summation of the past, the storehouse of wisdom, the creative source,
we may readily understand that the collective unconscious is the
psychic stream of life itself and that it not only bears the past in
it, but also the budding future. That which is to be lies creatively
within it, and is revealed to the great artist, the great thinker in
majestic symbols and so-called visions. That is why we say that great
art and great thought are always ahead of the world. For the extreme
introvert, absorbed in himself, lives in that world of imagination
where the products of the collective unconscious become known to
him. He has deep intuitions, he actually may have symbols and ideas
presented to him in dream and phantasy, even in hallucination. The
English mystic, Blake, actually saw the forms and shapes which he drew,
and claimed, also, that some of his poems were dictated to him by a
voice. I have already spoken of Moses’ experience with the burning bush
and the voice of God.
It was quite natural therefore that Nietzsche should have been a
forerunner. Out of his years of solitude there came at last an eruption
from the unconscious which was nothing short of amazing. Each part of
Thus Spake Zarathustra, and each part is about a hundred pages long,
was written in ten days. The thoughts and words came so fast that
Nietzsche could not keep up with them. If he was walking, he had to
write on scraps of paper. The experience was so overwhelming that he
compared it with that of the Biblical prophets, and said that not in
two thousand years had there been another such case of inspiration.
What is Thus Spake Zarathustra? It is an incomparable picture of the
collective unconscious, as Jung points out, and foreshadows the new
psychology, which by the slow, painfully cumulative method of science
has come to some of the same discoveries that Nietzsche grasped
intuitively. It also is an indictment of Christian civilization and
foreshadows its breaking up by the erection of a new principle, the
Anti-Christ, the principle of power.
It is, therefore, a revolutionary document, so far in advance of the
time when it was written that Nietzsche dared to show it only to
seven people, most of whom rejected it. He felt that he was in utter
isolation, a “voice crying in the wilderness.”
What Nietzsche celebrates (as shown in the section on Adler) is
_will-to-power_. The doctrine of Christianity is love, and the rule of
love has certain implications. It means that everyone is included, for
in the eyes of love the object is always valuable. To a loving mother
the child who is an idiot is as precious (if not more so) than his more
normal brothers and sisters. She loves him: that gives him value. Hence
the rule of love means equality, fraternity, democracy. It leads to the
idea of the greatest good for the greatest number. It leads, in short,
to the idea of numbers; the rule of the many.
Its dangers are obvious. Everything new, original, different is
pulled down to the common level. It breeds the spirit of conformity,
and finally eventuates in the Babbitts, the ideals of Main Street, the
formation of Ku Klux Klans. Such are the final fruits of a rampant rule
of love. If your neighbors are as valuable (really more valuable) than
yourself (for love always places the object above oneself) then you
should submit to your neighbors, live and do as they live and do, and
give up your own individual path, your own way, and anything original
or new that may be created by you.
It is against this that Nietzsche comes with a voice which is far
deeper than a personal voice. It is the protest of the collective
unconscious itself; it is a deep racial movement against a violation
of man’s own future. Hence, Nietzsche sets the individual against
the race; he raises an aristocratic ideal against the democratic;
he celebrates new values, original things, the exceptional and the
different. As against love, he rears the doctrine of power. And by
power he means the setting of oneself against the race, and the triumph
of oneself, for in this triumph, the new is born, the new art, new
idea, new thinking, and the race is forced into new paths of greatness.
But, seen in another light, the meaning of Zarathustra is the _revolt
of the introvert against the extravert_.
Western civilization is the civilization of the extravert. A
civilization built up on the principle of love is one which puts the
accent on others, on things outside ourself. As the saying goes, it
takes two to love; there is always the other, and that other is more
important than oneself, if it is really love. Hence, love is the root
of the extraverted attitude. As I said of Roosevelt, he might have put
it of himself: “I am--what I love.”
Such a civilization, therefore, tends toward action, democracy, the
rule of the many, invention, business (the exchange between people),
and since the power of a civilization over the individual is almost
overwhelming, it means that a Christian civilization has thwarted,
twisted, deformed all those whose natures were not in accord with it.
Christianity has been a violation of the introvert.
For, naturally, what Nietzsche depicts in his superman and his
will-to-power, is himself. He depicts the psychology of the introvert.
The introvert is governed by the power principle. Where the extravert
finds relief, and only functions happily, by losing himself in others,
by giving himself to the world outside him; the introvert finds relief
only by remembering himself, by refusing to allow others to absorb
him, by withdrawing from the outer world. The introvert is constantly
striving to preserve the integrity of his ego. He seeks an inner
freedom. He feels bound by the demands of others. Action takes him away
from the stream of his ideas, his inner brooding, and he will not have
much of it. Serving others often seems to him a shallow thing, a waste
of time, compared with the great discovery he is tracking, or the art
he is aiming to achieve.
Power vs. love--introvert vs. extravert.
And how is it that two such dissimilar human beings appear in the
same world? We have only to go back to the root-instincts in man
to come to some sort of understanding. As we know, the two great
instincts are that of self-preservation and that of race-preservation.
Self-preservation leads us to think of ourselves, to turn the eye
inward. It is selfish, hence, it is power, not love. Race-preservation
leads us to think of others, of wife and family, of neighbors, of the
world, to turn the eye outward. It concerns interest in others; hence,
it is more love than power.
The symbol of self-preservation is eating, devouring (we eat just for
ourselves); the symbol of race-preservation is sexuality (the motive in
sexuality is, unconsciously, to beget offspring).
One sees now how this discovery of the types by Jung settles the
question as to the puzzling opposition between the theories of Freud
and Adler.
Freud’s theory is the sexual, Adler’s the will-to-power. In other
words, as Jung has pointed out, Freud is an extravert, and his theory
reflects himself; Adler is an introvert, and his theory is typical of
his type.
Both theories are, in a sense, true; only we must never apply the
Freudian theory to an introvert, nor the Adler theory to an extravert.
It will be seen now how the theory of the collective unconscious
includes both the theory of Freud and the theory of Adler and
transcends them both. In the collective unconscious are both the
summed up wisdom of the race with its creative forward push and also
the instincts. The roots of both ego and sex are to be found there,
flowering in one individual more along the ego path, in another more
along the sex path.
The trouble with both Freud and Adler, according to Jung, is that
they stop at this point. Their theories are _reductive_. The one
reduces human nature back to sex, the other to power. We are _nothing
but_--this or that. But, actually, we are also all we have experienced,
and not only that, but also all the race has experienced. We are also
creative. We cannot explain man only in terms of the past, in the
things from which he originated (finally, the instincts), we must also
explain him in terms of the future, his possibilities, the new life he
is seeking, the greatness which is to be.
In short, we cannot cure a neurosis merely by explaining to a man that
he has an Oedipus complex or a homosexual tendency; neither can we cure
him by showing him that he has an inferiority complex and hence an
abnormal will-to-power. We can only cure him by giving him a future to
live; he must go out and feel that he has something to live for.
Just how psycho-analysis arrives at such a result must be reserved for
a later chapter.
VI.
TYPES.
In picturing Roosevelt as an extravert and Nietzsche as an introvert,
I did not mean to imply, of course, that either lacked the opposite
mechanism. All of us are born with both the sexual-instinct and the
ego-instinct, the gift of love and the will-to-power. However, because
we are loaded more one way than the other, the one tendency tends to
suppress the other, and the other remains therefore, not erased, but
relatively undeveloped, and shows itself in inadequate and perhaps
twisted expression.
There was, of course, an extravert in Nietzsche. But that extravert
lived a shadowy life beside the great introvert, and showed himself in
a clumsy relationship with others, an inadequate response to the world,
an inability to get along. So too was there an introvert in Roosevelt,
but he was a poor one, with doubtless strange ideas sometimes breaking
forth into impulsive and wrong-headed action.
All that we can say is that life forces us to accept one side more than
the other, until we become, as it were, specialists along the side of
extraversion or of introversion.
This specialization, of course, makes us one-sided, and this
one-sidedness reaches an even greater narrowness through a still
further specialization, which is that of _function_.
According to Jung, the human psyche is composed of four functions.
These are _thinking_, _feeling_, _intuition_ and _sensation_.
I do not intend to burden the reader with explanations of these terms,
for we would go far afield in a maze of technicalities. I will merely
try to give a hint of their meaning.
_Thinking_ is readily recognizable. It is, in its pure form, an act of
will, and it may begin with an idea, which it proceeds to illustrate
and to prove, or it may begin with many separated facts and proceeds to
bind them together into a theory or idea.
_Feeling_ is a reaction of like or dislike to an object. It must not
be confused with _emotion_. Both thinking and feeling, according to
Jung, are adapted functions; that is, functions which have developed
through the discipline of life, and which did not exist in their pure
forms when we were born. _Emotion_, however, is something allied to
our instinctive life and something we share with the animals. It is
psychologically what Jung calls a feeling-sensation; that is to say,
it is partly physical and partly mental. We see this clearly when we
find an emotion of shame bringing a blush to the cheek, or one of fear
setting the heart pounding, or one of joy making the pulses leap. In
each case we were aware of something mental, sense of joy, fear, etc.,
and something physical, heart pounding, cheeks blushing, etc.
Feeling is separated from sensation and developed into something by
itself. The feeling person is one who has a highly developed sense of
the values of things registered through reactions of like and dislike.
His immediate liking is not accidental, but due to a high sensitiveness
to the really good qualities of the object; his disliking is equally a
deep and a true thing.
If thinking and feeling are conscious functions, that is, more or less
under the direction of the will (one makes oneself think, one learns to
like and dislike), intuition and sensation are unconscious functions.
There is no control of them. They simply happen.
_Intuition_ is a sort of instant insight. It has something of the
lightning flash in it. It is a seeing-into. And this seeing-into may
be of something near or of something far. A man may have a hunch
that a certain horse is going to win a race; a woman may have an
intuition that her husband, in spite of his protests, has been untrue
to her. Intuitions may also be of a deeper sort. The intuition of the
painter leads him to paint the soul, the inner life of the sitter. The
intuition of the inventor by a blinding flash reveals the solution of
the problem.
_Sensation_, according to Jung, is sensing, a function which transmits
a physical stimulus to perception. We see, hear, feel (contact), etc.
It is our conscious sensing of the world about us through images,
sounds, etc., just as intuition is an unconscious sensing of the world
about us. Hence, sensation relates more closely to the physical life,
the body, than any of the other functions.
Now what Jung maintains, and amply proves in his great work on
Psychological Types, is that each of us is not only either an introvert
or an extravert, but also that each of us _develops one of these four
functions at the expense of the others_. There are therefore thinking
types, feeling types, intuitive types and sensational types, and since
any of these types is also either extraverted or introverted we have
eight types.
I will merely give a few examples to show what the types are like:
_Extraverted thinking type._ A good example is Darwin. He was a slow,
patient thinker; thinking was most obviously his most highly developed
function; but this function was extraverted. That is to say, like all
extraverts his attention and interest was in outer things and the ideas
of others. Hence he was one who built up a theory on observed data,
whether this was a direct study of plants and animals or in reading the
works of others. His thoughts proceeded from the outside in.
_Introverted thinking type._ Kant is a good example. He was a great
philosopher. Instead of proceeding from facts to theory, he proceeded
from ideas to facts. That is to say, through his introversion, he
received ideas from the unconscious, great ideas of a timeless nature,
conceptions of time, space, etc., and these he proceeded to elaborate
and prove.
_Extraverted feeling type._ A good example of this type is Mary
Pickford. It is obvious that she is not a thinker; neither is she one
of those intuitive persons who see into others and know life deeply.
She feels others. She responds by like and dislike; and by the fitness
of things. She is well extraverted and well adapted.
_Introverted feeling type._ Eleanore Duse is an example. She was a
great actress; but one felt her to be one of those silent women whose
feelings are all within, who nurse deep moods, who cannot express their
personal selves, who have great difficulty in their relationships and
tend, as a rule, to shun the world and live in seclusion.
According to Jung thinking is more a masculine function; both
extraverted and introverted it is found more in men than in women;
feeling is more feminine, and is usually found in women.
_Extraverted intuitive type._ Lloyd George, of England, is of this
type. A friend of mine who met him during the war said that as soon as
Lloyd George looked at him, he felt he was completely understood, that
the statesman saw through him. His gift has been to see the tide even
before it turned, to see the possibilities in the people about them,
to leap to his conclusions with a sure agility. If the thinking and
feeling types are more or less steady, pursuing a definite and logical
course, the intuitive type (and sensational) is changeable, erratic,
swift, fickle. This is due to the fact that wherever they see a new
possibility, they leap to it, forgetting what they hitherto pursued.
_Introverted intuitive type._ An excellent example is that given
in the last chapter, that of Nietzsche. His intuitions were of the
introverted kind. He saw inwardly, into the unconscious. This type
is usually very badly adapted to the world. It is close to the
unconscious, and its great intuitions of change, disaster and the new
order of the future put it at variance with society to such an extent
as to make life very difficult. Undoubtedly such men have always been
the great mystics, the great prophets, as Jung quotes, “the voice of
one crying in the wilderness.”
_Extraverted sensation type._ We see examples of this type very often
among actors, dancers, circus people. They are people of a very
sensuous nature, depending more on the sharp stimulus of sensation than
on any other function. We also see examples among men who are epicures
at eating, spend much of their time on fine dressing, and who seek
sensation for its own sake, sensuous surroundings, the more sybaritic
forms of sexuality, etc. Among women we see an inordinate love of
luxury, a theatrical exhibitionism, and self-indulgence in many forms.
Since this type is the least noble (as the intuitive is the most noble)
examples need not be given.
_Introverted sensation type._ This is a type extremely hard to
define. I will merely suggest it. It is probable that the poet Poe
was of this type. He was certainly introverted, but his work is not
marked specifically by deep thought, by feeling or by intuition.
If we consider his poetry we see that he gives us strange pictures
of a No Man’s Land of the imagination; and that he senses these
imaginative realms of the dead and the ghostly. We feel a reality in
these dark pictures. But they have no meaning in the way of giving us
to understand life more deeply or leading us to great ideas or high
flights of feeling. What they do give us is a sense of “out of space,
out of time,” as he himself put it. Introverted sensation gives us just
that. It is a sensing of the eternal images of the unconscious.
Such, by a series of swift strokes, are the eight types. I cannot, of
course, in this space, do full justice to them. They are included in
this survey because they represent an important element in Jung’s work
and serve to show how dark and deep are the psychological problems of
the race. With eight types (possibly more) living in the world about
us, there is indeed much room for misunderstanding and for human
conflict.
It is also obvious that Nietzsche was psychologically correct when
he said that he saw only fragments of human beings about him, and
nowhere a man. Here he saw an arm, there a leg, there an eye and here
an ear, there a mouth and here a breast. In short, he saw a world of
specialization, where one man becomes, like Darwin, a good thinker, but
also is callous to art and to the beauty and joy of life; and where
another develops neither his thinking nor his insight, but spends his
existence in a vain round of the senses.
It is no wonder, then, that there is so much mental sickness. Too
great a one-sidedness is a violation of man’s nature, which is full of
various needs and must, if it develops freely, live a rounded life.
Hence, according to Jung, the basis of the neurosis is not merely a
sexual problem or a problem of power; it is due to the conflict between
the developed and the undeveloped functions. There comes a time for the
thinker, for instance, when his outraged feeling life must manifest
itself. It is at such a moment that the neurosis begins.
VII.
THE CONFLICT AND ITS SOLUTION.
If we want to put the matter in its broadest sense, we can say that
the great conflict of this age is between the extraverted attitude and
the introverted, between Christ and Anti-Christ, between Christianity
with its democracy, its insistence on good works, its life of activity
and service, its concentration, actually, on business, machinery and
getting on, and on the other hand, the claims of the individual and the
demands of the inner life for an enhancement of art, of research, of
philosophy, of spiritual development, of freedom.
It is a conflict between the principle of love and the principle of
power, and naturally, it is not only an external thing, but something
that takes place in every individual who has made any sort of high
development. For it is a psychic law that if we carry anything to an
extreme, we meet the opposite.
This is clearly illustrated in Goethe’s Faust. The hero, Faust, has
carried his introverted side to a very high development; indeed, so
far, that everything he studied and all that he knows now appears
lifeless and uninteresting. He is sick of himself, sick of life. It
is all nothing. His search for knowledge has led nowhere. In the end
all that we know is--that we cannot know. What a pity then that he has
squandered his youth on study and meditation and medicine. A kind of
death comes over him; which means, psychologically, that he has reached
the end of one line of development, and is preparing himself to change
over to another and new line.
This soon appears, in the form of a poodle dog who soon shows himself
as the Devil. Both these symbols are inevitable. A dog, as shown
before, relates to our more extraverted side, and it is this side for
which Faust now longs. He has reached the end of his development (for
the time being) as an introvert; the longing that now is awakened is
for _life_--that is, for youth, activity, sexuality, love, ardent
adventure, etc. Hence, the symbol of the dog as representing the side
of himself he has not developed. But this really is also the Devil.
That is to say that which is undeveloped is still in a primitive state,
and through its long repression, bears the aspect of something ugly
and evil. In order, therefore, to reach the “other side,” in order to
begin to live out the unlived possibilities of his nature, he must sell
himself to the Devil.
That is to say, that when the undeveloped side shows itself and takes
command, it cannot be lived unless one is willing to go a path which
may often appear evil and which is in direct defiance to what one has
previously lived and thought good.
This selling out to the Devil appears as a great danger. It means
that he will never be “saved,” never go to heaven. But actually in
the prologue of the play, God allows the Devil to make this compact
with Faust because the Devil is “a part of that power which wills the
bad, but somehow works the good.” That is to say, if one is willing to
step over into the undeveloped side, and live it in spite of its evil
beginnings, one can only develop oneself and finally come to a higher
good.
Such the drama shows. By magic Faust gains wealth and power. He seduces
Gretchen, and her end is insanity, infanticide and a death that
narrowly escapes the gallows. But Faust goes on, and the whole play
shows how, by following the Devil, he brings the neglected side up to
the developed side of himself, so that in the end the Devil is defeated
and Faust gains that heaven where the two sides of his nature may now
be united in harmony.
If Faust outlines the problem, another great work, the “Prometheus and
Epimetheus” of Spitteler, shows its solution. Jung is at great pains to
analyze this long poem in his book on Psychological Types. Prometheus
and Epimetheus stand respectively for introvert and extravert.
Prometheus is the idealist who withdraws from the world into himself to
love and serve his soul; but Epimetheus is the man of the world, who
has common sense, who obeys the conventions and who becomes a king.
Epimetheus cannot wean his foolish brother from his obviously perverted
way of living. A conflict arises between them, which drives Prometheus
all the deeper in himself. Thus a great sickness falls not only upon
him, but upon his God (the collective unconscious). His soul then
brings him a jewel, a thing of magic, a wonder-child, which will save
the world. But this jewel is rejected by the king and by the world, and
as a result there is destruction, the king losing his throne.
“The final extinction of Good is prevented by the intervention of
Prometheus. He rescues Messias, the last of the sons of God, out
of the power of his enemy. Messias becomes the heir to the Divine
Kingdom, while Prometheus and Epimetheus, the personifications of the
severed opposites, become united in the seclusion of their native
valley.... Which means, extraversion and introversion cease to dominate
as one-sided lines of direction.... In their stead, a new function
appears, symbolically represented by a child named Messias. He is the
mediator, the symbol of the new attitude that shall reconcile the
opposites.”