INFORMATION AND PSYCHOLOGY: CARL JUNG
The Illusion of Rational Communication
by Kristo Ivanov, Umeå University
(February 2013, version 240309-1625)
CONTENTS:
APPENDIX: REFERENCES TO COLLECTED WORKS
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.
(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.
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."
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.