rape or just perceived harassment and perceived rape because of confused behavior willed by an unconscious overpowered ego - "morning-after regret". All this could be sufficient to explain the breakdown of societal communication and escalation of hate. In such a perspective the radical feminist collective incrimination of men can be seen as a socio-psychological analog to historical persecutions, such as of Jews, collectively incriminated on the basis of ethnic or biological characteristics.

 

 

(Page 152ff.) For the development of the personality, then, strict differentiation from the collective psyche is absolutely necessary, since partial or blurred differentiation leads to an immediate melting away of the individual in the collective. [...] Through his identification with the collective psyche he will infallibly try to force the demands of this unconscious upon others, for identity with the collective psyche always brings with it a feeling of universal validity - "godlikeness" - which completely ignores all differences in the personal psyche of his fellows. [...] The individual elements lapse into the unconscious, where, by the law of necessity, they are transformed into something essentially baleful, destructive, and anarchical. Socially, this evil principle shows itself in the spectacular crimes - regicide and the like - perpetrated by certain prophetically inclined individuals; but in the great mass of the community it remains in the background, and only manifests itself indirectly in the inexorable moral degeneration of society. It is a notorious fact that the morality of society as a whole is in inverse ratio to its size; for the greater the aggregation of individuals, the more the individual factors are blotted out, and with them morality, which rests entirely on the moral sense of the individual and the freedom necessary for this. [...] Society, by automatically stressing all the collective qualities in its individual representatives, puts a premium on mediocrity, on everything that settles down to vegetate in an easy, irresponsible way. This process begins in school, continues at the university, and rules all departments in which the State has a hand. [...] Without freedom there can be no morality. [...] -- Human beings have one faculty which, though it is of the greatest utility for collective purposes, is most pernicious for individuation, and that is the faculty of imitation. Collective psychology cannot dispense with imitation, for without it all mass organizations, the State and the social order, are impossible. [...] But we see every day how people use or rather abuse, the mechanism of imitation for the purpose of personal differentiation: they are content to ape some eminent personality, some striking characteristic or mode of behaviour, thereby achieving and outward distinction from the circle in which they move. We could almost say that as a punishment for this uniformity of their minds with those of their neighbours, already real enough, is intensified into an unconscious, compulsive bondage to the environment. As a rule these specious attempts at individual differentiation stiffen into a pose, and the imitator remains at the same level he always was, only several degrees more sterile than before. To find out what is truly individual in ourselves, profound reflection is needed.

 

This piece of text addresses the earlier mentioned phenomenon and my review of political correctness, in as much the individual psyche is tempted to bow to opinions that claim and have been accorded the "godlikeness" of universal validity, or else be the victim of persecution for the individual elements that are societally perceived as essentially baleful, destructive and anarchical. Hence the spiraling hate between the collective and individuals who get exasperated for not having the skill for unraveling and exposing all this complexity overviewed in the present text. This process of political correctness manifests in a collectively unperceived moral degeneration of society, and the gradual overtaking by a State-morality, which in Sweden has been described in the comprehensively historical overview of a book with the intriguing title "Is the Swede a human being?" that I have reviewed elsewhere. With regard to political correctness, the concept can be seen as also embracing what is to be worthy of imitation because considered as trendy or cool, not the least under the aegis of powerful leaders of opinion, fashion or aestheticist design, all divorced from moral considerations. Over an extended period this may include the incrementalism of creeping or mission creep, i.e. "the gradual expansion or proliferation of something beyond its original goals or boundaries, considered negatively" such as under the unnoticed extension of "cool tolerance" to the gradual disintegration of the traditional Christian family in the track of, first divorce, then abortion, and homosexuality and LGBT, serial monogamy, and lately also proposals of polygamy. Not to mention the ethical absurdities related to biotechnological applications to fertility, that I considered elsewhere.

 

 

(Page 158f.) [In analyzing the case of a young woman.] At the beginning of the treatment the patient was quite unconscious of the fact that her relation to her father was a fixation, and that she was therefore seeking a man like her father, whom she could then meet with her intellect. This in itself would not have been a mistake if her intellect had not had that peculiarly protesting character such as is unfortunately often encountered in intellectual women. Such an intellect is always trying to point out mistakes in others; it is pre-eminently critical, with a disagreeably personal undertone yet it always wants to be considered objective. This invariably makes a man bad-tempered, particularly if, as so often happens, the criticism touches on some weak spot which, in the interests of fruitful discussion, were better avoided. But far from wishing the discussion to be fruitful, it is the unfortunate peculiarity of this feminine intellect to seek out a man's weak spots, fasten on them, and exasperate him. This is not usually a conscious aim, but rather has the unconscious purpose of forcing a man into a superior position and thus making him an object of admiration. The man does not as a rule notice that he is having the role of the hero thrust upon him; he merely finds her taunts so odious that in future he will go a long way to avoid meeting the lady. In the end the only man who can stand her is the one who gives in at the start, and therefore has nothing wonderful about him.

 

I did include this text because despite of having been written in the context of a discussion of the Jungian "persona" it portrays a phenomenon that appears mainly described in the context of the "animus or "anima" (the latter in the case of men) which will be resumed later (below) in this paper. It is particularly relevant for a Jungian understanding of so called gender wars that are often associated to radical feminism and, lately, with so called the previously mentioned cyber-hate or, rather, the broad concept of hate speech whenever the "bad tempered" man does not choose to "go a long way to avoid meeting the lady."  It is important for a partial understanding the difficulties of dialogue between men and women, and therefore in society as a whole.

 

 

(Page 189.) No man is so entirely masculine that he has nothing feminine in him. The fact is, rather, that very masculine men have - carefully guarded and hidden - a very soft emotional life, often incorrectly described as "feminine". A man counts it a virtue to repress his feminine traits as much as possible, just as a woman at least until recently, considered it unbecoming to be "mannish". The repression of feminine traits and inclinations naturally causes these contrasexual demands to accumulate in the unconscious. No less naturally, the imago of woman (the soul image) becomes a receptacle for these demands, which is why a man in his love-choice, is strongly tempted to win the woman who best corresponds to his own unconscious femininity - a woman, in short, who can unhesitantly receive the projection of his soul. Although such a choice is often regarded and felt as altogether ideal, it may turn out that the man manifestly married his own worst weakness.

 

This passage reveals the process of mutual attraction between man and woman that Jung in other works develops as central to the ultimate psychological development, the individuation process in which the projection of man's more or less unconscious feminine contrasexual side (anima) is facilitated to fall upon an outwardly feminine woman, while a woman's corresponding inward masculine side (animus) is facilitated to be projected upon an outwardly masculine man. As the text above suggests such a most motivated choice is often regarded and felt as altogether ideal: regarded from the man's side, by marrying his worst weakness he unconsciously hopes and expects to discharge himself from the responsibility of remediating his own worst weakness. This however does not work in the long run because the woman who is the receptacle of his projection will in time affirm her true personality and consequently the difference between it and the man's projections. Under the binding promise of lifelong faithfulness the man then feels obliged to retire his projections recognizing and assimilitating his contrasexual content that has been allowed to remain unconscious. The corresponding process is valid when seen from woman's side. And, indeed, this seems to be the psychic purpose of marriage, the initial discharge of an unconscious responsibility in order that later life and emotional bindings including children will help the hard work of retiring projections, integrating the contrasexual side into the individuated personality of both the contracting parties, and at the same time learning to know both oneself and the other party divested from one own's projections. It is easy to see that this does not mean "acting out" the contrasexual side in a sort of overt homosexuality or bisexuality since it would be not a projection of unconscious contrasexual contents, but rather a would-be shortcut to sham-individuation, a mirroring and amplification of an unconscious function turned inside-out. More on this below when the book's text mentions" These psychic changes of sex are due entirely to the fact that a function which belongs inside has been turned outside.

 

 

(Page 192ff.) The persona is a complicated systems of relations between the individual consciousness and society, fittingly enough a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and, on the other, to conceal the true nature of the individual.[...] What goes behind the mask is then called "private life".[...] The construction of a collectively suitable persona means a formidable concession to the external world, a genuine self-sacrifice which drives the ego straight into identification with the persona, so that people really do exist who believe they are what they pretend to be. [...] When we examine such cases critically, we find that the excellence of the mask is compensated by the "private life" going behind it. [...A]ny man who becomes one with his persona can cheerfully let all disturbances manifest themselves through his wife without her noticing it, though she pays for her self-sacrifice with a bad neurosis. [...] -- The persona, the ideal picture of man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and the individual outwardly plays the strong man, so he becomes inwardly a woman, i.e. the anima, for it is the anima that reacts to the persona. But because the inner world is dark and invisible to the extraverted consciousness, and because a man is all the less capable of conceiving his weakness the more he is identified with the persona, the persona's counterpart, the anima, remains completely in the dark and is at once projected, so that our hero comes under the heel of his wife's slipper. If this results in a considerable increase of her power she will acquit herself none too well. She becomes inferior, thus providing her husband with the welcome proof that it is not he, the hero, who is inferior in private, but his wife.

 

That is, just because "private life" is what goes on behind the mask of the persona with which the ego has identified itself, people do not dare to tell or to acknowledge "the meaning of what is going on in their own or others' bedrooms", as I already wrote above. Many of us who have experiences from a long life know of secrets that cover the untold realities and fantasies of bedrooms, destroying the claims of self-righteousness by those who complain of others' . In any case, the interplay described above between man and woman (husband and wife) must be seen as symmetrical, i.e. an analog interplay between the woman's persona and her animus. That is, for instance, the persona or the ideal picture of a woman as she should be, in inwardly compensated by masculine boldness or arrogance. Outwardly she plays the weak oppressed woman that is broadly advertised by radical feminists, so she becomes inwardly a man, i.e. the animus, for it is the animus that reacts to the persona. Thus the animus that is in the dark is at once projected upon the man, lending considerable increase of her husband's power he will acquit himself none too well. (Compare with my reference to self-victimization in my weblog.) He becomes inferior, thus providing his wife the welcome proof that she is not inferior in private, but her husband and possibly men in general. And, as Jung expresses it in a related passage (p. 195): "This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life."

 

 

(Page 197ff.) Just as the father acts as a protection against the dangers of the external world and thus serves his son as a model persona, so the mother protects him against the dangers that threaten from the darkness of his psyche. In the puberty rites, therefore, the initiate receives instruction about these things of "the other side", so that he is put in a position to dispense with his mother's protection. -- The modern civilized man has to forgo this primitive but nonetheless admirable system of education. The consequence is that the anima, in the form of the mother-imago, is transferred to the wife; and the man, as soon as he marries, becomes childish, sentimental, dependent, and subservient, or else truculent, tyrannical, hypersensitive, always thinking about the prestige of his superior masculinity. The last is of course merely the reverse of the first. The safeguard against the unconscious, which is what his mother meant to him, is not replaced by anything in the modern man's education; unconsciously, therefore, his ideal of marriage is so arranged that his wife has to take over the magical role of the mother. Under the cloak of ideally exclusive marriage he is really seeking his mother's protection, and thus he plays into the hands of his wife's possessive instincts. His fear of the of the dark incalculable power of the unconscious gives his wife an illegitimate authority over him, and forges such a dangerously close union that the marriage is permanently on the brink of explosion from internal tension - or else, out of protest, he flies to the other extreme, with the same results.[...] -- When the anima continually thwarts the good intentions of the conscious mind, by contriving a private life that stands in sorry contrast to the dazzling persona, it is exactly the same as when a nave individual, who has not the ghost of a persona, encounters the most painful difficulties in his passage through the world. [...] Such people can avoid disappointments and an infinity of sufferings, scenes, and social catastrophes only by learning to see how men behave in the world. They must learn to understand what society expects of them; they must realize that there factors and persons in the world far above them; they must know that what they do has a meaning for others, and so forth. [...] -- The man with the persona is blind to the existence of inner realities, just as the other is blind to the reality of the world, which for him has merely the value of an amusing and fantastic playground. [...] -- No more than the blows rained on the innocent abroad can be healed by moral repression will it help him resignedly to catalogue his "weaknesses". [...] Take, for example the "spotless" man of honour and public benefactor, whose tantrums and explosive moodiness terrify his wife and children. What is the anima doing here? [...] Clearly, the anima is trying to enforce a separation. This tendency is in nobody's interest. The anima comes between them like a jealous mistress who tries to alienate the man from his family .[...] Our first thought is that the man of honour is on the lookout for another woman. That might be - it might even be arranged by the anima as most effective means to the desired end. [...] As a matter of fact, this arrangement is a very common method of implementing a separation - and of hampering a final solution, Therefore it is more reasonable not to assume that such an obvious possibility is the end purpose of the separation. We would be better advised to investigate what is behind the tendencies of the anima, that is, the strict refusal to regard the trend towards separation as a weakness of one's own. Only when this has been done can one face the anima with the question, "Why do you want this separation?" [...] -- I mean this as an actual technique. We know that practically every one has not only the peculiarity, but also the faculty, of holding a conversation with himself.

 

This passage exposes the possible sources of emotional, moody, or aggressive behavior in intimate relationships that is caused by lack of self-knowledge where the self (not yet understood here in the particular sense of analytical psychology) is explained to "not being a unity but a contradictory multiplicity of complexes" (p. 201). The highlighted complexes are the ego, persona , and anima-animus. That means that hopes, disappointments and ultimate even hate and aggression are based on misunderstandings that are in turn conditioned by shortcomings in the dominant culture, family life, and education rather than in "patriarchy", which has symptomatically no visible connection to "patriarchs" and only has been understood and used in a sociologistic (as analog to biologistic) reduction of the psyche to politics. In this context it is also shown that the present ongoing disintegration of the traditional family, far from being a modern liberation and affirmation of individual freedom, can be a symptom of psychic disintegration and "moral degeneration of society"  as explained above.

 

 

(Page 205ff.) In the course of my exposition so far, I have kept exclusively to masculine psychology. The anima, being of feminine gender, is exclusively a figure that compensates the masculine consciousness. In woman the compensating figure is of masculine character, and can therefore appropriately be termed the animus. If it was not easy task to describe what is meant by the anima, the difficulties become almost insuperable when we set out to describe the psychology of the animus. [...] -- An inferior consciousness cannot eo ipso be ascribed to women; it is merely different from masculine consciousness. But, just as a woman is often clearly conscious of things which a man is still groping for in the dark, so there are naturally fields of experience in a man which, for woman, are still wrapped in the shadows of non-differentiation, chiefly things in which she has little interest. Personal relations are as a rule more important and interesting to her than objective facts and their interconnections. The wide fields of commerce, politics, technology, and science, the whole realm of the applied masculine mind, she relegates to the penumbra of consciousness; while, on the other hand, she develops a minute consciousness of personal relationships, the infinite nuances of which usually escape the man entirely.[...] -- I could only say this: as the anima produces moods, so the animus produces opinions; and as the moods of a man issue from a shadowy background, so the opinions of a woman rest on equally unconscious prior assumptions. Animus opinions very often have the character of solid convictions that are not lightly shaken, or of principles whose validity is seemingly unassailable. [...] -- The animus does not appear as one person, but as plurality of persons. [...] The animus is rather like as assembly of fathers or dignitaries of some kind who lay down incontestable, "rational", ex cathedra judgments. On closer examination these exacting judgments turn out to be largely sayings and opinions scraped together more or less unconsciously from childhood on, and compressed into a canon of average truth, justice, and reasonableness, a compendium of preconceptions which, whenever a conscious and competent judgment is lacking [...] instantly obliges an opinion. [...] -- It goes without saying that the animus is just as often projected as the anima. [...] Like the anima, the animus is a jealous lover. He is an adept putting, in place of the real man, an opinion about him. [...] Animus opinions are invariably collective, and they override individuals and individual judgments in exactly the same way as the anima thrusts her emotional anticipations and projections between man and wife. [...I]f the woman does not stir his sentimental side, and competence is expected of her rather than  appealing helplessness and stupidity, then her animus opinions irritate the man to death. [...] Men can be pretty venomous here, for it is an inescapable fact that animus always plays up the anima - and vice versa, of course - so that all further discussion becomes pointless. -- In intellectual women the animus encourages a critical disputatiousness and would-be highbrowism, which, however, consists essentially in harping on some irrelevant weak point and nonsensically making it the main one. Or a perfectly lucid discussion gets tangled up in the most maddening way through the introduction of a quite different and if possible perverse point of view.

 

Where the text above states that "the wide fields of commerce, politics, technology, and science, the whole realm of the applied masculine mind, she relegates to the penumbra of consciousness; while, on the other hand, she develops a minute consciousness of personal relationships, the infinite nuances of which usually escape the man entirely I could only say this: as the anima produces moods, so the animus produces opinions" it will be objected that this is no more the case today after the recent presumed liberation of women (and men), despite of being exquisitely endorsed by a feminist icon like Ellen Key, opportunely categorized as "difference feminist". But what may happening is that if the liberation is obtained under animus-anima domination then the activities will now be the third-rate product of moods and opinions, something that I testify suspecting in my most familiar field of science (cf. my later research reports) and of personal relationships. In feminist research this phenomenon of third rate intellectual product can be perceived by comparing, for instance, the treatment of the concept of honor in the kind of research summarized by Jenny Westerstrand in the article on violence against women (in Swedish, Dagens Nyheter, 26 August 2013) with the treatment of honor as related to Christianity by Steven Shapin in his A Social History of Truth (chap. 3, esp. pp. 107-109.) The passages above will be read by some as highly controversial because, despite a majority of scientists subscribing to long-term "evolution", sex-issues renamed as gender issues are supposed to have evolved in one or few hundred years or, in question of women's professional liberation, or acceptance of homosexuality and legitimation of use of terms like homophobia, even in a few decades. Even well established and historically researched complex concepts like (sexual) instinct have been trivialized and neutralized by using other ad-hoc atheoretical geometrical terms such as (LGBT) "leaning" and "inclination", which reduces stray instincts to posited ad-hoc biological constructs. Not to mention the connection to the issue of "free will" and of human independence upon nature as expressed in the following text of Friedrich Schelling quoted by Bob Doyle: The defenders of Freedom usually think of showing the independence of man from nature, which is indeed easy. But they leave alone man's inner independence from God, because this is the most difficult problem...Thus since man occupies a middle place between the non-being of nature and the absolute Being, God, he is free from both. He is free from God through having and independent root in nature; free from nature through the fact that the divine is awakened in him, that which in the midst of nature is above nature.

 

Biological differences, if accepted at all, are not recognized as entailing psychological differences despite of philosophy of science acknowledging that reality does not appear subdivided in the academic disciplines created by man for scientific studies. Because of all this I did warn the reader from the beginning that I do enter into the polemic of the issue. I satisfy myself with postulating the body of the original analytical psychology and proceed "as if" plus "take it or leave it", describing and deducing in a way that permits the readers to possibly recognize their own recent experiences, and those accounted for in mass media or social media. Ultimately I wish to convey the feeling that apparent escalating hate and aggression is not necessarily based on evil inherent to women or men but, rather on the lack of self-knowledge and self-control as well protection from evil influences that previously under hundreds of years was directed through religions. An analysis of some of these issues is included in my review of the previously mentioned book about political correctness and of a book about The Lucifer Effect.

 

 

(Page 208.) However all these traits [...] are simply and solely due to the extraversion of the animus. The animus does not belong to the function of conscious relationship; his function is rather to facilitate relations with the unconscious. Instead of the woman merely associating opinions with external situations - situations which she ought to think about consciously - the animus, as an associative function, should be directed inwards, where it could associate the contents of the unconscious. [...] The animus is [...] also a creative and procreative being, not in the sense of masculine creativity, but in the sense that he brings forth something we might call the [logos spermatikos], the spermatic word. Just as a man brings forth his work as a complete creation out of his inner feminine nature, so the inner masculine side of a woman brings forth creative seeds which have the power to fertilize the feminine side of man. [...] -- A woman possessed by the animus is always in danger of losing her femininity, her adapted feminine persona, just as a man in like circumstances runs the risk of effeminacy. These psychic changes of sex are due entirely to the fact that a function which belongs inside has been turned outside. [...] -- With regard to the plurality of the animus as distinguished from what we might call the "uni-personality" of the anima, this remarkable fact seems to me to be a correlate of the conscious attitude. The conscious attitude of woman is in general far more exclusively personal than that of man. Her world is made up of fathers and mothers, brothers and sisters, husbands and children. The rest of the world consists likewise of families, who nod to each other but are, in the main, interested essentially in themselves. The man's world is the nation, the state, business concerns, etc.

 

This passage indicates that the orientation of anima and animus is important with regard to the expression of masculinity and femininity in the outward behavior which socially men respectively. When one proclaims gender equality and differentiates gender (as social construction) from sex, sex is reduced to its least common denominator of animal biological drive. This combined with the equality equated to economic independence based on the State's subsidizing contributions (that I analyzed as the roots of "Swedish love" in my review of Is the Swede a Human Being?) undermines the counter-play that creates the dynamics of projection and the socio-psychological motivation for the painful withdrawal of the projected psychic contents. The main consequence of this state of affairs is, as portrayed in earlier passages of the book, the extensive breakdown of communications between man and woman, their psychic development in individuation, as well the destruction of the family as environment for education of children of both sexes as related to a true father and mother.

 

 

(Page 224f.) [In discussing fantasies of a patient.] To the degree that the patient takes an active part, the personified figure of anima or animus will disappear. It becomes the function of relationship between conscious and unconscious. But when the unconscious contents - these same fantasies - are not "realized" they give rise to a negative activity and personification, i.e., to the autonomy of animus and anima. Psychic abnormalities then develop, states of possession ranging in degree from ordinary moods and "ideas" to psychoses. All these states are characterized by one and same fact that an unknown "something" has taken possession of a smaller or greater portion of the psyche and asserts its hateful and harmful existence undeterred by all our insight, reason, and energy, thereby proclaiming the power of the unconscious over the conscious mind, the sovereign power of possession. In this state the possessed part of the psyche generally develops an animus or anima psychology. The woman's incubus consists of a host of masculine demons; the man's succubus is a vampire.[...] -- [A] second fantasy is a typical example of the kind of content produced by the collective unconscious. Although the form is entirely subjective and individual, the substance is none the less collective, being composed of universal images and ideas common to the generality of men, components, therefore, by which the individual is assimilated to the rest of mankind. If these contents remain unconscious, the individual is, in them, unconsciously commingled with other individuals - in other words, he is not differentiated, not individuated. -- Here one may ask, perhaps, why it is so desirable that a man should be individuated. Not only is it desirable, it is absolutely indispensable because, through his contamination with others, he falls into situations and commits actions which bring him into disharmony with himself. From all states of unconscious contamination and non-differentiation there is begotten a compulsion to be and act in a way contrary to one's own nature. Accordingly a man can neither be at one with himself nor accept responsibility for himself. He feels to be in a degrading unfree, unethical condition. [...] When a man can say of his states and actions, "As I am, so I act," he can be at one with himself [...] We must recognize that nothing is more difficult to bear than oneself. [...] Yet even this most difficult of achievements becomes possible if we can distinguish ourselves from the unconscious contents. The introvert discovers these contents in himself, the extravert finds them projected upon human objects. In both cases the unconscious contents are the cause of blinding illusions which falsify ourselves and our relations to our fellow men, making both unreal. For these reasons, individuation is indispensable for certain people, not only as a therapeutic necessity, but as a high ideal, and idea of the best we can do. Nor should I omit to remark that it is at the same time the primitive Christian ideal of the Kingdom of Heaven which "is within you." The idea at the bottom of this ideal is that right action comes from right thinking, and that there is no cure and no improving of the world that does not begin with the individual himself.

 

I reproduce this passage because it gives an idea of the ethical importance of resolving the integration of unconscious context that otherwise have extensive influence on the personality. At the same time it illustrates Jung's periodical efforts to relate psychology to the basic tenets of Christianity that is nowadays programmatically ignored in gender questions. The book's text becomes increasingly difficult to follow and to comment while proceeding towards the book's end because many difficult explanatory details had to be left outside the purpose of this paper.

 

CONCLUSION

My awkward text in trying to apply Carl Jung's original brand of analytical psychology to elusive problems of personal and social communication (and information) illustrates the difficulty and limitations of language as well as of science. I started my career with electronics and systems theory in the sense of "design of inquiring systems". Following this path and acknowledging the role and limitations of logic and empiricism I proceeded with faith in philosophy of science in particular and philosophy in general until I felt I met the limits of rationality at the interface with religiously based ethics and analytical psychology. At this point i felt undermined in my earlier "religiously" based faith in the enlightened god of democratic debate. This may be clearly sensed if one closely examines (as I did but am incapable to incorporate in this already too long paper) the synonyms and associate words of "debate" beyond rhetoric: disagreement, dispute, discussion, argumentation, deliberation, explanation, conversation, understanding.

 

Without further illusions I tried to illustrate what kind of issues may be found at the basis of difficulties of communication and exchange of information. In psychological terms the hypothesis is that the function of a supposedly independent rational ego with its supposed logic and empiricism, plus a Hegelian dialectic of debate in an open society, with rational-critical communication under the control of a supposed democracy is undermined by unperceived psychic processes. They are analog to those that characterized, if not caused, the great wars and the historical persecutions, of, say, Christians in old Rome, witches in the Middle Ages, or Jews in Germany. What seems to happen in the psyche of a great number of citizens, who particularly in the secularized West are left religiously unprotected, is an invasion, by archetypal unconscious contents erupted through the interfaces of anima-animus. This is consistent with the increasing collective touchiness and irascibility bordering brutalization, with the open-and-shut affirmation and acceptance of homosexuality, and the challenging of the traditional family structure as basis of society or social expression of love, along with abortions, divorces, and serial monogamy or outright proposals of polygamy. This is concomitant with, if not conditioned by, the increasing conscious identification of the ego with the persona, that today tends to be the personification of increasingly undetermined and flexible social expectations that facilitate criminality or at least criminalization or, rather, overcriminalization. It has deserved a whole learned Swedish PhD dissertation - with English  summary, by Claes Lernestedt. Its only source of stability are the dominating doctrines denominated by the controversial term political correctness, sanctioned by a strong government such as the one guaranteeing the psychosocial effectiveness as explained in my comments on the analysis of the "Swedish model". In order to work out this complex hypothesis, however, it is necessary to get the help of social psychologists and other professional people who are deeply knowledgeable about analytical psychology. The task will be to unravel the Freud-influenced kind of details advanced by, say, Anthony Stevens in Archetype (1982, "The archetypal masculine and feminine", p.193ff. ). It will also be necessary to relate them to the present reinforced trends of narcissism that were announced as early as in the seventies by Christopher Lasch in The Culture of Narcissism, and earlier mentioned Peter Homans in Jung in Context (subtitle: Modernity and the Making of a Psychology, cf. the important "Conclusion: Jung, psychological man, and modernization", pp. 193ff.), an issue that has engaged me both in my weblog and in a researched book review.

 

A further hard task will be to relate the psychology of projection to the details of the sociopsychological history of how man became the "nasty sex" or nasty gender that has got established as a feminist standard today. In two remarkably ambitious articles in the Swedish major newspaper Svenska Dagbladet 17 and 18 February 2013, Håkan Lindgren surveys a great number of authors based on the content of a recent book by Christoph Kucklick with the title of Das unmoralische Geschlecht (The Immoral Gender, 2008) which by the way, unsought, leads thoughts to the unmentioned oddly different messages by Otto Weininger's Geschlecht und Charakter (Gender and Character, 1903) and Pavel Evdokimov's La Femme et le Salut du Monde (Woman and the Salvation of the World, 1978.) The survey describes how this stereotype of "negative andrology" arose in literature along with "modernity". By integrating gender with the problem of modernity it became impossible to solve or address that problem: society can loudly moralize about "men" while it continues along the same old track. The review of many involved authors indicates that the stereotype developed in the last 200 years. What is not mentioned is that the start coincides with the French revolution whose role in this context I did emphasize in an earlier review of a book on political correctness by Howard Schwartz where I also touch upon the "metaphysics of sex" (cf. also the Indian Tantra) that is ignored in debates about homosexuality and feminism. This results in paradoxical if yet deep occasional insights about debates versus political correctness (Johan Hilton in Dagens Nyheter 17 September 2013.) The meaningful enigma in the spirit of Carl Jung illustrated above is to relate this to the post-revolutionary attempts to suppress religion that had worked as a protective shield against invasions by the unconscious. Håkan Lindgren's review highlights a historical series of authors that seem to illustrate a history of sociopsychological projections involving names as E.H.V. Sprengel, Carl Friedrich Pockels, Philipp Christian Reinhard, William Alexander, Isaak Iselin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Christoph Meiners and Anthony Giddens. Lindgren's, if not Kucklick's conclusions, however, in my opinion are a mix of correct observations akin to those in this present essay of mine, with stray findings about supposed relations between sexuality, power, violence, and religion. One main correct insight is that "you cannot overcome fundamental flaws in modernity by correcting one or other characteristic of men". But the final conclusions are characterized by an absent or faulty understanding of psychology and religion, leading him to believe in an unperceived ongoing return to a patriarchy that in my mind rather recalls the kind of patriarchy of historical strong dictators in the spirit of Jung's references to "the blond beast". And he may be right just because of the general faulty understanding of all those relations.

If this could be summarized in few words it would recall the message of the great religions of the world in general, and Christianity in particular: the interplay between love in the sense of Christian "caritas", and justice that is often confounded with power and "empowerment". Or, as Jung himself expresses it in a passage of his book used in this paper (p. 53) that I have been quoting elsewhere: "Logically, the opposite of love is hate, and of Eros, Phobos (fear); but psychologically it is the will to power. Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking." One symptom of this is that reciprocal fear in communication and debates has exploded in hate up to the extreme of threats of power to murder. It is often forgotten in the complaints about men's so called "contempt" for women (and, if so, radical feminist women's contempt for men) that contempt and hate, including the semantic horror of the invented term homophobia, can be basically a justified fear. The question, then, is how to foster love in friendship. In the Western culture this has been the Christian message of caritas based on the sacrifice of the crucified Christ whose often misunderstood crucifixion is a message of freedom and love's victory over power, as in
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, as explained by Nikolai Berdyaev in Dostoievsky: An Interpretation. Despite of not being faithful to the official Catholic standpoint in its theological details, that seems to be in concert with trends of ealier Christian interpretations such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte's La Querelle de l'Athéisme (The Atheism Dispute, anthology in French translation) on the "intentions of the death of Jesus" (esp. pp. 199 ff.) In this perspective, human love between man and woman and the origin of life itself is, through the loved one as in the Jungian process of individuation, a bridge to God himself in whose similitude we are created. It is tragic that today such love is "deconstructed" in the name of so called queer theories based on a love that is equated to erotic preferences, leanings or concupiscence. The "heteronormative traditional family" as the order of creation concerning the origin of human life is derided in the public service of Swedish Radio as "holy family" while homosexuality is exalted in the name of a unquestioned concept of freedom and justice. But the justice and love that homosexuals and LGBT-labeled people unconsciously need and seek should be a loving, redeeming understanding of the meaning of their suffering. In the meantime the social atom or family is deconstructed or, rather, blown up in concupiscence and hate as the atom is blown up in the material world of physics, and probably with the same effectual risks.

 

In this context of crucifixion I will permit myself to also quote, by necessity somewhat cryptically, a passage from Plato's Republic (in The Collected Dialogues, eds. Hamilton & Cairns, 361e-362a, p. 609) that struck me and got engraved in my mind despite of the difficulty of grasping it in its wholeness - that as the case is for the Bible or, say, the I Ching, - may take a lifetime to do:  "[The] just man will have to endure the lash, the rack, chains, the branding iron in his eyes, and finally, after every extremity of suffering, he will be crucified, and so will learn his lesson that not to be but to seem just is what we ought to desire. [...And] it is literally true, they will say, that the unjust man, as pursuing what clings closely to reality, to truth, and not regulating his life by opinion, desires not to seem but to be unjust [...]"

 

And, regarding the relation to debate (Plato, in Protagoras, idem, 337b): "Let your conversation be a discussion, not a dispute. A discussion is carried on among friends, with good will, but a dispute is between rivals and enemies."

APPENDIX: REFERENCES TO COLLECTED WORKS

For the convenience of those readers who wish to pursue further research on these issues I submit the following selected references to other volumes of Carl Jung's Collected Works.

Volume 5 (Symbols of Transformation)
page 186, § 272; p. 304, § 462.

Volume 6 (Psychological Types)
page 235f., § 398f.; p.468 § 804ff.

Volume 8 (The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche)

page 307ff., §§ 582ff; p. 219ff., § 425ff.

Volume 9.1 (The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious)
page 70f., § 144 ff.; p. 87ff, §§ 167ff.; p. 124ff. § 223ff.

Volume 9.2 (Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self)
"The Syzygy: Anima and Animus", pp. 11-22,, §§ 20-42.

Volume 10 (Civilization in Transition)
page 117ff, § 243ff.; p. 222ff, § 453ff.

Volume 16 (The Practice of Psychotherapy)
page 292ff, § 501ff.

Volume 18 (The Symbolic Life)

page 147f., §339ff.; pp. 733ff., § 1657ff.