LITTLE BLUE BOOK NO. 978 Edited by E. Haldeman-Julius
The Psychology of Jung
James Oppenheim
HALDEMAN-JULIUS COMPANY GIRARD, KANSAS
Copyright, 1925, Haldeman-Julius Company
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JUNG.
CONTENTS.
Chapter Page
I. The Psychology of the Future 5
II. The Sexual Theory 8
III. Will-To-Power 18
IV. The Break Between Freud and Jung 22
V. The Introvert vs. the Extravert 33
VI. Types 45
VII. The Conflict and Its Solution 53
VIII. Note 61
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF JUNG.
I.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE FUTURE.
The origin of the new psychology, with its technic universally known as
psycho-analysis, lies in the effort which man has always made to cure
those ills “not of the body.” When we speak of the ills of the “soul,”
we do not, however, mean that the mind is not a part of the body. We
merely mean that there is a difference, for instance, between the
illness that might arise from receiving bad news, and that which was
caused, say, by being knocked down by a motor car. The first we call a
mental ill, a spiritual malady, the second a physical.
The old shaman of the savage tribe did not only attempt to cure
gangrene and malaria and sore throat; he also treated people who were
“possessed by demons” or had “lost their souls”; he treated people who
had lost hope, who were despairing, who wanted a charm to conquer the
object of love or hate, who desired success, who heard voices, saw
visions and were afraid to live.
From the beginning, therefore, man has attempted to bring a healing to
the mind. Every religion has been such an attempt.
The trouble with this, however, from our modern standpoint, is that a
religion demands faith, not only in the natural, but the supernatural;
and not only, let it be added, in the supernatural, but a very definite
and dogmatic supernatural, some set of stories and brand of divinities.
There are Gods, Devils and ghosts to which we must submit. But modern
science, which has steadfastly discredited mythology and sought to
explain life and its phenomena by natural causes, or laws of nature,
has seriously undermined the old religions, and we see them beginning
to topple in all places of the earth.
However, the science of medicine, which sought to discover the causes
of sickness, reached a limit beyond which it could not pass. If there
is no medicine for a broken heart, there is also none for a man with a
fixed idea or one with a sense of utter inferiority. The insane cannot
be cured by drugs or by operations, except in those rare curable cases
which have an indubitable physical origin. The thousands creeping and
stumbling around the world, victims of neurosis, cannot be reached by
serums or diets.
It was therefore necessary for medicine to go beyond itself, to invade
the wide and dark realm of religion and preempt the creeds, by applying
the technic of science to what had hitherto been understood darkly
through intuition, guess-work and “revelation.”
It is not my intention to give a history of the origin and rise of
psycho-analysis. That, in itself, is a book. It is merely necessary
to say that the first genius in this field was Sigmund Freud, that
Freud made the first great discoveries, that he traced the first chart
of the unconscious mind, and that he originated the first technic of
psycho-analysis.
If Freud, however, was the pioneer, it remained for two of his pupils
to carry the work forward to the point where it has become one of the
vital contributions to the race. The work of Adler, the first of these,
came as a revolt against Freud and gave rise to a rival theory. The
work of Jung, however, not only brought a synthesis of the work of
Adler and Freud, but went beyond both. It is for this reason, then,
that I call his work “the psychology of the future.”
In order to come to a clear understanding of Jung, it will be
necessary first to summarize the theories of both Freud and Adler. We
can then see how Jung, accepting both, has transcended both, and laid
out the first tracings of a complete psychology.
II.
THE SEXUAL THEORY.
Freud sees life as a great and never-ending conflict between
civilization, or organized society, and the individual. The individual
is born with certain instincts, desires, wishes. Many of these are
in conflict with the law and moral code of society. Hence, they are
suppressed.
This suppression works, however, in a curious way. Not only are the
unlawful and “sinful” impulses shut out of the mind; they are also
forgotten. And because they are forgotten, we actually have the
spectacle of pious men and women who can solemnly swear that they are
quite free of murderous, lustful, lecherous, dangerous thoughts and
wishes; that they are “good” people; that they have nothing in common
with the criminal and the debased.
As a matter of fact, however, no instinct, no function in man can be
abolished by cutting it off from consciousness. It is merely repressed,
and forms what Dr. Jung later denoted as a _complex_; that is to say, a
group of ideas, emotions, wishes that all go together and become a sort
of mental family living off by itself, in exile.
It is, in reality, a part of consciousness of which we are
unconscious: a part of the mind shut out by the barrier of our will and
our forgetfulness. And since there are many things that we repress,
a goodly area of the mind is so cut off. Hence, all that part of the
mind which is repressed, and of whose existence we are not aware, Freud
calls _the unconscious mind_.
But since the unconscious is living, not dead; since every impulse in
man seeks constantly for expression; the unconscious is continually
active, like a volcano. Only, instead of sending up its fire and lava
and steam in their native state, it is sending them up in a camouflaged
form. The bottled up energy seeking ever an outlet, loads itself into
some part of the body, and becomes a symptom. It may appear as a
paralysis of some muscle, as deafness or blindness, heart trouble or
stomach trouble, etc. Naturally, these symptoms are not organic; it is
not a real blindness, a real paralysis. Which explains why there can
be miracles when believers touch saint’s bones or repeat the dogmas of
the Christian Scientists. The reason is, that being mental in origin,
these symptoms can also be cured in a mental way. But since faith
healing does not probe to the secret source of the symptom, which is
in the unconscious, such healing is usually followed by the outbreak
of another symptom, in a different place, perhaps, and of a different
nature.
However, the repressed complex does not only express itself in bodily
symptoms. It may appear in the conscious mind. But since the conscious
mind resists the invasion, it appears in a masked form. It may become
apparent as a fixed idea, for instance, the idea that one must go to
some street corner and preach the Gospel, an idea which, in spite of
its absurdity and irrationality, the patient cannot dislodge, and which
is therefore fixed. Or it may appear as a fear, a fear of dogs, or of
the dark, of closed places, going outdoors, etc.
Nor is this all. Where there is a marked repression of a large part of
oneself, the repressed material may become what is called a secondary
personality, and every so often preempt the conscious mind, so that
at one time the personality may be timid, pious, good, and at another
bold, wicked and evil. It is, in a way, the story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde.
Finally, the unconscious appears in consciousness in the form of
dreams. It is really this great discovery which led to the development
of the technic of psycho-analysis, and opened up the path which has led
to all the other discoveries.
A dream takes place when we are asleep; that is to say, when the
conscious mind is completely relaxed, when all the bars are let down.
What more natural than that the repressed portion of the mind may now
flare up, just as the stars become visible when the sun is withdrawn
from the sky? But dreams usually have something absurd about them. We
walk in seven league boots, we cut off a hand and sew it on again,
animals talk; we are in the land of make-believe and of the fairies and
the bad spirits.
Why does the unconscious speak such a fantastic language? Why doesn’t
it express itself in simple English? According to Freud, this is
because the conscious mind has refused to face the evil which it
has repressed, and the unconscious therefore ever seeks a masked or
camouflaged expression, whether in the form of a physical symptom, a
fixed idea, a phobia, or a dream.
Dreams, in short, are symbolic. Everything in a dream stands for
something else. But these symbols are not haphazard; what they stand
for are definitely expressed by the symbol. It is not haphazard for
instance that a dove has always symbolized the holy spirit, or that a
spear has stood for the masculine organ, or that a vessel has stood for
the womb. There is a certain likeness between symbol and fact.
It is nothing new to invest dreams with meaning. The human race has
always done so. Man has always intuitively known that these strange
manifestations of the night held a hidden meaning for him, a meaning
that must be searched out by interpretation and analysis. So we
read in the Bible of Joseph interpreting the dreams of Pharaoh; in
Euripides’ play, Iphigenia, the action begins with a dream of the
heroine, which she herself interprets, though somewhat mistakenly. So
too we have the well-authenticated dream of Lincoln (ten days before
he was assassinated) that he heard a noise of lamentation and sobbing
downstairs in the White House and took a candle and went down. Around a
catafalque moved a crowd of weeping people. He asked who was dead, and
was informed that it was the President, who had been killed.
Such dreams are of the prophetic order, and will be dealt with later
on. The last dream, also, was straightforward. It was not symbolic. But
such dreams are outside the usual run; they are the exceptions to the
rule.
The way then to find out the meaning of a dream is to treat the images
in it as symbols and try to discover what the symbols stand for. And
the quickest way to do this is to ask the dreamer himself.
You dream, for instance, to use a simple illustration, that you are
involved in a fight between a cat and a dog. Well, what do you think of
cats and dogs? What are your associations?
You begin to tell all the thoughts that come into your mind when you
think of these two animals. You may drag in personal stories of a pet
cat you once had, of a dog it fought with, etc. When all you have said
is boiled down it may amount to this: that cats and dogs appear to be
opposites, that cats are aloof, “selfish,” withdrawn, asking much and
giving little, whereas dogs are loving, affectionate, very sociable,
and may even give their lives for their masters. Symbolically then, the
cat stands for the ego-impulses, the dog for the social impulses. It
is natural that they should fight each other every so often; there are
times when we are in great conflict between our wish to serve others
and our desire to gratify or satisfy ourselves.
What Freud discovered was that the repression came to light through
the dream; that the dream material, if analyzed, showed exactly why
the patient was ill, why he had his phobia or his physical symptom.
For instance, the man might have a strain of sexual perversion in him.
He himself is not aware of it. But the dream immediately brings it to
light and he is forced to recognize it.
Naturally it is difficult to get a patient to accept the repressed
material. If he repressed it because of a great moral revulsion, he can
only be led by a process of re-education to accept it. When he first
comes for treatment, therefore, he merely tells the analyst all that
he remembers about his past, his family and personal history, etc.
Gradually he acquires confidence in the analyst. This unburdening is
like a confession. The analyst hears things that the patient has never
before mentioned to anyone else. The analyst, because of his knowledge
of psychology, also shows an understanding of the patient that quite
startles the latter. The analyst, in short, becomes more than a father
to him, more than a mother. There is a feeling of gratitude, of trust,
which approaches the border of love. This feeling, this attitude,
is called the _transference_. The patient has transferred himself,
his burden, to the analyst. And no cure can take place until this is
achieved.
For when the transference is made, the patient is now ready to go
along with the analyst in his re-education. He gains a new standpoint.
He discovers that the ugly and evil things which he suppressed are not
his personal property, his private depravity, but are public property,
that every one who is a human being has the same impulses, the same
shameful lusts, the same wicked wishes; and that there can be no
genuine health until one allows these impulses in consciousness and
accepts them in their nakedest aspect.
The patient then is ready to face squarely and truthfully the
divulgences of his dreams.
And what is the cure? Sometimes, happily, it is a simple matter. The
man who has suppressed his sexuality altogether, for instance, may now
marry and gain a good direct expression for his need. But what of those
who find strong perverted wishes, what shall we do with them?
At this point Freud erects the theory of _sublimation_. It is not a new
theory. The youth in college is admonished to go into athletics that
he may channel off and use up the energy which otherwise would provide
him with a sexual problem. It is the substitution of a “higher” thing
for a “lower.” Only, of course, the higher thing must stand in some
natural relation to the lower, that the instinctive craving may have
some genuine satisfaction.
The classic example is that of surgery. A man is sadistic. That is,
he desires to practice cruelty on the object of his love. Turn this
upside-down from something destructive to something creative, and you
let him dig his knife into the human body, but now it is to help and
heal another, not to hurt him. Hence, the surgeon is sublimating his
sadistic tendencies.
Another example, according to Freud, is the artist. His wicked and
criminal impulses, we will say, would indicate a long list of murders
if he lived them out. He does not live them out, he writes them out. He
becomes known as a writer of crime and detective stories, and in this
form he releases his evil energy and spends it utterly.
Or take the actor. As a child he wanted constantly to exhibit himself,
to go naked before others. This strong strain of exhibitionism can be
satisfied finally by acting, by showing himself off before audiences.
Hence, the Freudian cure for those impulses we cannot live, is, first,
to recognize and accept them, and secondly, to sublimate them.
The Freudian psychology, however, does not rest at this point. It has a
theory which underlies all the others; it is the theory connected with
the Oedipus complex.
Oedipus was the man, celebrated in Greek drama, who, by a fluke of
fate, married his own mother, had children by her, and later had to
expiate his crime by blinding himself and wandering poor and helpless
about the world. For his crime is the one crime which mankind has
usually found absolutely taboo. In practically all the savage tribes,
and in every civilized code, incest, or intermarriage between child and
parent, brother and sister, has been strictly forbidden.
Why is this so? Freud believes that there is a natural sexual
attraction within the family group itself, that the child begins its
sexual life very early, that the boy gains satisfactions through his
mother’s caresses; and that hence the whole beginnings of sexuality
are wrapped up in the incestuous wish. Naturally, however, for the son
there is a great rival. It is his father. His father would fight him
off just as he would any other male rival. This is one of the reasons
for the universal taboo.
But if the origins and beginnings of sexuality are entwined in the
incestuous wish, and incest is taboo, we have an immediate cause of
trouble in human nature. We are all bound to repress. And indeed if we
look upon man, we see that he is afflicted with much sickness, that he
is born to trouble as the sparks fly upward.
If, however, this is the nuclear complex, this Oedipus complex, how
can we account for the other sexual difficulties, the perversions?
They originate, according to Freud, in the Oedipus complex itself. The
child’s first act is suckling, this involves the mouth; he then learns
to suck his finger when he cannot get at the nipple, this involves
mouth and hand; he then begins to use his hand rubbing himself and this
leads to rubbing the sexual organ (auto-erotism); he now takes pleasure
in his own body and in bodies like his own (homosexual interest), and
finally he becomes interested in bodies unlike his own (normal sexual
wish). He may find, however, that he cannot cross the last bridge and
get to normal sexuality. The repressed incest wish stands in the way
and makes him fear the woman who would, unconsciously, be used as a
substitute for the mother. Hence, he remains fixed at some infantile
stage; mouth-erotism, auto-erotism, homosexuality, etc. Often in
analysis, when he discovers this, according to Freud, he can learn
to renounce the infantile fixation, or perversion, and learn to take
pleasure in normal sexuality.
Such, in brief, and with, alas, much omitted, is an outline of the
Freudian theory. It is a sexual theory. The psychological troubles
of mankind, with all their symptoms, either physical or mental, are
traced back to a disturbance in sexuality, to taboos which bring the
individual into conflict with society and so cause these unnatural
repressions. Freud, however, does not use the word sexuality in a
narrow sense; he makes it synonymous with love-life, though the purely
sexual element is, on close examination, always present.
However, recently, Freud, now an old man, has advanced a new theory to
supplement the sexual theory. He believes, though he is very cautious
in his statement, that beside the sexual impulse, the will-to-live, to
create and procreate, there is an opposite impulse, a will-to-death, a
wish to have done. In this, he pays an unconscious tribute to some of
the theories of Jung, which will be discussed later on.
III.
WILL-TO-POWER.
Alfred Adler was a pupil of Freud. In the course of his psycho-analytic
practice he stumbled across a discovery which led to a break with Freud
and the enunciation of a new theory. In contradistinction to the sexual
theory it may be called the power-theory.
What Adler noticed in every neurotic was a marked feeling of
inferiority, a feeling, as he put it, of being _under_, and a
consequent incessant striving to be _over_ or on top. To use a simple,
concrete case: If a man felt inferior to the woman he loved, and this
was a symptom of inferiority he had always had toward the women he
loved, he would strive by every means to put the woman down and himself
up. He might put her down by economic pressure, by intellectual attack;
or he might put her down in the sexual way, for instance through
cruelty (sadism).
In the latter case, Freud would say that the problem was sexual.
But Adler would say, what the man is striving for is not sexual
satisfaction, but power. If he could put the woman down through
money-pressure, that would satisfy him, or if he could put her down
sexually, that would be satisfactory. What he was seeking was mastery.
Take the well-known case of the Don Juan who has one love-affair
after another, who wins a woman only to tire of her and pass on to the
next. Such men will admit, as a rule, that the greatest pleasure is in
conquest, and that when a woman has been conquered she is no longer
interesting. They look upon love-affairs as a series of battles, and
the aim is not love or sexuality, so much as triumph.
What becomes then of the Oedipus complex, the incestuous longing of
the son for the mother? According to Adler this, too, is a problem of
power. The father is the head of the house, the master, the king in the
realm of the family, and possesses the mother. The son is under the
father, but would depose this king and take his place. In short, he
would be the head and possess the mother. But actually, what the child
is seeking, is not really to possess the mother, but to have power in
the manner of his father.
The cause, then, of mental disorders and spiritual maladies, Adler
traces to an excessive feeling of inferiority which leads to a marked
will-to-power. But whence arises this feeling of inferiority? Adler at
this point is sure that the origin is to be sought not in something
psychic but in something physical. His theory is that the feeling of
inferiority is due to some _actual organic inferiority_.
In other words, he believes that a child who has a club foot, like
Byron, or one subject to epileptic fits, like Dostoyevski, or one with
an impediment which causes stammering, like Demosthenes, or one with
a chronic tendency to constipation like Lincoln (the cases of great
men could be multiplied endlessly), that such a child feels himself
inferior to normal children; he feels that there is something the
matter with him, that he has less chance of success, etc. This is the
feeling of inferiority, the feeling of being under. And the deeper this
feeling, the greater the reaction to it, the greater the striving to
change the position about, so that instead of being under his fellows
he is over them. Out of such defects, then, arise the great ambitions,
or as Adler puts it, the “guiding fiction.” By this he means a phantasy
of some great goal which the child dreams about and sets out to reach.
A classical case is that of Demosthenes. Because he stammered, because
he was inferior in speech to other children, an ambition awoke not
merely to be able to talk in the normal manner, but something far
greater: namely, to be the greatest of orators, an ambition he actually
achieved. But suppose he could not have achieved such a victory,
suppose conditions had been such that it was impossible for him to
be an orator? Then his incessant striving would prove futile, the
feeling of inferiority would increase, and there would be a breakdown.
The breakdown would be a neurosis, and he would be ready for a
psycho-analyst.
Why did Napoleon set out to conquer Europe? His inordinate
will-to-power could be traced back to a painful feeling of inferiority
in his youth, which showed itself in the military school, where he was
put to shame by his fellows. They, he must have felt, would become in
time great generals and leaders in the army; hence, he must be even
more than they, the general of generals.
As to the feeling of inferiority itself, Adler denotes it as the
feeling of being _feminine_. Woman, he believes, has the psychology of
being under, man that of being over, as shown in the sexual act itself.
Besides, man is physically stronger than woman. Hence, if a man has an
organic inferiority, he feels that he is not a man, and hence, that he
is in some way feminine. All his striving therefore is to be masculine,
and indeed, super-masculine. This striving Adler calls _the masculine
protest_. One finds it in women also; a marked feeling of inferiority
in a woman leading her to strive to be like a man, and a refusal to
accept her own psychology.
Such, in brief, is the Adler theory. It owes many things to Nietzsche,
who, in his “Thus Spake Zarathustra” teaches will-to-power as the
guiding principle of life, who relegates woman to a lesser, man to a
greater sphere, and who finds in the striving of the ego the dominant
impulse of life.
IV.
THE BREAK BETWEEN FREUD AND JUNG.
At the time that Dr. Freud was making his discoveries in Vienna, Dr.
Carl Jung, a young psychiatrist, was conducting certain experiments
in Zurich, Switzerland. These were of a dry technical nature which
need not be given here, but they led to a tentative theory of an
unconscious mind. It was while he was engaged on these experiments that
Jung first read the work of Freud. He knew at once that he had found
his master and hastened to become Freud’s pupil and colleague. He did
more than that. At that period Freud was the laughing stock of Vienna,
and wherever his work penetrated. He was jeered and ridiculed for his
fantastic notions, and was suffering the bitter fate of all pioneers.
Jung was in a powerful position at Zurich, and at once proceeded to
enlarge and deepen the fight for Freud. He became the most powerful
exponent of the Freudian psychology, and helped to bring the new
knowledge and new technic into its first acceptance by the world.
Freud looked upon Jung as upon a favorite son. They fought
shoulder-to-shoulder, the work spread, and they were invited to
this country to give lectures. In Switzerland, Austria, England and
America the psycho-analyst made his appearance, and the world of the
intelligentsia awoke with a shock to the sexual theory. Among the
cultured everywhere there was discussion of the Oedipus complex, the
repressions, the sexual perversions, the idea that much that we had
thought purely spiritual, like art and religion, were merely masks for
sexual complexes. The psycho-analytic movement, held firmly together by
two great men, was forging ahead.
However, Jung, from his continued analysis of patients, and from his
own experiences, was beginning to form doubts in his own mind. There
was something, he began to think, inadequate in Freud’s theory. He
hardly dared, at this time, to make any formal criticism; but finally,
after a great conflict, he was moved, even inspired, to write his first
great book. This book is entitled “The Psychology of the Unconscious.”
He has said of it that it was a voyage of discovery. He himself, when
he started it, hardly knew to what depths it would lead him, to what
conclusions it would force him. But when he was finished, he knew that
he could no longer withhold his own point of view and that this would
inevitably lead to a break with Freud.
It proved to be so. Freud was shocked and appalled. He sent the
manuscript back with a letter in which their relationship was ended. He
said that Jung had betrayed the psycho-analytic movement, that he had
ventured out beyond the bounds of science, and that he was seeking to
destroy the greatest values in the new psychology.
Of course such a break was inevitable, and in the end it proved
fortunate. It set Jung free. He could now go on, without hindrance, in
his great task, which led finally to the greatest contributions thus
far made.
The break itself may be traced to a divergence between two theories of
the unconscious. As will be remembered, Freud’s theory would define the
unconscious as something which is produced after we are born, and when
the repressions begin. All that is anti-social, that flies in the face
of conventional morality and the law of the land, everything that is
taboo, gets walled off from the conscious mind, and is henceforth the
unconscious mind. The unconscious then is a storehouse of the evil, the
thwarted, the unconventional, the instinctive.
Jung does not deny that a _part_ of the unconscious is exactly of this
nature. But in “The Psychology of the Unconscious” he proceeds to
prove, by a wealth of material and a sureness of analysis, that the
unconscious is something far deeper and greater than merely a personal
bag of discards.
He finds in numerous typical dreams and phantasies of his patients
that they reproduce symbols and stories as old as the human race. He
shows that the human mind everywhere, among the most widely scattered
peoples, and in different ages, produces the same typical myths, the
same figures of deities and demons; and that the patient of today gives
forth, in analysis, a similar mythology; and very often something which
he, the patient, has been utterly ignorant of and which is beyond his
understanding.
He finds further that man has always had what might be called a typical
psychological fate; that the story of man’s inner life and development
has always taken a certain form, embodied in the figure of the hero.
The hero, in the myth, is always he who goes forth to conquer greatly,
who overcomes dragons and supernatural powers, but who finally loses
his power, is subjugated and dies an inner death. But out of this death
he is reborn and appears with a new life, often magical, by which he
goes on to his greater achievements.
Such a death and rebirth is pictured in the story of the crucifixion
of Jesus. It appears in a modern work, in “Jean-Christophe,” where
the hero suffers a spiritual disintegration and can no longer compose
music, but with the first breath of Spring, feels the new tides of life
pouring into him and rises to the greatest heights of his creative
power. Such, too, is doubtless the inner story of our greatest American
poet, Walt Whitman. When he was about 35, and after suffering some deep
personal reverse, he secluded himself on Long Island beside the sea for
some weeks, and had a spiritual experience which led to his awakening
as a poet and the beginning of “Leaves of Grass.”
What is this typical myth? It is known as the sun-myth, for the savage
doubtless based it on the strange fact that the sun, after setting in
the west, rose again the following morning in the east. This sun-myth,
boiled down to its essentials, is somewhat as follows: The sun is the
hero. He is born of the mother, the sea, in the east. He rises in his
splendor and reaches the zenith. But now his strange descent begins,
and when he reaches the west, he must re-descend into the waters of the
sea, die again and re-enter the mother’s womb. Actually he is pictured
as being devoured by a sea monster. In the belly of this monster he
rides in the sea under the earth back toward the east. At first he lies
supine; but finally, plucking up courage he begins to battle with the
monster. Finally he kills him, and the body of the great fish floats to
shore, where the hero, the sun, steps out reborn, and rises again in
the east.
This story, based on something seen in nature, is found to be typical
of man’s soul. And Jung discovered that wherever an analysis was
carried far enough, this typical myth appeared in various forms in
the dreams of the patient, and the patient went through an experience
analogous to the myth.
What is this experience? A man has reached a high point of development
and achievements. There comes upon him now a sense of deadness and
futility, a period of disillusionment and turning away from the world,
the experience which is described in the beginning of Goethe’s “Faust.”
This inner death proceeds until he is lost in himself, until he is,
in the language of the myth, devoured by the monster; and now he goes
through a long period of inner suffering and groping until the time
comes when a new life awakens and he goes back to the world of men with
a greater energy, a new vision, and perhaps a new life-task. So, in the
beginning of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spake Zarathustra,” we see the hero step
forth after his years of preparation in the wilderness to bring his
message to the world of men.
This then is the typical experience of those who carry their
development to any height. What is its meaning psychologically?
There is no understanding of it, says Jung, unless we broaden the
conception of the unconscious. And with this he introduces his theory
of the _collective unconscious_.
The human body is the product of millions of years of evolution, and in
it is written the history of life. It is not a sudden creation. If this
is true of the body, how can it be anything but true of the mind, which
is a function of the body? The mind, too, is a product of millions of
years of evolution, and just as the history of life is written in the
flesh, so too the history of man’s spirit, his adventure, is summed
up in the mind. In other words, the new born babe does not present a
mind like a blank sheet of paper on which his personal experience will
begin to write; he is born with the great inheritance of the race, the
collective unconscious, in which is stored the wisdom of the ages as
well as the great instincts, and what Jung calls “the residues of our
animal ancestry.”
How do we know this? Because the mind of a man today, a man even
ignorant and unread, will, on certain occasions, produce the same
myths, the same supernatural figures, the same psychic phenomena as
those produced thousands of years ago, and the same in every part of
the earth among the most widely separated nations and races.
In short, the unconscious contains typical _images_ and typical
_stories_. And whence did these arise? It is quite natural that the
presence in our own unconscious of a wisdom greater than ours and at
the same time of animal instincts sometimes overwhelming in their
destructiveness, should give the savage, for instance, a sense of the
nearness of supernatural powers of good and evil, of some supernatural
wisdom that helped him (in the form of revelation or inspiration) and
of some demonic lust or passion, which, if it swept over him, led
to the orgy, the murder or insanity. Hence, these experiences would
be pictured as the work of beings like those he knew, only greater.
Wisdom was a Great Mother or a Great Father, a God, in short; evil was
a Devil, a Demon, like a bad man, only greater and worse. And certain
experiences would be pictured in the form of monsters, great strange
animals, sometimes animals part human and part beast.
Thus we see an explanation for the origin of the many religions on
earth, all of which have certain things in common. Some sensitive
man experienced his own unconscious in the form of dreams and
hallucinations. Moses for instance heard the voice of God and saw
the burning bush. Psychologically, this would mean that what Moses
thought was outside himself, came from within himself, came from the
unconscious and was, in the technical language, _projected_, the
vision of fire upon the bush, the voice into the air. He heard and saw
something out of his own depths.
Every religion makes this projection. Heaven is up in the sky, hell
under the earth; the Gods are on high, the Devils below. It has
remained for modern psychology not only to locate these phenomena
as in the brain itself, but also to divest them of their miraculous
coating, and to explain them as something having a direct meaning in
the patient’s life.
According to Jung, the collective unconscious is more or less dormant
in all of us, except under certain circumstances or after certain
experiences. The average man goes on unaware of his own demonic and
divine attributes. But in a lynching-bee or in battle the devil will
suddenly awake and transform him from something human into something
monstrous. On the other hand, the youth falling headlong in love,
the man who sustains the death of his loved one and similar great
experiences of life, will encounter the presence of ineffable wisdom
and power, so that he feels he is visited by something beyond the human.
But the process of analysis also leads to the experience of the
collective unconscious. Psycho-analysis is self-discovery. One goes
deeper and deeper into oneself. One goes back on the track of the
years to one’s childhood. One exhausts in the process one’s personal
memories. One goes down, as it were, beyond the personal layers of the
unconscious, to the impersonal. At this point the manifestations of
the collective unconscious begin, and the dreams are now loaded with
mythological conceptions, and images of the supernatural.
This deep entering into oneself Jung defines as _introversion_, a self
descent, and a means of development, a discipline not only in the
wisdom of all time, but in overcoming the undeveloped tendencies in
oneself. It is at this point that the hero is devoured by the monster,
the unconscious, and makes that voyage that leads to his rebirth.
Dante depicts this in his Divine Comedy. The hero, Dante, is led
by Virgil, down through the depth of Inferno (the evil side of the
unconscious), up the mount of Purgatory (the overcoming) and finally
reaches Paradise, where he finds Beatrice, an image of his soul, and a
new wisdom, a new life are his.
Naturally one cannot do justice to so deep a conception within
the space allotted. But we can see at a glance that much that is
otherwise inexplicable, save on the ground of something miraculous
and supernatural, is now given a more natural explanation. We
can understand the genius as one who has the gift of tapping his
unconscious and bringing forth works which are impossible to the run
of men. We can understand why man has always needed a religion. We can
understand those intuitions which lead to new discoveries in science.
Man has a storehouse of wisdom in himself.
We can also understand the strange aberrations of insanity, of those
unfortunates who are caught, as it were, in the collective unconscious,
and live only in a world of demons and divinities and uncanny myths.
We can understand too the demonic outbreaks in war, and the cause of
many crimes. I know of the case of a man who was a clergyman, and who,
each time he had finished an impassioned sermon which passed through
the audience like a rousing electricity, immediately went to a brothel
and indulged in an orgy of drink and sexuality. He was a man under the
complete dominance of the collective unconscious. First the divine side
appeared, with its marvelous inspirations; then the demonic, dragging
him in the mud.
It must not be thought, from the foregoing, that Jung rejected
the sexual theory of Freud. What he did was to modify this theory,
holding that not all cases of neurosis registered sexual repression
or maladjustment. He fully agreed however, that the Oedipus complex
appears as one of the great problems, but instead of interpreting
dreams of this nature to mean that the son actually had incestuous
longings for the mother, he took such dreams, like all others, to be
symbolic. If a man dreams that a monster devours him, it does not mean
that he is literally eaten by a large animal. It means that he has
made a deep introversion. So too a dream of incest means that the son
has reunited himself with the mother. But what does the mother mean?
She may symbolize that period of his life when he actually was united
with her spiritually, the time of early childhood, a time when he was
irresponsible, taken care of, sheltered, helped. His dream may mean
then that he longs to be like a child again; he longs to escape from
the hardships of adaptation and his present problems.
On the other hand the mother may have a deeper meaning. She may appear
with a supernatural air about her, and stand for the collective
unconscious itself, which is the source (or mother) of our conscious
life. The longing of the son for the mother, from this standpoint,
is the longing for descent into self, for deep introversion. It has
the meaning of the sun-myth where the setting sun is devoured by the
monster and starts on his journey toward rebirth.
Since there is great danger in the withdrawal from life, in an
introversion that in a way shuts one in oneself, whether one
does this as an escape from responsibility or from a longing for
self-development, it is natural that the myth should represent this
incest-longing as taboo, as forbidden, just as real incest is, and that
it is only the hero who can overcome this taboo and make that great
descent which Dante pictures in his Inferno, and which in Faust is
shown as the perilous descent to the Mothers.
V.
THE INTROVERT VS. THE EXTRAVERT.
If the reader has compared Freud’s sexual theory with Adler’s power
theory, he must have been struck by the fact that _both theories sound
plausible_. It is certainly true that the conventional morality of
civilization causes us to suppress certain instinctive desires. If
a man is by nature polygamous, and is taught the ideal of monogamy
in such a way as to believe that even the thought of illicit love is
a sin, it is reasonable to think that he may repress his polygamous
tendencies, thus paving the way for an unconscious conflict and a
neurosis.
But, on the other hand, who has not, at least at times, had the painful
feeling of inferiority and not been stirred by an ambition to get on
top? What seems more natural than that the stammerer, Demosthenes,
should strive to achieve greatness as an orator, or that a club-footed
Byron should attempt to make himself a conqueror of women and a famous
poet? Certainly the struggle for power is as widespread and clearly
discernible in life as the instinctive drive for sexuality and a full
love-life.
It is at this point that the greatness of Jung emerges. He had, in
the course of his investigations, come upon a startling divergence
of reaction among his patients, so that he was forced to conclude
that there were two kinds of human being, as different, if not more
different, from each other, than the two sexes. These two types he
named the _extravert_ and the _introvert_.
He next discovered that these two types had long been noted by men of
genius under such designations as objective and subjective, romantic
and classical, realistic and idealistic, materialistic and spiritual.
William James called them the tough-minded and the tender-minded.
William Blake, the English poet, said of them:
“There are two classes of men: the _prolific_ and the _devouring_.
Religion is an endeavor to reconcile the two.”
Jung interprets prolific here to mean, “the fruitful, who brings forth
out of himself”; and “the devouring, as the man who swallows up and
takes into himself.”
Needless to say the prolific type, which has appeared under the
designations of the objective, romantic, realistic, materialistic
and tough-minded, is, more exactly defined, the extravert, and the
devouring type which was also called the subjective, classical,
idealistic, spiritual and tender-minded, is the introvert.
What characterizes the extravert is that _his interest is normally
centered on things outside himself_. An excellent example was our
own Theodore Roosevelt. He was thoroughly extraverted, with instant
response to the world about him. His attention was given wholeheartedly
to anything that caught it. He was a man with an immense diversity of
interests, from birds and flowers, to simplified spelling, from a local
political fight to an international war; poetry, Greek coins, history,
hunting, sports, finance,--the list was almost endless. And into
each of these interests he could throw himself full force, and with
astonishing power. He was as interested in men as in things, and his
friends included people from every walk of life. He was well adapted
to life, and made himself at home almost anywhere. What characterized
him chiefly was that he gave himself without stint, went into action
at a moment’s notice, had a tendency to practicality and common sense
which kept him from being an extremist; was, in short, an excellent
opportunist, knowing, very often, just when to strike, just what to
say, with a decisiveness that won through. He was the fighting man, the
man of action, the man of his own time, his own age, his own country.
He was, in other words, a man “orientated by the object.” That is to
say, his life was determined by things and thoughts and ideas coming to
him from the _outside_, in the main. If an enemy showed his head, he
struck; if a friend, he clasped hands; if a popular movement appeared,
he led it; if there was a war he wanted to be in it; if someone else
originated a good idea (not too radical) he took it over and made it
his.
It will be seen from this that the extravert is normally a man who
is a harmonious part of the world _as it is_. This does not mean, of
course, that he will be merely a conservative; for the world is in
constant change, and an intelligent extravert will be one-to-one with
the forward tide. But since he is, to a large extent, bound up in the
things outside himself, he is, mainly, a reflection of the world. He
could almost say of himself, “I am--what I love.”
His shortcomings are obvious. He covers a lot of ground, but
necessarily in a shallow way. He cannot be deep, because depth implies
a certain slowness, a certain amount of meditation and constant
study, a brooding and solitude. He originates but little, for it is
the thoughts and ideas of others which interest him. He is an enemy
to anything really new, anything pregnant with the future, because
it collides with the world as it is, which is the world he loves.
Finally, he lacks an inner life, the more creative and profound life;
a fact which the keen-sighted Roosevelt knew very well, for he said of
himself, “My danger is that I forget I have a soul.”
Such is a brief sketch of the extravert as he appears in a pronounced,
perhaps an extreme form. The value of using an extreme case is, of
course, that he covers the whole territory, and we can see in him the
various sides of the type. Hence, it will be valuable to consider an
extreme introvert, the direct opposite of Roosevelt, so that we may
come to an understanding of the contrasting type.
If the extravert is characterized by the fact that his interest
is normally centered in things outside himself, the introvert is
characterized by the fact that his interest is normally centered on
things _inside_ himself. From the extravert’s standpoint this would
mean that the introvert was a man who thought of nothing but himself,
was consumed with his own aches and pains, his own fears and hopes, and
perhaps certain erratic and absurd or dangerous ideas. For everything
that the extravert holds most dear, as action, fitting in, being a
“good fellow,” getting on, the introvert looks upon as rather shallow
and cheap, and vice versa, everything most valuable to the introvert
seems foolish, absurd, ridiculous, dangerous to the extravert.
Naturally, to be interested in the things inside oneself need not be
anything trivial. Within oneself is the world of thought and ideas, the
world of imagination, the world out of which every art, every religion,
every philosophy, every invention, every fresh discovery of science,
every new idea for the advancement and development of the race has
sprung. Kant, oblivious of the world, sat and brooded, until out of
himself sprang a great philosophy which wrought a change in the mind of
Europe. A Jesus from his solitary brooding brings forth a new religion.
A Michaelangelo in his isolation gives birth to colossal art.
We find in Friedrich Nietzsche an example of the extreme introvert.
His life, like those of most introverts who were extreme, was devoid of
action and hence without history. There is very little to say about it,
for the real drama took place within him. He served for a short time
in a war, but was discharged because of sickness. He taught philology
for a time in a university. But finally, on a small income, he retired,
and led a secluded life, producing his works, until, while still in
the prime of life, he became insane. He did not marry; he had but few
friends; he was a solitary.
Where Roosevelt presents the picture of a man at home in the world,
Nietzsche is seen as a stranger in it, an alien. Where Roosevelt
went straight out and acted, Nietzsche withdrew into his shell.
Where Roosevelt forgot himself in others, in causes, in the glamour
and absorption of _things_, Nietzsche remained in a state of _acute
self-consciousness_. A Roosevelt glories in the world and thinks it is
good and the people in it excellent and interesting; a Nietzsche sees
it as full of horrible and terrible things and is filled with revulsion
at the sight of human cowardice, slothfulness and depravity. Where
a Roosevelt spreads himself all over, interested in a multitude of
objects, a Nietzsche concentrates more and more on a few things, a few
ideas, a life which shuts out as much as possible anything that will
disturb his predetermined path.
This is the normal attitude of the introvert. He is ill adapted to
the outer world, because he is absorbed in the inner world. And this
absorption leads, in the case of a Nietzsche, to great discoveries and
great works.