The Essential Jung

Selected and introduced by

Anthony Storr

Copyright

Harper Press

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB

Published, with a revised bibliography, by Fontana Press 1998

First published in Great Britain in 1983 by Fontana Paperbacks as Jung: Selected Writings, part of the Fontana Pocket Readers series. Second Edition 1986

Copyright © C. G. Jung 1983 Introduction copyright © Anthony Storr, 1983

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Contents

Title Page

Copyright

Note on the Text

Preface

Introduction

Part 1 Jung’s Early Work

From “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena” (1902)

From “School Years” Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

From “Tavistock Lecture II” (1935)

From “A Review of the Complex Theory” (1934)

From “Mental Disease and the Psyche” (1928)

From “On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia” (1939)

Part 2 Jung’s Involvement with Freud and His Divergence from Freud’s Theories

“Psychoanalysis and Neurosis” (1916)

From “The Theory of Psychoanalysis” (1913)

From “Sigmund Freud” Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

From “On Psychic Energy” (1928)

Part 3 The Development of the Idea of the Collective Unconscious and of Archetypes

From “Recent Thoughts on Schizophrenia” (1957)

From “The Structure of the Psyche” (1927/31)

From “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1917/26/43)

From “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

From “The Stages of Life” (1930/1)

From “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

From “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

From “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” (1938/54)

Part 4 Archetypes: Shadow; Anima; Animus; the Persona; the Old Wise Man

From Psychology and Religion (1938/40)

From “The Shadow” Aion (1951)

From “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1929)

From “Definitions” Psychological Types (1921)

From “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928)

From “The Syzygy: Anima and Animus” Aion (1951)

From “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

From “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1928)

From “The Phenomenology of the Spirit in Fairytales” (1945/8)

Part 5 Psychological Types and the Self-regulating Psyche

“Introduction” Psychological Types (1921)

“Psychological Typology” (1936)

From “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (1917/26/43)

“The Practical Use of Dream-analysis” (1934)

Part 6 The Development of the Individual

“The Development of Personality” (1934)

From “The Aims of Psychotherapy” (1931)

“Conscious, Unconscious, and Individuation” (1939)

From “Commentary on The Secret of the Golden Flower” (1929)

Part 7 Integration, Wholeness, and the Self

From “Confrontation with the Unconscious” Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

“Mandalas” (1955)

From Psychology and Religion (1938/40)

From Psychology and Religion (1938/40)

From “The Work” Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1962)

“Introduction to the Religious and Psychological Problems of Alchemy” Psychology and Alchemy (1944)

From “The Conjunction” Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955/6)

Part 8 Self and Opposites: God and the Problem of Evil

From “Christ, a Symbol of the Self” Aion (1951)

From Answer to Job (1952)

From Answer to Job (1952)

Part 9 “Unus Mundus and Synchronicity

From “Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies” (1958)

From “The Conjunction” Mysterium Coniunctionis (1955/6)

From “On the Nature of the Psyche” (1947/54)

From “Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle” (1952)

From Answer to Job (1952)

From “Flying Saucers: a Modern Myth of Things Seen in Skies” (1958)

From letter to Father Victor White (10 April 1954)

Part 10 Man and His Future

“The Undiscovered Self (Present and Future)” (1957)

Chronology of Jung’s Life and Work

Keep Reading

Glossary

Bibliography

About the Author

Index

About the Publisher

Note on the Text

Bibliographical details of the works from which I have taken extracts – Collected Works (CW), Memories, Dreams, Reflections (MDR), Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, The Freud/Jung Letters and Letters – are given on pages 434–5. English and American page or paragraph numbering diverges only in the case of MDR; when quoting from this book I have given the English hardback edition’s pages followed by those of the American edition.

I have been selective about my inclusion of footnotes, keeping those of Jung’s which illuminate the text or which refer to sources of interest to the non-specialist reader, but omitting his and his editors’ references to works which, particularly in the case of the alchemical volumes, are unobtainable by all but the most dedicated scholars. Where editors’ notes have been retained, they are within square brackets. I have used the bibliographies contained in CW to fill out Jung’s footnotes where appropriate.

Preface

Throughout his long life, C. G. Jung was a prolific writer, so that his Collected Works run to no less than eighteen large volumes. In addition, there are two volumes of his letters, a separate volume of his correspondence with Freud, and his autobiography, Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Comparatively few people are prepared to read the whole corpus of this material; but many might welcome the opportunity to become acquainted with Jung’s thought as he himself expounded it. This book is an attempt to distil the essential features of Jung’s psychology as it developed during the course of his life by means of extracts from his own writings. Since Jung’s way of thinking may be unfamiliar to contemporary readers, I have summarized the main features of his thought in an introduction; and I have prefaced the extracts which I have chosen with brief explanatory remarks. But, so far as is possible, I have let Jung present his ideas in his own words. My purpose has been exposition, not criticism; and it must not be assumed that I personally subscribe to everything that Jung wrote.

Anthony Storr

Introduction

Carl Gustav Jung was born on 26 July 1875 and died on 6 June 1961. The greater part of his early childhood was spent at Klein-Hüningen, near Basel, to which his family moved in 1879. Jung attended the local school from the age of six, and, in his eleventh year, was transferred to the Gymnasium in Basel. From here, he went on to study medicine at the University of Basel during the years 1895–1900. Concurrently, he read extensively in the fields of philosophy and theology.

In 1900, he moved to Zurich where he became an assistant physician to Eugen Bleuler at the Burghölzli mental hospital. He was later promoted to Senior Staff Physician. In 1902–3, he spent a term at the Salpêtrière in Paris in order to study psychopathology with Pierre Janet. During these first years in psychiatry, he wrote his MD dissertation, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena”; undertook experimental work in word association; and, in 1903, married Emma Rauschenbach, by whom he had a son and four daughters. In 1905, he was appointed a lecturer in the University of Zurich.

In 1907, Jung published a pioneering book on schizophrenia, The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, which he sent to Freud. This led to a meeting between the two men in Vienna, and to a close association between them which lasted until 1913. In 1909, Jung, in company with Freud and Ferenczi, paid his first visit to the USA, where he lectured on word-association experiments and received an honorary degree from Clark University, in Massachusetts. In the same year, Jung gave up his post at the Burghölzli in favour of his growing private practice which he conducted in his own house at Küsnacht on the Lake of Zurich. Although he travelled in various parts of the world and paid frequent visits to his country retreat in Bollingen, which was also on the Lake of Zurich, Jung continued to practise and to write in the same house in Küsnacht until his death in 1961. His last piece of writing was completed only ten days before he died.

Jung’s earliest work and his later writings have more in common than is generally supposed. They are linked by the theme that mental illness is characterized by disunity of the personality, whilst mental health is manifested by unity. Jung’s first study was conducted on a 15½-year-old girl who, claiming to be a medium, said that she was “controlled” by a variety of different personalities, which Jung interpreted as personifications of various unconscious parts of herself. Before Freud’s concept of repression became widely employed, the term used to describe such phenomena was “dissociation”; and Jung, who at that time was as much influenced by Janet, with whom he had studied, as he was by Freud, whom he had only read, continued to think of personality as being capable of dissociation into a number of subsidiary personalities, any of which could temporarily “take over.” Although Jung accepted the idea of repression in the Freudian sense of making the unacceptable unconscious, and thus inaccessible, he continued to think and write in terms of subsidiary, dissociated personalities, and it is important to bear this in mind when approaching his work. In hysteria, for example, the patient might behave as if she were two or more different persons, who were sometimes given different names and who had no cognizance of each other. Dissociation was a splitting of the personality in which the right hand did not know what the left was doing; and it followed that cure of this type of neurosis depended upon making the divided selves conscious of each other and thus creating a new unity. In schizophrenia, the personality appeared fragmented into many parts, rather than into two or three as in hysteria. Moreover, whereas the hysteric retained contact with reality by means of that part of the personality which was already being called the “ego,” the schizophrenic lost contact with reality because the ego was overwhelmed by irruptions from the unconscious and became only one “voice” amongst many.

Jung’s next group of studies was based upon the word-association test. A list of a hundred words is read out, and the subject is asked to respond to each with the first word that occurs to him. By timing the interval between stimulus and response, it becomes possible to show that, unknown to themselves, subjects are influenced by words which arouse emotion and slow down their responses. Often, groups of words were linked around a theme; and to such a collection of associations, Jung applied the word “complex,” a term which he introduced into psychology. He regarded complexes as similar to, but lesser than, the subsidiary personalities referred to above. These experiments were important in that they demonstrated objectively, in ways which could be measured, the dynamic effects of unconscious mental contents. They will also remind the reader that Jung was trained in the natural sciences and had an accurate grasp of scientific method, although his later interests drew him into fields where scientific method cannot easily be applied.

Although Freud’s writings were being eagerly discussed by the younger generation when Jung was working at the Burghölzli, psychiatry was dominated by German phenomenology. Psychiatrists were content to describe their patients’ symptoms and behaviour, and to fit them into diagnostic categories, without attempting to understand them as individuals. Jung, by applying psychoanalytic ideas to the study of delusions and hallucinations, was able to demonstrate that such phenomena, hitherto dismissed as incomprehensible, could sometimes be shown to have a psychological origin and meaning. Jung remained keenly interested in schizophrenia, and was one of the first psychiatrists to attempt psychoanalytic treatment of the psychotic.

Jung was never dogmatic as to a single “cause” of schizophrenia, although he inclined to the belief that a psychological, rather than a physical, origin was probable. He was also modest in his therapeutic claims, recognizing that only a limited number of cases responded to analysis, and that partial alleviation was more common than cure. Jung considered that there were many schizophrenics who never came near a mental hospital. If such people consulted him, he was cautious and sometimes dismissed them without attempting psychotherapy. Jung was one of the first to recognize that a psychotic episode could be precipitated by analysis.

It was Jung’s intimate acquaintance with the phenomena of schizophrenia which led him to postulate a “collective” unconscious. He found that delusions and hallucinations, which often seemed to be variations on similar themes, could seldom be entirely explained as products of the patient’s personal history. Jung’s extensive knowledge of comparative religion and of mythology led him to detect parallels with psychotic material which argued a common source: a myth-producing level of mind which was common to all men.

Jung described the collective unconscious as consisting of mythological motifs or primordial images to which he gave the name “archetypes.” Archetypes are not inborn ideas, but “typical forms of behaviour which, once they become conscious, naturally present themselves as ideas and images, like everything else that becomes a content of consciousness.” (CW 8, par. 435) Archetypes have an organizing influence on images and ideas. Archetypes are not themselves conscious, but seem to be like underlying ground themes upon which conscious manifestations are sets of variations. Their presence is felt as “numinous”; that is, of profound spiritual significance. Jung wrote:

All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. This is particularly true of religious ideas, but the central concepts of science, philosophy and ethics are no exception to this rule. In their present form they are variants of archetypal ideas, created by consciously applying and adapting these ideas to reality. For it is the function of consciousness not only to recognize and assimilate the external world through the gateway of the senses, but to translate into visible reality the world within us. [CW 8, par. 342]

Examples of archetypes as images of ideas are given in extracts which follow.

It was also Jung’s study of schizophrenia which led him to formulate a different, and more general, view of psychic energy from that of Freud. Freud believed that schizophrenia, in common with other mental disturbances, was due to repression of sexuality and withdrawal of erotic interest from objects in the external world into the inner world of the subject. Jung considered that contact with the external world was maintained in other ways beside the sexual; and that the loss of contact with reality characteristic of schizophrenia could not be attributed to sexual withdrawal alone. Because of this, he came to use the term “libido” for psychic energy in general, without limiting it to sexuality.

While Jung was still at the Burghölzli, his private practice was also growing, so that he became as familiar with the various types of neurosis as he was with schizophrenia and the other psychoses. His divergence from Freud became wider. Freud believed that neurosis invariably originated in early childhood, and that the incestuous fantasies and desires connected with the Oedipus complex were central factors. (Freud made an exception in the case of so-called “traumatic” neurosis; but this did not form a main part of his theory.) Jung thought that the cause of neurosis usually lay in the present; and that the infantile fantasies which Freud unearthed were secondary phenomena. When the natural course of a man’s development through life was held up, either by misfortune or by his failure to face life’s obligations, his libido became turned in upon himself and reactivated the attitudes and feelings of childhood which would normally have been left behind him. Jung believed that there was a natural and proper path of development for each individual; and that neurosis might actually be a valuable signal which indicated when, through intellectual arrogance, a false set of values or an evasion of responsibilities, a person was straying too far from his own true path. Neurotic symptoms, therefore, might be compensatory; part of a self-regulating mechanism whose aim was the achievement of a better balance within the psyche. Jung sometimes said of an individual: “Thank God, he became neurotic!” Just as pain might make a man realize that there was something wrong with his body, so neurotic symptoms could draw attention to psychological problems of which the individual was unaware.

The idea of self-regulation runs right through the whole of Jung’s scheme of how the mind works, and largely accounts for his view of dreams. Freud considered that the majority of dreams had as their core an unacceptable wish which was striving, in the dream, to find indirect expression. He believed that the “manifest content” of a dream was merely a cloak concealing the “latent content,” which was generally some repressed sexual desire of an infantile kind. Jung, on the other hand, regarded dreams as communications from the unconscious. Dreams might be couched in symbolic language which was hard to understand; but they were not necessarily concerned with wishes, nor ways of concealing the unacceptable. Most commonly, dreams were compensatory to the conscious point of view; expressions of aspects of the individual which were neglected or unrealized; or, like neurotic symptoms, warnings of divergence from the individual’s proper path. Dreams from the collective level might sometimes be visions of vast significance, quite outside the range of conscious contrivance.

The idea of compensation and self-regulation also became linked with Jung’s classification of “psychological types.” It was Jung who introduced the terms “extravert” and “introvert” into psychology. Jung’s observation of the very different ways in which Freud, Adler and he himself approached the same psychological material led him to postulate that individuals adopted differing habitual attitudes toward life which determined their interpretation of experience. The extravert’s bias was toward the external world; the introvert’s, toward the inner world of the psyche. Jung later proposed that the psyche operated by means of four functions: thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Any one of these functions could also be predominant in an individual’s way of dealing with experience. For example, a man could be an introverted thinker or an extraverted intuitive or an introverted feeling type. The eight possible types are vividly described in volume 6 of the Collected Works, Psychological Types.

Compensation and self-regulation are integral parts of this type theory. Jung considered that habitual attitudes were nearly always carried too far, so that the thinker neglected his feelings, while the intuitive paid too little attention to the facts given by sensation. Introverts were caught up in their inner worlds; while extraverts lost themselves in the press of events. In Western man, because of the achievements of his culture, there was an especial tendency toward intellectual hubris; an overvaluation of thinking which could alienate a man from his emotional roots. Neurotic symptoms, dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious were often expressions of the “other side” trying to assert itself. There was, therefore, within every individual, a striving toward unity in which divisions would be replaced by consistency, opposites equally balanced, consciousness in reciprocal relation with the unconscious. Jung affirmed that personality was manifested by “definiteness, wholeness and ripeness”. (CW 17, par. 288) He considered personality to be an achievement, not something given. Moreover, it was essentially an achievement of the second half of life. In the first half of life, a person is, and should be, concerned with emancipating himself from parents and with establishing himself in the world as spouse, parent and effective contributor. In the modern world, especially, a certain one-sidedness might be needed to fulfil these conventional demands; but, once a person had done so, then he could and should look inwards. Jung called the journey toward wholeness the “process of individuation,” and it is toward the study of this process that the thrust of his later work is directed.

Jung’s later writings are much concerned with alchemy. Although the ostensible purpose of alchemy was to find a way of changing base metals into gold, the early alchemists “sought not only to make gold, but to perfect everything in its own nature” (F. Sherwood Taylor, The Alchemists, London: Heinemann, 1951, p. 3). Moreover they linked change in matter with change in man, so that the alchemical “work” aimed at perfecting matter was, at the same time, a psychological process aimed at perfecting man. Some of the alchemists undoubtedly thought of their work as a meditative development of the inner personality; and this is why their writings appealed to Jung, who found parallels between the series of changes described by the alchemists and the process of individuation which he observed taking place within his patients. Individuation is essentially a spiritual journey. “Only the man who can consciously assent to the power of the inner voice becomes a personality.” (CW 17, par. 308) By paying attention to the voice within, the individual achieves a new synthesis between conscious and unconscious, a sense of calm acceptance and detachment, and a realization of the meaning of life.

If the unconscious can be recognized as a co-determining factor along with consciousness, and if we can live in such a way that conscious and unconscious demands are taken into account as far as possible, then the centre of gravity of the total personality shifts its position. It is then no longer in the ego, which is merely the centre of consciousness, but in the hypothetical point between conscious and unconscious. This new centre might be called the self. [CW 13, par. 67]

Jung found that the new centre expressed itself in quaternity symbols and circular structures which he called “mandalas,” the Sanskrit name applied to images of this kind which, in the East, are used for meditation. Mandalas symbolize an integrating factor. In cases where consciousness is confused, mandalas may appear as compensatory attempts at self-healing by imposing an ordered structure. The self, of which the mandala is a symbol, is the archetype of unity and totality. Jung believed that this archetype was the underlying reality manifesting itself in the various systems of monotheism. The self, therefore, is the God within; and the individual, in seeking self-realization and unity, becomes the means through which “God seeks his goal.” (CW 10, par. 588) By fulfilling his own highest potential, the individual is not only realizing the meaning of life, but also fulfilling God’s will.

Jung believed that only exceptional individuals reached the peaks of individual development. Individuation means parting company with the crowd; and this at first accentuates loneliness, and may seem alarming. Most human beings are content to remain safely with the majority, conforming to the conventions and beliefs shared by members of their family, church or political party. But exceptional individuals are impelled by their inner nature to seek their own path; and, although human psyches, like human bodies, share a basic structure, the individual psyche is “an endlessly varied recombination of age-old components”. (MDR, p. 223/235) Jung continued to affirm that the highest ideals and values were carried by the individual, never by an ideology or the State.

Jung’s major contribution to psychology, therefore, lies in the field of adult development. Freud and his followers were primarily interested in the earliest development of the young child, since they considered that the majority of neuroses originated in the first five years of life. Freudian analysis had as its aim the reconstruction and recall of the patient’s earliest years. It was assumed that, when the repressed, infantile material had been made conscious, the patient would become free of the malign effects of his childhood and lose the neurotic symptoms which were its consequence. Freudian analysis, therefore, was, and is, primarily orientated toward the patient’s past.

Jung, of course, was well aware of the importance of early childhood in determining personality development. Indeed, in cases in which it was clear that the patient’s primary problem was emancipating himself from the influence of home and parents, Jung advocated proceeding along Freudian or Adlerian lines. But Jung was inclined to leave such analyses to others. The patients who interested him were those who had already freed themselves from the past sufficiently to become established in their own right; who were often successful in worldly terms; but who, in the mid-period of their lives, found that the world had become stale and unprofitable. Such people were seeking a meaning to their lives; and Jung’s aim was to guide them along the path of individuation. Jungian analysis, therefore, was, and is, primarily orientated toward the patient’s future.

The quest for a new synthesis of personality involves taking into account those parts of the whole which have been neglected. As pointed out above, Jung found that those who consulted him because of the emptiness of their lives were one-sided in their development: too much identified with their predominant attitude and function. Since everyone has both an extraverted and an introverted potential, and also needs all four functions (thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition) if he is to live life fully, it follows that one task of analysis is to help the patient become aware of neglected aspects of his personality. Such aspects appear in dreams; and the study of dreams became even more important in Jungian analysis than in its Freudian counterpart.

Another technique developed by Jung was that of “active imagination.” Jung encouraged his patients to enter a state of reverie in which judgment was suspended but consciousness preserved. They were then enjoined to note what fantasies occurred to them, and to let these fantasies go their own way without interference. Jung encouraged his patients to draw and paint their fantasies, finding that this technique both helped the patient to rediscover hidden parts of himself and also portrayed the psychological journey upon which he was embarked. Jung was the first analyst to supplement verbal exchange in this way; and the increasing use of painting, modelling and music in therapy bears witness to Jung’s prescience.

In times when so much importance is attributed to good or bad interpersonal relationships as determinants of mental health or illness, Jung’s concentration upon the individual’s relations with the different parts of his own psyche may seem puzzling. Jung was well aware of the importance of interpersonal relationships, but believed that it was only when the individual had come to terms with himself that satisfactory relationships with others could be achieved. Jung wrote: “Companionship thrives only when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify himself with others.” (MDR, p. 328/356)

Individuation is not the same as individualism, “which is essentially no more than a morbid reaction against an equally futile collectivism. In contrast to all this, the natural process of individuation brings to birth a consciousness of human community precisely because it makes us aware of the unconscious, which unites and is common to all mankind.” (CW 16, par. 227)

Although Jung claimed that what he discovered were facts which anyone else who adopted the same technique would confirm, he was also aware that subjective factors were bound to influence his point of view. “Philosophical criticism has helped me to see that every psychology – my own included – has the character of a subjective confession … Even when I am dealing with empirical data I am necessarily speaking about myself.” (CW 4, par. 774) It may be helpful to glance at some of the influences which contributed to Jung’s particular viewpoint.

For the first nine years of his life, Jung remained an only child who lived primarily in his imagination and who spent much of his time in solitary play. When he first went to school, he found that, in trying to adapt to his rural companions, he tended to become alienated from himself, as sensitive and imaginative people often do when trying too hard to “fit in.” It became important to him to preserve his inner imaginative world from intrusion. In his autobiography, he describes various secret rituals by means of which he kept contact with his inner world and shielded it from others. In the “Late Thoughts” which form part of his autobiography, Jung wrote: “There is no better means of intensifying the treasured feeling of individuality than the possession of a secret which the individual is pledged to guard.” (MDR, p. 315/342) In the last chapter of the same book, he wrote: “As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know.” (MDR, p. 327/356) Jung’s childhood discovery of the vital importance of remaining in touch with the inner world is one factor accounting for his emphasis on healing and the growth of personality as essentially an inner process, concentrating upon the individual’s relation with the various aspects of his own psyche, rather than upon his relationships with other human beings.

From his earliest years, Jung was exposed to a great deal of discussion of religious matters. His father was a minister in the Swiss Reformed Church; two of his uncles were parsons; and there were no less than six parsons in his mother’s family. Very early in his life, so Jung records, he experienced dreams and visions of a religious kind which convinced him not only that religious experience was a personal matter which might have little to do with established creeds, but also that God had a “dark” side which did not accord with the conventional Christian image of an ever-loving father. His own father was content to promulgate the teachings of his church, though Jung came to question the genuineness of his faith. He was unable, or unwilling, to discuss the doubts with which his more gifted son confronted him. Jung, therefore, found himself in the position of being unable to subscribe to the faith in which he had been reared, while at the same time continuing to think that individuals could neither be happy nor healthy unless they acknowledged their dependence upon some higher power than that of the ego. Jung himself became one of those exceptional individuals who so much interested him as patients: individuals who were compelled by their own natures to strike out on their own, abandon conventional beliefs and find what they were seeking within their own psyches. Although Jung continued to profess allegiance to what he called “the extreme left wing of Protestantism,” his religious ideas became so unconventional that he gave offence to both Catholic and Protestant theologians, although some from both camps continued to find value in what Jung had to say.

Another important factor determining Jung’s psychological standpoint was the period of mental upheaval through which he passed in the years of the First World War, just after his break with Freud. Although, as we shall see, Jung was never a disciple of Freud, and had carried out a good deal of original work before he had even met him, Freud was a powerful influence, and separating from him was extremely painful. It was because Jung felt that he had to be true to his own inner voice that the break occurred; for Freud’s tolerance of any divergence from the “truths” which he believed he had discovered was limited. At the time of parting, Jung was thirty-eight. Jung’s insistence that the mid-life period was a turning point in psychological development took origin from his own experience.

Like many solitary thinkers, Jung was always an avid reader, and, while still an adolescent, plunged into Kant and Schopenhauer. The latter’s sombre view especially appealed to him. “Here at last was a philosopher who had the courage to see that all was not for the best in the fundaments of the universe.” (MDR, p. 76/69) Although there are profound differences between Jung’s thought and that of Schopenhauer, there are also striking similarities. Schopenhauer considered that individuals were the embodiments of an underlying Will which was outside space and time. Jung begins his autobiography by writing: “My life is a story of the self-realization of the unconscious.” (MDR, p. 17/3) Schopenhauer considered that the very notion of individuality, the principium individuationis, is dependent on the human, subjective categories of space and time which force us to be conscious of individual objects, and prevent us from seeing the original unity of the Will of which individuals are a manifestation. Jung also believed that there was a realm outside space and time from which individuals become differentiated. Borrowing the Gnostic term, he referred to this spiritual realm transcending consciousness as the pleroma. “We are distinguished from the pleroma in our essence … which is confined within time and space.” Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, I) Whereas in the pleroma all is one and there is no differentiation between opposites like good and evil, light and darkness, time and space, or force and matter, the principium individuationis compels distinctiveness which is the essential characteristic of individuals. Whereas Schopenhauer’s philosophy is governed by the ideal of deliverance from the bonds of individuality by means of self-denial and asceticism (an ideal which Schopenhauer himself was far from realizing), Jung’s philosophy is ruled by the idea of affirmation of individuality. A man who understands and comes to terms with the different aspects of his inner being is enabled to live life more completely. Jung was also influenced by Nietzsche, who was a passionate individualist; but, whereas Nietzsche stated that God was dead, Jung rediscovered God as a guiding principle of unity within the depths of the individual psyche.

Jung’s belief in the ultimate unity of all existence led him to suppose that physical and mental, as well as spatial and temporal, were human categories imposed upon reality which did not accurately reflect it. Human beings, because of the nature of thought and language, are bound to categorize things as opposites; that is, all human statements are antinomian. But these opposites may, in fact, be facets of the same reality. Through his collaboration with the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, Jung came to believe that the physicist’s investigation of matter and the psychologist’s investigation of the depths of the psyche might be different ways of approaching the same underlying reality. It had long been recognized that analytical psychology could never be wholly “objective,” since the observer was bound to exert an effect on what he was observing by the fact of paying it attention. But the same point had also been reached in modern physics. At the subatomic level, it was recognized that it was impossible to determine a particle’s momentum and its velocity at the same time. Moreover, the constituents of matter could be considered to behave as waves or particles, depending on the choice of the observer. Physicists came to realize that it was possible to look at one and the same event through two different frames of reference which, though mutually exclusive, were nevertheless complementary. The Principle of Complementarity, which became a cornerstone of modern physics, could also be applied to the mind-body problem. Perhaps mind and body were simply different aspects of a single reality as viewed through different frames of reference.

Jung claimed that there were “sufficient reasons” for believing that “the psychic lies embedded in something that appears to be of a nonpsychic nature.” (CW 8, par. 437) Jung came to think of archetypes as existing in this reality outside space and time, but manifesting themselves in the individual psyche as organizers. “Archetypes, so far as we can observe and explain them at all, manifest themselves only through their ability to organize images and ideas, and this is always an unconscious process which cannot be detected until afterwards. By assimilating material whose provenance in the phenomenal world is not to be contested, they become visible and psychic.” (CW 8, par. 440) One reason why Jung thought of archetypes as existing outside space and time was that he believed them responsible for what he called “meaningful coincidences,” of which examples are given in the extracts which follow. Throughout his life, Jung had been impressed by clusters of significant events occurring together, and by the fact that these events might be physical as well as mental. The physical death of one individual, for example, might coincide with a disturbing dream referring to that death in the mind of another. Jung felt that such coincidences, which he considered “relatively common,” demanded an explanatory principle in addition to causality. This principle he named synchronicity. Once again, Jung seems to have been influenced by Schopenhauer, who had postulated a link between simultaneous events which were causally unconnected. Jung’s idea was that synchronicity was based on a universal order of meaning, complementary to causality. He thought that synchronistic phenomena were connected with archetypes which he referred to as psychoid factors of the collective unconscious, meaning by this that archetypes were neither physical nor mental but partaking of both realms, and able, therefore, to manifest themselves both physically and mentally simultaneously. Jung refers to the case of Swedenborg, who experienced a vision of a fire in Stockholm at the same time as an actual fire was raging. Jung considered that some change in Swedenborg’s state of mind gave him temporary access to “absolute knowledge”; to an area in which the limits of space and time are transcended. Jung believed that causeless events were creative acts “as the continuous creation of a pattern that exists from all eternity, repeats itself sporadically, and is not derivable from any known antecedents.” (CW 8, par. 967) The recognition of patterns of order affects human beings as meaning.

In Jung’s view, changes in the collective unconscious, which might take centuries to complete themselves, were responsible for alterations in the way in which men viewed the world and thought about themselves. The decline in conventional Christian belief, for example, is related to the fact that the Christ-image, which excludes both evil and the feminine, can no longer symbolize wholeness for modern man. It was only in 1950 that the Pope proclaimed the Assumption of the Virgin Mary as part of divine revelation. Jung considered this as a significant step toward incorporating femininity into the image of the divine, and pointed out that the impulse to do this did not come from the ecclesiastical authorities but from the Catholic masses “who have insisted more and more vehemently on this development. Their insistence is, at bottom, the urge of the archetype to realize itself” (CW 9 ii, par. 142) and it took many years for this to be accomplished.

I hope that this brief introduction to Jung’s thought will make it easier for the reader to find his way through the extracts which follow. Some may find Jung’s later writings difficult or antipathetic; but Jung’s valuable contributions to psychotherapy and to the understanding of individuals can be appreciated without subscribing to the whole of his system of belief.

Part 1. Jung’s Early Work

Jung began his career in psychiatry in December 1900, when he was appointed as an assistant physician at the Burghölzli mental hospital in Zurich. Breuer and Freud had published their Studies on Hysteria in 1895; and Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams had appeared in November 1899. But psychiatrists were still fascinated by the researches of Janet and Morton Prince into cases of “multiple personality,” and it was this phenomenon which inspired Jung’s first published work: his dissertation for his medical degree, “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena.” This was based on his observations during seances of a 15½-year-old cousin, Hélène Preiswerk (called S. W. in the paper), who was reputedly a medium. She claimed to be controlled by a variety of spirits, varying from her grandfather, who was deeply serious, to a figure called Ulrich von Gerbenstein, who was flirtatious and frivolous. Jung interpreted these various figures as “unconscious personalities.”

From “On the Psychology and Pathology of So-called Occult Phenomena” CW 1, par. 77

In our account of S. W.’s case, the following condition was indicated by the term “semi-somnambulism”: For some time before and after the actual somnambulistic attack the patient found herself in a state whose most salient feature can best be described as “preoccupation”. She lent only half an ear to the conversation around her, answered absent-mindedly, frequently lost herself in all manner of hallucinations; her face was solemn, her look ecstatic, visionary, ardent. Closer observation revealed a far-reaching alteration of her entire character. She was now grave, dignified; when she spoke, the theme was always an extremely serious one. In this state she could talk so seriously, so forcefully and convincingly, that one almost had to ask oneself: Is this really a girl of 15½? One had the impression that a mature woman was being acted with considerable dramatic talent.

Jung goes on to compare S. W. with a case of Janet’s.

CW 1, pars. 92–3

Janet conducted the following conversation with the subconscious of Lucie, who, meanwhile, was engaged in conversation with another observer:

[Janet asks:] Do you hear me? [Lucie answers, in automatic writing:] No.

But one has to hear in order to answer. – Absolutely.

Then how do you do it?-I don’t know.

There must be someone who hears me. – Yes.

Who is it? – Somebody besides Lucie.

All right. Somebody else. Shall we give the other person a name? – No.

Yes, it will be more convenient. – All right. Adrienne.

Well, Adrienne, do you hear me? – Yes.

One can see from these extracts how the unconscious personality builds itself up: it owes its existence simply to suggestive questions which strike an answering chord in the medium’s own disposition. This disposition can be explained by the disaggregation of psychic complexes, and the feeling of strangeness evoked by these automatisms assists the process as soon as conscious attention is directed to the automatic act. Binet remarks on this experiment of Janet’s: “Nevertheless it should be carefully noted that if the personality of ‘Adrienne’ could be created, it was because the suggestion encountered a psychological possibility; in other words, disaggregated phenomena were existing there apart from the normal consciousness of the subject.”* The individualization of the subconscious is always a great step forward and has enormous suggestive influence on further development of the automatisms. The formation of unconscious personalities in our case must also be regarded in this light.

Returning to his own case, Jung discusses the “Origin of the Unconscious Personalities.”

CW 1, pars. 132–3

As we have seen, the various personalities are grouped round two types, the grandfather and Ulrich von Gerbenstein. The grandfather produces nothing but sanctimonious twaddle and edifying moral precepts. Ulrich von Gerbenstein is simply a silly schoolgirl, with nothing masculine about him except his name. We must here add, from the anamnesis, that the patient was confirmed at the age of fifteen by a very pietistic clergyman, and that even at home she had to listen to moral sermons. The grandfather represents this side of her past, Gerbenstein the other half; hence the curious contrast. So here we have, personified, the chief characters of the past: here the compulsorily educated bigot, there the boisterousness of a lively girl of fifteen who often goes too far. The patient herself is a peculiar mixture of both; sometimes timid, shy, excessively reserved, at other times boisterous to the point of indecency. She is often painfully conscious of these contrasts. This gives us the key to the origin of the two subconscious personalities. The patient is obviously seeking a middle way between two extremes; she endeavours to repress them and strives for a more ideal state. These strivings lead to the adolescent dream of the ideal Ivenes, beside whom the unrefined aspects of her character fade into the background. They are not lost; but as repressed thoughts, analogous to the idea of Ivenes, they begin to lead an independent existence as autonomous personalities.

This behaviour calls to mind Freud’s dream investigations, which disclose the independent growth of repressed thoughts.

The idea that personality was not a unity, but might contain subsidiary personalities was familiar to Jung from his own experience, since he records his surprise, at the age of twelve, at finding that he himself was two different persons.

From “School Years” MDR, pp. 44–6/33–4

Around this time I was invited to spend the holidays with friends of the family who had a house on Lake Lucerne. To my delight the house was situated right on the lake, and there was a boat-house and a rowing boat. My host allowed his son and me to use the boat, although we were sternly warned not to be reckless. Unfortunately I also knew how to steer a Waidling (a boat of the gondola type) – that is to say, standing. At home we had such a punt, in which we had tried out every imaginable trick. The first thing I did, therefore, was to take my stand on the stern seat and with one oar push off into the lake. That was too much for the anxious master of the house. He whistled us back and gave me a first-class dressing-down. I was thoroughly crestfallen but had to admit that I had done exactly what he had said not to, and that his lecture was quite justified. At the same time I was seized with rage that this fat, ignorant boor should dare to insult ME. This ME was not only grown up, but important, an authority, a person with office and dignity, an old man, an object of respect and awe. Yet the contrast with reality was so grotesque that in the midst of my fury I suddenly stopped myself, for the question rose to my lips: “Who in the world are you, anyway? You are reacting as though you were the devil only knows how important! And yet you know he is perfectly right. You are barely twelve years old, a schoolboy, and he is a father and a rich, powerful man besides, who owns two houses and several splendid horses.”

Then, to my intense confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different persons. One of them was the schoolboy who could not grasp algebra and was far from sure of himself; the other was important, a high authority, a man not to be trifled with, as powerful and influential as this manufacturer. This “Other” was an old man who lived in the eighteenth century, wore buckled shoes and a white wig and went driving in a fly with high, concave rear wheels between which the box was suspended on springs and leather straps.

This notion sprang from a curious experience I had had. When we were living in Klein-Hüningen an ancient green carriage from the Black Forest drove past our house one day. It was truly an antique, looking exactly as if it had come straight out of the eighteenth century. When I saw it, I felt with great excitement: “That’s it! Sure enough, that comes from my times.” It was as though I had recognized it because it was the same type as the one I had driven in myself. Then came a curious sentiment écoeurant, as though someone had stolen something from me, or as though I had been cheated – cheated out of my beloved past. The carriage was a relic of those times! I cannot describe what was happening in me or what it was that affected me so strongly: a longing, a nostalgia, or a recognition that kept saying “Yes, that’s how it was! Yes, that’s how it was!”

When Jung began work at the Burghölzli mental hospital, word-association tests were used as a means of studying the way in which mental contents are linked together by similarity, contrast or contiguity in space and time. Jung transformed their use into a tool for investigating emotional preoccupations; and his researches led him to formulate the notion of the “complex,” a term which he introduced.

From “Tavistock Lecture II” CW 18, pars. 97–106

First of all I want to say something about word-association tests. To many of you perhaps these seem old-fashioned, but since they are still being used I have to refer to them. I use this test now not with patients but with criminal cases.

The experiment is made – I am repeating well-known things – with a list of say a hundred words. You instruct the test person to react with the first word that comes into his mind as quickly as possible after having heard and understood the stimulus word. When you have made sure that the test person has understood what you mean you start the experiment. You mark the time of each reaction with a stop-watch. When you have finished the hundred words you do another experiment. You repeat the stimulus words and the test person has to reproduce his former answers. In certain places his memory fails and reproduction becomes uncertain or faulty. These mistakes are important.

Originally the experiment was not meant for its present application at all; it was intended to be used for the study of mental association. That was of course a most Utopian idea. One can study nothing of the sort by such primitive means. But you can study something else when the experiment fails, when people make mistakes. You ask a simple word that a child can answer, and a highly intelligent person cannot reply. Why? That word has hit on what I call a complex, a conglomeration of psychic contents characterized by a peculiar or perhaps painful feeling-tone, something that is usually hidden from sight. It is as though a projectile struck through the thick layer of the persona into the dark layer. For instance, somebody with a money complex will be hit when you say: “To buy,” “to pay,” or “money.” That is a disturbance of reaction.

We have about twelve or more categories of disturbance and I will mention a few of them so that you will get an idea of their practical value. The prolongation of the reaction time is of the greatest practical importance. You decide whether the reaction time is too long by taking the average mean of the reaction times of the test person. Other characteristic disturbances are: reaction with more than one word, against the instructions; mistakes in reproduction of the word; reaction expressed by facial expression, laughing, movement of the hands or feet or body, coughing, stammering, and such things; insufficient reactions like “yes” or “no”; not reacting to the real meaning of the stimulus word; habitual use of the same words; use of foreign languages – of which there is not a great danger in England, though with us it is a great nuisance; defective reproduction, when memory begins to fail in the reproduction experiment; total lack of reaction.

All these reactions are beyond the control of the will. If you submit to the experiment you are done for, and if you do not submit to it you are done for too, because one knows why you are unwilling to do so. If you put it to a criminal he can refuse, and that is fatal because one knows why he refuses. If he gives in he hangs himself. In Zurich I am called in by the Court when they have a difficult case; I am the last straw.

The results of the association test can be illustrated very neatly by a diagram (Figure 5). The height of the columns represents the actual reaction time of the test person. The dotted horizontal line represents the average mean of reaction times. The unshaded columns are those reactions which show no signs of disturbance. The shaded columns show disturbed reactions. In reactions 7, 8, 9, 10, you observe for instance a whole series of disturbances: the stimulus word at 7 was a critical one, and without the test person noticing it at all three subsequent reaction times are overlong on account of the perseveration of the reaction to the stimulus word. The test person was quite unconscious of the fact that he had an emotion. Reaction 13 shows an isolated disturbance, and in 16–20 the result is again a whole series of disturbances. The strongest disturbances are in reactions 18 and 19. In this particular case we have to do with a so-called intensification of sensitiveness through the sensitizing effect of an unconscious emotion: when a critical stimulus word has aroused a perseverating emotional reaction, and when the next critical stimulus word happens to occur within the range of that perseveration, then it is apt to produce a greater effect than it would have been expected to produce if it had occurred in a series of indifferent associations. This is called the sensitizing effect of a perseverating emotion.

Figure 5. Association Test

In dealing with criminal cases we can make use of the sensitizing effect, and then we arrange the critical stimulus words in such a way that they occur more or less within the presumable range of perseveration. This can be done in order to increase the effect of critical stimulus words. With a suspected culprit as a test person, the critical stimulus words are words which have a direct bearing upon the crime.

The test person for Figure 5 was a man about 35, a decent individual, one of my normal test persons. I had of course to experiment with a great number of normal people before I could draw conclusions from pathological material. If you want to know what it was that disturbed this man, you simply have to read the words that caused the disturbances and fit them together. Then you get a nice story. I will tell you exactly what it was.

To begin with, it was the word knife that caused four disturbed reactions. The next disturbance was lance (or spear) and then to beat, then the word pointed and then bottle. That was in a short series of fifty stimulus words, which was enough for me to tell the man point-blank what the matter was. So I said: “I did not know you had had such a disagreeable experience.” He stared at me and said: “I do not know what you are talking about.” I said: “You know you were drunk and had a disagreeable affair with sticking your knife into somebody.” He said: “How do you know?” Then he confessed the whole thing. He came of a respectable family, simple but quite nice people. He had been abroad and one day got into a drunken quarrel, drew a knife and stuck it into somebody, and got a year in prison. That is a great secret which he does not mention because it would cast a shadow on his life. Nobody in his town or surroundings knows anything about it and I am the only one who by chance stumbled upon it. In my seminar in Zurich I also make these experiments. Those who want to confess are of course welcome to. However, I always ask them to bring some material of a person they know and I do not know, and I show them how to read the story of that individual. It is quite interesting work; sometimes one makes remarkable discoveries.

I will give you other instances. Many years ago, when I was quite a young doctor, an old professor of criminology asked me about the experiment and said he did not believe in it. I said: “No, Professor? You can try it whenever you like.” He invited me to his house and I began. After ten words he got tired and said: “What can you make of it? Nothing has come of it.” I told him he could not expect a result with ten or twelve words; he ought to have a hundred and then we could see something. He said: “Can you do something with these words?” I said: “Little enough, but I can tell you something. Quite recently you have had worries about money, you have too little of it. You are afraid of dying of heart disease. You must have studied in France, where you had a love affair, and it has come back to your mind, as often, when one has thoughts of dying, old sweet memories come back from the womb of time.” He said: “How do you know?” Any child could have seen it! He was a man of 72 and he had associated heart with pain – fear that he would die of heart failure. He associated death with to die – a natural reaction – and with money he associated too little, a very usual reaction. Then things became rather startling to me. To pay, after a long reaction time, he said La Semeuse, though our conversation was in German. That is the famous figure on the French coin. Now why on earth should this old man say La Semeuse? When he came to the word kiss there was a long reaction time and there was a light in his eyes and he said: Beautiful. Then of course I had the story. He would never have used French if it had not been associated with a particular feeling, and so we must think why he used it. Had he had losses with the French franc? There was no talk of inflation and devaluation in those days. That could not be the clue. I was in doubt whether it was money or love, but when he came to kiss/beautiful I knew it was love. He was not the kind of man to go to France in later life, but he had been a student in Paris, a lawyer, probably at the Sorbonne. It was relatively simple to stitch together the whole story.

Jung soon began to link the idea of complexes with that of “unconscious personalities.”

From “A Review of the Complex Theory” CW 8, pars. 200–3

So far, I have purposely avoided discussing the nature of complexes, on the tacit assumption that their nature is generally known. The word “complex” in its psychological sense has passed into common speech both in German and in English. Everyone knows nowadays that people “have complexes.” What is not so well known, though far more important theoretically, is that complexes can have us. The existence of complexes throws serious doubt on the naïve assumption of the unity of consciousness, which is equated with “psyche,” and on the supremacy of the will. Every constellation of a complex postulates a disturbed state of consciousness. The unity of consciousness is disrupted and the intentions of the will are impeded or made impossible. Even memory is often noticeably affected, as we have seen. The complex must therefore be a psychic factor which, in terms of energy, possesses a value that sometimes exceeds that of our conscious intentions, otherwise such disruptions of the conscious order would not be possible at all. And in fact, an active complex puts us momentarily under a state of duress, of compulsive thinking and acting, for which under certain conditions the only appropriate term would be the judicial concept of diminished responsibility.

What then, scientifically speaking, is a “feeling toned complex”? It is the image of a certain psychic situation which is strongly accentuated emotionally and is, moreover, incompatible with the habitual attitude of consciousness. This image has a powerful inner coherence, it has its own wholeness and, in addition, a relatively high degree of autonomy, so that it is subject to the control of the conscious mind to only a limited extent, and therefore behaves like an animated foreign body in the sphere of consciousness. The complex can usually be suppressed with an effort of will, but not argued out of existence, and at the first suitable opportunity it reappears in all its original strength. Certain experimental investigations seem to indicate that its intensity or activity curve has a wavelike character, with a “wave-length” of hours, days, or weeks. This very complicated question remains as yet unclarified.

We have to thank the French psychopathologists, Pierre Janet in particular, for our knowledge today of the extreme dissociability of consciousness. Janet and Morton Prince both succeeded in producing four to five splittings of the personality, and it turned out that each fragment of personality had its own peculiar character and its own separate memory. These fragments subsist relatively independently of one another and can take one another’s place at any time, which means that each fragment possesses a high degree of autonomy. My findings in regard to complexes corroborate this somewhat disquieting picture of the possibilities of psychic disintegration, for fundamentally there is no difference in principle between a fragmentary personality and a complex. They have all the essential features in common, until we come to the delicate question of fragmented consciousness. Personality fragments undoubtedly have their own consciousness, but whether such small psychic fragments as complexes are also capable of a consciousness of their own is a still unanswered question. I must confess that this question has often occupied my thoughts, for complexes behave like Descartes’ devils and seem to delight in playing impish tricks. They slip just the wrong word into one’s mouth, they make one forget the name of the person one is about to introduce, they cause a tickle in the throat just when the softest passage is being played on the piano at a concert, they make the tiptoeing latecomer trip over a chair with a resounding crash. They bid us congratulate the mourners at a burial instead of condoling with them, they are the instigators of all those maddening things which F. T. Vischer attributed to the “mischievousness of the object.” They are the actors in our dreams, whom we confront so powerlessly; they are the elfin beings so aptly characterized in Danish folklore by the story of the clergyman who tried to teach the Lord’s prayer to two elves. They took the greatest pains to repeat the words after him correctly, but at the very first sentence they could not avoid saying: “Our Father, who art not in heaven.” As one might expect on theoretical grounds, these impish complexes are unteachable.

I hope that, taking it with a very large grain of salt, no one will mind this metaphorical paraphrase of a scientific problem. But even the soberest formulation of the phenomenology of complexes cannot get round the impressive fact of their autonomy, and the deeper one penetrates into their nature – I might almost say into their biology – the more clearly do they reveal their character as splinter psyches. Dream psychology shows us as plainly as could be wished how complexes appear in personified form when there is no inhibiting consciousness to suppress them, exactly like the hobgoblins of folklore who go crashing round the house at night. We observe the same phenomenon in certain psychoses when the complexes get “loud” and appear as “voices” having a thoroughly personal character.

In 1907, Jung published The Psychology of Dementia Praecox (the current name for what is now called schizophrenia). He sent the book to Freud, and it was this which led to Freud’s invitation to Jung to visit him in Vienna. Jung retained an interest in schizophrenia throughout his life, and wrote a paper on the condition as recently as 1957, only four years before his death.

From “Mental Disease and the Psyche” CW 3, pars. 498–503

In 1907 I came before the scientific public with a book on the psychology of dementia praecox. By and large, I adopted a standpoint affirming the psychogenesis of schizophrenia, and emphasized that the symptoms (delusions and hallucinations) are not just meaningless chance happenings but, as regards their content, are in every respect significant psychic products. This means that schizophrenia has a “psychology,” i.e., a psychic causality and finality, just as normal mental life has, though with this important difference: whereas in the healthy person the ego is the subject of his experience, in the schizophrenic the ego is only one of the experiencing subjects. In other words, in schizophrenia the normal subject has split into a plurality of subjects, or into a plurality of autonomous complexes.

The simplest form of schizophrenia, of the splitting of the personality, is paranoia, the classic persecution-mania of the “persécuteur persécuté.” It consists in a simple doubling of the personality, which in milder cases is still held together by the identity of the two egos. The patient strikes us at first as completely normal; he may hold office, be in a lucrative position, we suspect nothing. We converse normally with him, and at some point we let fall the word “Freemason.” Suddenly the jovial face before us changes, a piercing look full of abysmal mistrust and inhuman fanaticism meets us from his eye. He has become a hunted, dangerous animal, surrounded by invisible enemies: the other ego has risen to the surface.

What has happened? Obviously at some time or other the idea of being a persecuted victim gained the upper hand, became autonomous, and formed a second subject which at times completely replaces the healthy ego. It is characteristic that neither of the two subjects can fully experience the other, although the two personalities are not separated by a belt of unconsciousness as they are in an hysterical dissociation of the personality. They know each other intimately, but they have no valid arguments against one another. The healthy ego cannot counter the affectivity of the other, for at least half its affectivity has gone over into its opposite number. It is, so to speak, paralysed. This is the beginning of that schizophrenic “apathy” which can be observed in paranoid dementia. The patient can assure you with the greatest indifference: “I am the triple owner of the world, the finest Turkey, the Lorelei, Germania and Helvetia of exclusively sweet butter and Naples and I must supply the whole world with macaroni.” All this without a blush, and with no flicker of a smile. Here there are countless subjects and no central ego to experience anything and react emotionally.

Turning back to our case of paranoia, we must ask: Is it psychologically meaningless that the idea of persecution has taken possession of him and usurped a part of his personality? Is it, in other words, simply a product of some chance organic disturbance of the brain? If that were so, the delusion would be “unpsychological”; it would lack psychological causality and finality, and would not be psychogenic. But should it be found that the pathological idea did not appear just by chance, that it appeared at a particular psychological moment, then we would have to speak of psychogenesis, even if we assumed that there had always been a predisposing factor in the brain which was partly responsible for the disease. The psychological moment must certainly be something out of the ordinary; it must have something about it that would adequately explain why it had such a profound and dangerous effect. If someone is frightened by a mouse and then falls ill with schizophrenia, this is obviously not a psychic causation, which is always intricate and subtle. Thus our paranoiac fell ill long before anyone suspected his illness; and secondly, the pathological idea overwhelmed him at a psychological moment. This happened when his congenitally hypersensitive emotional life became warped, and the spiritual form which his emotions needed in order to live finally broke down. It did not break by itself, it was broken by the patient. It came about in the following way.

When still a sensitive youth, but already equipped with a powerful intellect, he developed a passionate love for his sister-in-law, until finally – and not unnaturally – it displeased her husband, his elder brother. His were boyish feelings, woven mostly out of moonshine, seeking the mother, like all psychic impulses that are immature. But these feelings really do need a mother, they need prolonged incubation in order to grow strong and to withstand the unavoidable clash with reality. In themselves there is nothing reprehensible about them, but to the simple, straightforward mind they arouse suspicion. The harsh interpretation which his brother put upon them had a devastating effect, because the patient’s own mind admitted that it was right. His dream was destroyed, but this in itself would not have been harmful had it not also killed his feelings. For his intellect then took over the role of the brother and, with inquisitorial sternness, destroyed every trace of feeling, holdings before him the ideal of cold-blooded heartlessness. A less passionate nature can put up with this for a time, but a highly-strung, sensitive nature in need of affection will be broken. Gradually it seemed to him that he had attained his ideal, when suddenly he discovered that waiters and suchlike people took a curious interest in him, smiling at one another understandingly, and one day he made the startling discovery that they took him for a homosexual. The paranoid idea had now become autonomous. It is easy to see the deeper connection between the pitilessness of his intellect, which cold-bloodedly destroyed every feeling, and his unshakable paranoid conviction. That is psychic causality, psychogenesis.

In some such way – naturally with endless variations – not only does paranoia arise, but also the paranoid form of schizophrenia characterized by delusions and hallucinations, and indeed all other forms of schizophrenia. (I would not class among the group of schizophrenias those schizophrenic syndromes, such as catatonias with a rapidly lethal outcome, which seem from the beginning to have an organic basis.) The microscopic lesions of the brain often found in schizophrenia I would, for the time being, regard as secondary symptoms of degeneration, like the atrophy of the muscles in hysterical paralyses. The psychogenesis of schizophrenia would explain why certain milder cases, which do not get as far as the mental hospital but only appear in the neurologist’s consulting-room, can be cured by psychotherapeutic means. With regard to the possibility of cure, however, one should not be too optimistic. Such cases are rare. The very nature of the disease, involving as it does the disintegration of the personality, rules out the possibility of psychic influence, which is the essential agent in therapy. Schizophrenia shares this peculiarity with obsessional neurosis, its nearest relative in the realm of the neuroses.

From “On the Psychogenesis of Schizophrenia” CW 3, pars. 539–40

Two facts have impressed themselves on me during my career as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist. One is the enormous change that the average mental hospital has undergone in my lifetime. That whole desperate crowd of utterly degenerate catatonics has practically disappeared, simply because they have been given something to do. The other fact that impressed me is the discovery I made when I began my psychotherapeutic practice: I was amazed at the number of schizophrenics whom we almost never see in psychiatric hospitals. These cases are partially camouflaged as obsessional neuroses, compulsions, phobias, and hysterias, and they are very careful never to go near an asylum. These patients insist upon treatment, and I found myself, Bleuler’s loyal disciple, trying my hand on cases we never would have dreamed of touching if we had had them in the clinic, cases unmistakably schizophrenic even before treatment – I felt hopelessly unscientific in treating them at all – and after the treatment I was told that they could never have been schizophrenic in the first place. There are numbers of latent psychoses – and quite a few that are not so latent – which, under favourable conditions, can be subjected to psychological analysis, sometimes with quite decent results. Even if I am not very hopeful about a patient, I try to give him as much psychology as he can stand, because I have seen plenty of cases where the later attacks were less severe, and the prognosis was better, as a result of increased psychological understanding. At least so it seemed to me. You know how difficult it is to judge these things correctly. In such doubtful matters, where you have to work as a pioneer, you must be able to put some trust in your intuition and to follow your feeling even at the risk of going wrong. To make a correct diagnosis, and to nod your head gravely at a bad prognosis, is the less important aspect of the medical art. It can even cripple your enthusiasm, and in psychotherapy enthusiasm is the secret of success.

The results of occupational therapy in mental hospitals have clearly shown that the status of hopeless cases can be enormously improved. And the much milder cases not in hospitals sometimes show encouraging results under psychotherapeutic treatment. I do not want to appear overoptimistic. Often enough one can do little or nothing at all; or again, one can have unexpected results. For about fourteen years I have been seeing a woman, who is now sixty-four years of age. I never see her more than fifteen times in the course of a year. She is a schizophrenic and has twice spent a number of months in hospital with an acute psychosis. She suffers from numberless voices distributed all over her body. I found one voice which was fairly reasonable and helpful. I tried to cultivate that voice, with the result that for about two years the right side of the body has been free of voices. Only the left side is still under the domination of the unconscious. No further attacks have occurred. Unfortunately, the patient is not intelligent. Her mentality is early medieval, and I was able to establish a fairly good rapport with her only by adapting my terminology to that of the early Middle Ages. There were no hallucinations then; it was all devils and witchcraft.

*Alfred Binet, Alterations of Personality, tr. Helen Green Baldwin, London: 1896, p. 147.

Part 2. Jung’s Involvement with Freud and His Divergence from Freud’s Theories

During the years 1907–13, Jung was closely associated with Freud, and deeply influenced by him. The story of the rise and fall of their relationship can be traced and studied in The Freud/Jung Letters. But, although Jung always acknowledged his debt to Freud, and paid tribute to his originality, he was never a whole-hearted “Freudian.” For example, in his introduction to The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, dated July 1906, Jung writes:

Fairness to Freud, however, does not imply, as many fear, unqualified submission to a dogma; one can very well maintain an independent judgment. If I, for instance, acknowledge the complex mechanisms of dreams and hysteria, this does not mean that I attribute to the infantile sexual trauma the exclusive importance that Freud apparently does. Still less does it mean that I place sexuality so predominantly in the foreground, or that I grant it the psychological universality which Freud, it seems, postulates in view of the admittedly enormous role which sexuality plays in the psyche. As for Freud’s therapy, it is at best but one of several possible methods, and perhaps does not always offer in practice what one expects from it in theory. [CW 3, Foreword, p. 4]

And, in a letter to Freud dated 5 October 1906, Jung wrote:

What I can appreciate, and what has helped us here in our psychopathological work, are your psychological views, whereas I am still pretty far from understanding the therapy and the genesis of hysteria because our material on hysteria is rather meagre. That is to say your therapy seems to me to depend not merely on the affects released by abreaction but also on certain personal rapports, and it seems to me that though the genesis of hysteria is predominantly, it is not exclusively sexual. I take the same view of your sexual theory. [The Freud/Jung Letters, pp. 4–5]

Freud originally supposed that hysteria was caused by trauma, and that the trauma was both literal and sexual. By the end of 1897, however, Freud realized that the stories which his hysterical patients told him of incestuous seduction were fantasies rather than actual occurrences. Freud then postulated that the cause of neurosis was the “fixation” of the patient at an early stage of emotional development, but continued to assume that the reason for this fixation was to be found in the events of the patient’s early childhood without reference to the present. Jung took a different view.

“Psychoanalysis and Neurosis” CW 4, pars. 557–75

After many years’ experience I now know that it is extremely difficult to discuss psychoanalysis at public meetings and at congresses. There are so many misconceptions of the matter, so many prejudices against certain psychoanalytic views, that it is an almost impossible task to reach mutual understanding in a public discussion. I have always found a quiet conversation on the subject much more useful and fruitful than heated arguments coram publico. However, having been honoured by an invitation from the Committee of this Congress to speak as a representative of the psychoanalytic movement, I will do my best to discuss some of the fundamental theoretical problems of psychoanalysis. I must limit myself to this aspect of the subject because I am quite unable to put before my audience all that psychoanalysis means and strives for, and its various applications in the fields of mythology, comparative religion, philosophy, etc. But if I am to discuss certain theoretical problems fundamental to psychoanalysis, I must presuppose that my audience is familiar with the development and the main results of psychoanalytic research. Unfortunately, it often happens that people think themselves entitled to judge psychoanalysis who have not even read the literature. It is my firm conviction that no one is competent to form an opinion on this matter until he has studied the basic writings of the psychoanalytic school.

In spite of the fact that Freud’s theory of neurosis has been worked out in great detail, it cannot be said to be, on the whole, very clear or easy to understand. This justifies my giving you a short abstract of his fundamental views on the theory of neurosis.

You are aware that the original theory that hysteria and the related neuroses have their origin in a trauma or sexual shock in early childhood was given up about fifteen years ago. It soon became evident that the sexual trauma could not be the real cause of the neurosis, for the simple reason that the trauma was found to be almost universal. There is scarcely a human being who has not had some sexual shock in early youth, and yet comparatively few develop a neurosis in later life. Freud himself soon realized that many of the patients who related an early traumatic experience had only invented the story of the so-called trauma; it had never occurred in reality, but was a mere creation of fantasy. Moreover, on further investigation it became quite obvious that even if a trauma had actually occurred it was not always responsible for the whole of the neurosis, although it does sometimes look as if the structure of the neurosis depended entirely on the trauma. If a neurosis were the inevitable consequence of the trauma it would be quite incomprehensible why neurotics are not incomparably more numerous than they are.

The apparently heightened effect of the shock was clearly due to the exaggerated and morbid fantasy of the patient. Freud also saw that this same fantasy activity manifested itself relatively early in bad habits, which he called infantile perversions. His new conception of the aetiology of neurosis was based on this insight, and he traced the neurosis back to some sexual activity in early infancy. This conception led to his recent view that the neurotic is “fixated” to a certain period of his early infancy, because he seems to preserve some trace of it, direct or indirect, in his mental attitude. Freud also makes the attempt to classify or to differentiate the neuroses, as well as dementia praecox, according to the stage of infantile development in which the fixation took place. From the standpoint of this theory, the neurotic appears to be entirely dependent on his infantile past, and all his troubles in later life,his moral conflicts and his deficiencies, seem to be derived from the powerful influences of that period. Accordingly, the main task of the treatment is to resolve this infantile fixation, which is conceived as an unconscious attachment of the sexual libido to certain infantile fantasies and habits.

This, so far as I can see, is the essence of Freud’s theory of neurosis. But it overlooks the following important question: What is the cause of this fixation of libido to the old infantile fantasies and habits? We have to remember that almost everyone has at some time had infantile fantasies and habits exactly corresponding to those of a neurotic, yet he does not become fixated to them; consequently, he does not become neurotic later on. The aetiological secret of the neurosis, therefore, does not he in the mere existence of infantile fantasies but in the so-called fixation. The numerous statements of neurotics affirming the existence of infantile sexual fantasies are worthless in so far as they attribute an aetiological significance to them, for the same fantasies can be found in normal individuals as well, a fact which I have often proved. It is only the fixation which seems to be characteristic.

It is therefore necessary to demand proof of the reality of this infantile fixation. Freud, an absolutely sincere and painstaking empiricist, would never have evolved this hypothesis had he not had sufficient grounds for it. These grounds are furnished by the results of psychoanalytic investigations of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis reveals the unconscious presence of numerous fantasies which have their roots in the infantile past and are grouped round the so-called “nuclear complex,” which in men may be designated as the Oedipus complex, in women as the Electra complex. These terms convey their own meaning exactly. The whole tragic fate of Oedipus and Electra was acted out within the narrow confines of the family, just as a child’s fate lies wholly within the family boundaries. Hence the Oedipus complex, like the Electra complex, is very characteristic of an infantile conflict. The existence of these conflicts in infancy has been proved by means of psychoanalytic research. It is in the realm of this complex that the fixation is supposed to have taken place. The extremely potent and effective existence of the nuclear complex in the unconscious of neurotics led Freud to the hypothesis that the neurotic has a peculiar fixation or attachment to it. Not the mere existence of this complex – for everybody has it in the unconscious – but the very strong attachment to it is what is typical of the neurotic. He is far more influenced by this complex than the normal person; many examples in confirmation of this can be found in every one of the recent psychoanalytic histories of neurotic cases.

We must admit that this view is a very plausible one, because the hypothesis of fixation is based on the well-known fact that certain periods of human life, and particularly infancy, do sometimes leave determining traces behind them which are permanent. The only question is whether this is a sufficient explanation or not. If we examine persons who have been neurotic from infancy it seems to be confirmed, for we see the nuclear complex as a permanent and powerful agent throughout life. But if we take cases which never show any noticeable trace of neurosis except at the particular time when they break down, and there are many such, this explanation becomes doubtful. If there is such a thing as fixation, it is not permissible to erect upon it a new hypothesis, claiming that at times during certain periods of life the fixation becomes loosened and ineffective, while at others it suddenly becomes strengthened. In these cases we find that the nuclear complex is as active and potent as in those which apparently support the theory of fixation. Here a critical attitude is justifiable, especially when we consider the oft-repeated observation that the moment of the outbreak of neurosis is not just a matter of chance; as a rule it is most critical. It is usually the moment when a new psychological adjustment, that is, a new adaptation, is demanded. Such moments facilitate the outbreak of a neurosis, as every experienced neurologist knows.

This fact seems to me extremely significant. If the fixation were indeed real we should expect to find its influence constant: in other words, a neurosis lasting throughout life. This is obviously not the case. The psychological determination of a neurosis is only partly due to an early infantile predisposition; it must be due to some cause in the present as well. And if we carefully examine the kind of infantile fantasies and occurrences to which the neurotic is attached, we shall be obliged to agree that there is nothing in them that is specifically neurotic. Normal individuals have pretty much the same inner and outer experiences, and may be attached to them to an astonishing degree without developing a neurosis. Primitive people, especially, are very much bound to their infantility. It now begins to look as if this so-called fixation were a normal phenomenon, and that the importance of infancy for the later mental attitude is natural and prevails everywhere. The fact that the neurotic seems to be markedly influenced by his infantile conflicts shows that it is less a matter of fixation than of the peculiar use which he makes of his infantile past. It looks as if he exaggerated its importance and attributed to it a wholly artificial value. Adler, a pupil of Freud’s, expresses a very similar view.

It would be unjust to say that Freud limited himself to the hypothesis of fixation; he was also aware of the problem I have just discussed. He called this phenomenon of reactivation or secondary exaggeration of infantile reminiscences “regression.” But in Freud’s view it appears as if the incestuous desires of the Oedipus complex were the real cause of the regression to infantile fantasies. If this were the case, we should have to postulate an unexpected intensity of the primary incestuous tendencies. This view led Freud to his recent comparison between what he calls the psychological “incest barrier” in children and the “incest taboo” in primitive man. He supposes that a desire for real incest led primitive man to frame laws against it; while to me it looks as if the incest taboo were only one among numerous taboos of all kinds, and were due to the typical superstitious fear of primitive mana fear existing independently of incest and its prohibition. I am able to attribute as little strength to incestuous desires in childhood as in primitive humanity. I do not even seek the reason for regression in primary incestuous or any other sexual desires. I must admit that a purely sexual aetiology of neurosis seems to me much too narrow. I base this criticism not on any prejudice against sexuality but on an intimate acquaintance with the whole problem.

I therefore suggest that psychoanalytic theory should be freed from the purely sexual standpoint. In place of it I should like to introduce an energic viewpoint into the psychology of neurosis.

All psychological phenomena can be considered as manifestations of energy, in the same way that all physical phenomena have been understood as energic manifestations ever since Robert Mayer discovered the law of the conservation of energy. Subjectively and psychologically, this energy is conceived as desire. I call it libido, using the word in its original sense, which is by no means only sexual. Sallust uses it exactly as we do here when he says: “They took more pleasure [libidinem] in handsome arms and war horses than in harlots and revelry.”

From a broader standpoint libido can be understood as vital energy in general, or as Bergson’s élan vital. The first manifestation of this energy in the infant is the nutritive instinct. From this stage the libido slowly develops through numerous variants of the act of sucking into the sexual function. Hence I do not consider the act of sucking a sexual act. The pleasure in sucking can certainly not be considered as sexual pleasure, but as pleasure in nutrition, for it is nowhere proved that pleasure is sexual in itself. This process of development is continued into adult life and is accompanied by constantly increasing adaptation to the external world. Whenever the libido, in the process of adaptation, meets an obstacle, an accumulation takes place which normally gives rise to an increased effort to overcome the obstacle. But if the obstacle seems to be insurmountable, and the individual abandons the task of overcoming it, the stored-up libido makes a regression. Instead of being employed for an increased effort, the libido gives up its present task and reverts to an earlier and more primitive mode of adaptation.

The best examples of such regressions are found in hysterical cases where a disappointment in love or marriage has precipitated a neurosis. There we find those well-known digestive disorders, loss of appetite, dyspeptic symptoms of all sorts, etc. In these cases the regressive libido, turning back from the task of adaptation, gains power over the nutritive function and produces marked disturbances. Similar effects can be observed in cases where there is no disturbance of the nutritive function but, instead, a regressive revival of reminiscences from the distant past. We then find a reactivation of the parental imagos, of the Oedipus complex. Here the events of early infancy – never before important – suddenly become so. They have been regressively reactivated. Remove the obstacle from the path of life and this whole system of infantile fantasies at once breaks down and becomes as inactive and ineffective as before. But let us not forget that, to a certain extent, it is at work all the time, influencing us in unseen ways. This view, incidentally, comes very close to Janet’s hypothesis that the “parties supérieures” of a function are replaced by its “parties inférieures.” I would also remind you of Claparède’s conception of neurotic symptoms as emotional reflexes of a primitive nature.

For these reasons I no longer seek the cause of a neurosis in the past, but in the present. I ask, what is the necessary task which the patient will not accomplish? The long list of his infantile fantasies does not give me any sufficient aetiological explanation, because I know that these fantasies are only puffed up by the regressive libido, which has not found its natural outlet in a new form of adaptation to the demands of life.

You may ask why the neurotic has a special tendency not to accomplish his necessary tasks. Here let me point out that no living creature adjusts itself easily and smoothly to new conditions. The law of inertia is valid everywhere.

A sensitive and somewhat unbalanced person, as a neurotic always is, will meet with special difficulties and perhaps with more unusual tasks in life than a normal individual, who as a rule has only to follow the well-worn path of an ordinary existence. For the neurotic there is no established way of life, because his aims and tasks are apt to be of a highly individual character. He tries to go the more or less uncontrolled and half-conscious way of normal people, not realizing that his own critical and very different nature demands of him more effort than the normal person is required to exert. There are neurotics who have shown their heightened sensitiveness and their resistance to adaptation in the very first weeks of life, in the difficulty they have in taking the mother’s breast and in their exaggerated nervous reactions, etc. For this peculiarity in the neurotic predisposition it will always be impossible to find a psychological aetiology, because it is anterior to all psychology. This predisposition – you can call it “congenital sensitiveness” or what you like – is the cause of the first resistances to adaptation. As the way to adaptation is blocked, the biological energy we call libido does not find its appropriate outlet or activity, with the result that a suitable form of adaptation is replaced by an abnormal or primitive one.

In neurosis we speak of an infantile attitude or of the predominance of infantile fantasies and wishes. In so far as infantile impressions are of obvious importance in normal peoplethey will be equally influential in neurosis, but they have no aetiological significance; they are reactions merely, being chiefly secondary and regressive phenomena. It is perfectly true, as Freud says, that infantile fantasies determine the form and the subsequent development of neurosis, but this is not an aetiology. Even when we find perverted sexual fantasies whose existence can be demonstrated in childhood, we cannot consider them of aetiological significance. A neurosis is not really caused by infantile sexual fantasies, and the same must be said of the sexualism of neurotic fantasy in general. It is not a primary phenomenon based on a perverted sexual disposition, but merely secondary and a consequence of the failure to apply the stored-up libido in a suitable way. I realize that this is a very old view, but this does not prevent it from being true. The fact that the patient himself very often believes that his infantile fantasies are the real cause of his neurosis does not prove that he is right in his belief, or that a theory based on this belief is right either. It may look as if it were so, and I must admit that very many cases do have that appearance. At all events, it is perfectly easy to understand how Freud arrived at this view. Everyone who has any psychoanalytic experience will agree with me here.

To sum up: I cannot see the real aetiology of neurosis in the various manifestations of infantile sexual development and the fantasies to which they give rise. The fact that these fantasies are exaggerated in neurosis and occupy the foreground is a consequence of the stored-up energy or libido. The psychological trouble in neurosis, and the neurosis itself, can be formulated as an act of adaptation that has failed. This formulation might reconcile certain views of Janet’s with Freud’s view that a neurosis is, in a sense, an attempt at self-cure-a view which can be and has been applied to many other illnesses.

Here the question arises as to whether it is still advisable to bring to light all the patient’s fantasies by analysis, if we now consider them of no aetiological significance. Hitherto psychoanalysis has set about unravelling these fantasies because they were considered aetiologically important. My altered view of the theory of neurosis does not affect the psychoanalytic procedure. The technique remains the same. Though we no longer imagine we are unearthing the ultimate root of the illness, we have to pull up the sexual fantasies because the energy which the patient needs for his health, that is, for adaptation, is attached to them. By means of psychoanalysis the connection between his conscious mind and the libido in the unconscious is re-established. Thus the unconscious libido is brought under the control of the will. Only in this way can the split-off energy become available again for the accomplishment of the necessary tasks of life. Considered from this standpoint, psychoanalysis no longer appears as a mere reduction of the individual to his primitive sexual wishes, but, if rightly understood, as a highly moral task of immense educational value.

Another reason for Jung’s divergence from Freud was disagreement about the psychopathology of schizophrenia. Freud tried to maintain that withdrawal of sexual involvement with the external world was at the root of schizophrenic withdrawal, whereas Jung considered that schizophrenia involved a more general failure in adaptation to reality. This led to Jung’s use of the word “libido” as a synonym for psychic energy in general; whereas Freud used the term to signify only sexual energy. It must be remembered that Freud had little experience of schizophrenic patients, since most such cases were to be found in mental hospitals rather than in private practice. Freud’s only experience of mental hospital work was three weeks as a locum tenens (at Oberdöbling in June 1885), whereas Jung stayed at the Burghölzli from 1900 until 1909.

From “The Theory of Psychoanalysis” CW 4, pars. 271–8

THE PROBLEM OF LIBIDO IN DEMENTIA PRAECOX

In my book Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido I tried to furnish proof of these transgressions and at the same time to show the need for a new conception of libido which took account only of the energic view. Freud himself was forced to admit that his original conception of libido might possibly be too narrow when he tried to apply the energic view consistently to a famous case of dementia praecox – the so-called Schreber case. This case is concerned among other things with that well-known problem in the psychology of dementia praecox, the loss of adaptation to reality, a peculiar phenomenon consisting in the special tendency of these patients to construct an inner fantasy world of their own, surrendering for this purpose their adaptation to reality.

One aspect of this phenomenon, the absence of emotional rapport, will be well known to you, as this is a striking disturbance of the reality function. By dint of much psychoanalytic work with these patients we established that this lack of adaptation to reality is compensated by a progressive increase in the creation of fantasies, which goes so far that the dream world becomes more real for the patient than external reality. Schreber found an excellent figurative description for this phenomenon in his delusion about the “end of the world.” He thus depicts the loss of reality in a very concrete way. The dynamic explanation is simple: we say that libido has withdrawn more and more from the external world into the inner world of fantasy, and there had to create, as a substitute for the lost world, a so-called reality equivalent. This substitute is built up piece by piece, so to speak, and it is most interesting to see out of what psychological material this inner world is constructed.

This way of looking at the displacement of libido is based on the everyday use of the term, its original, purely sexual connotation being very rarely remembered. In actual practice we speak simply of libido, and this is understood in so innocuous a sense that Claparède once remarked to me that one could just as well use the word “interest.” The customary use of the term has developed, quite naturally and spontaneously, into a usage which makes it possible to explain Schreber’s end of the world simply as a withdrawal of libido. On this occasion Freud remembered his original sexual definition of libido and tried to come to terms with the change of meaning that had quietly taken place in the meantime. In his paper on Schreber he asks himself whether what the psychoanalytic school calls libido and conceives as “interest from erotic sources” coincides with interest in general. You see that, putting the problem in this way, Freud asks himself the question which Claparède had already answered in practice.

Freud thus broaches the question of whether the loss of reality in schizophrenia, to which I drew attention in my “Psychology of Dementia Praecox,” is due entirely to the withdrawal of erotic interest, or whether this coincides with objective interest in general. We can hardly suppose that the normal “fonction du réel” (Janet) is maintained solely by erotic interest. The fact is that in very many cases reality disappears altogether, so that not a trace of psychological adaptation can be found in these patients. (In these states reality is replaced by complex contents.) We are therefore compelled to admit that not only the erotic interest, but all interest whatsoever, has got lost, and with it the whole adaptation to reality.

Earlier, in my “Psychology of Dementia Praecox,” I tried to get round this difficulty by using the expression “psychic energy,” because I could not base the theory of dementia praecox on the theory of displacements of libido sexually defined. My experience – at that time chiefly psychiatric – did not permit me to understand this latter theory: only later did I come to realize its partial correctness as regards the neuroses, thanks to increased experiences in the field of hysteria and obsessional neurosis. Abnormal displacements of libido, quite definitely sexual, do in fact play a great role in these illnesses. But although very characteristic repressions of sexual libido do take place in the neuroses, the loss of reality so typical of dementia praecox never occurs. In dementia praecox the loss of the reality function is so extreme that it must involve the loss of other instinctual forces whose sexual character must be denied absolutely, for no one is likely to maintain that reality is a function of sex. Moreover, if it were, the withdrawal of erotic interest in the neuroses would necessarily entail a loss of reality comparable to that which occurs in dementia praecox. But, as I said before, this is not the case.

(Another thing to be considered – as Freud also pointed out in his work on the Schreber case – is that the introversion of sexual libido leads to an investment of the ego which might conceivably produce that effect of loss of reality. It is indeed tempting to explain the psychology of the loss in this way. But when we examine more closely the various things that can arise from the withdrawal and introversion of sexual libido, we come to see that though it can produce the psychology of an ascetic anchorite, it cannot produce dementia praecox. The anchorite’s whole endeavour is to exterminate every trace of sexual interest, and this is something that cannot be asserted of dementia praecox.*)

These facts have made it impossible for me to apply Freud’s libido theory to dementia praecox. I am also of the opinion that Abraham’s essay on this subject is theoretically untenable from the standpoint of Freud’s conception of libido. Abraham’s belief that the paranoid system, or the schizophrenic symptomatology, is produced by the withdrawal of sexual libido from the outside world cannot be justified in terms of our present knowledge. For, as Freud has clearly shown, a mere introversion or regression of libido invariably leads to a neurosis and not to dementia praecox. It seems to me impossible simply to transfer the libido theory to dementia praecox, because this disease shows a loss of reality which cannot be explained solely by the loss of erotic interest.

THE GENETIC CONCEPTION OF LIBIDO

The attitude of reserve which I adopted towards the ubiquity of sexuality in my foreword to “The Psychology of Dementia Praecox,” despite the fact that I recognized the psychological mechanisms pointed out by Freud, was dictated by the position of the libido theory at that time. Its sexual definition did not permit me to explain functional disturbances which affect the indefinite sphere of the hunger drive just as much as that of sex solely in the light of a sexual libido theory. Freud’s libido theory had long seemed to me inapplicable to dementia praecox. In my analytical work I noticed that, with growing experience, a slow change in my conception of libido had taken place. Instead of the descriptive definition set forth in Freud’s Three Essays, there gradually took shape a genetic definition of libido, which enabled me to replace the expression “psychic energy” by “libido.”

A very important divergence of view with Freud was over the question of incest. Freud, with his insistence on the literal, believed that neurosis was connected with the persistence of incestuous desires connected with the Oedipus complex. As a previous extract demonstrated, Jung believed that incestuous fantasies were not causal factors in neurosis, but became reactivated as a result of regression in the face of a failure of adaptation in the present. He also began to realize that regression might be a necessary prelude to finding a new and better adaptation. Incest, therefore, could have the symbolic significance of a new synthesis taking place within the individual which pointed toward a creative solution to his problems.

From “Sigmund Freud” MDR, p. 162/167

When I was working on my book about the libido and approaching the end of the chapter “The Sacrifice,” I knew in advance that its publication would cost me my friendship with Freud. For I planned to set down in it my own conception of incest, the decisive transformation of the concept of libido, and various other ideas in which I differed from Freud. To me incest signified a personal complication only in the rarest cases. Usually incest has a highly religious aspect, for which reason the incest theme plays a decisive part in almost all cosmogonies and in numerous myths. But Freud clung to the literal interpretation of it and could not grasp the spiritual significance of incest as a symbol. I knew that he would never be able to accept any of my ideas on this subject.

I spoke with my wife about this, and told her of my fears. She attempted to reassure me, for she thought that Freud would magnanimously raise no objections, although he might not accept my views. I myself was convinced that he could not do so. For two months I was unable to touch my pen, so tormented was I by the conflict. Should I keep my thoughts to myself, or should I risk the loss of so important a friendship? At last I resolved to go ahead with the writing – and it did indeed cost me Freud’s friendship.

In the following passage, Jung elaborates the idea that regression occurs when inner conflict prevents the individual’s adaptation to the external world. He goes on to show that the unconscious contents reactivated by regression contain the germs of a new and better adaptation. (The balance of opposites and the notion of compensation which Jung touches on in the passage below will be reviewed in more detail later.)

From “On Psychic Energy” CW 8, pars. 60–9
FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF THE LIBIDO THEORY

Progression and Regression

One of the most important energic phenomena of psychic life is the progression and regression of libido. Progression could be defined as the daily advance of the process of psychological adaptation. We know that adaptation is not something that is achieved once and for all, though there is a tendency to believe the contrary. This is due to mistaking a person’s psychic attitude for actual adaptation. We can satisfy the demands of adaptation only by means of a suitably directed attitude. Consequently, the achievement of adaptation is completed in two stages: (1) attainment of attitude, (2) completion of adaptation by means of the attitude. A man’s attitude to reality is something extraordinarily persistent, but the more persistent his mental habitus is, the less permanent will be his effective achievement of adaptation. This is the necessary consequence of the continual changes in the environment and the new adaptations demanded by them.

The progression of libido might therefore be said to consist in a continual satisfaction of the demands of environmental conditions. This is possible only by means of an attitude, which as such is necessarily directed and therefore characterized by a certain one-sidedness. Thus it may easily happen that an attitude can no longer satisfy the demands of adaptation because changes have occurred in the environmental conditions which require a different attitude. For example, a feeling-attitude that seeks to fulfil the demands of reality by means of empathy may easily encounter a situation that can only be solved through thinking. In this case the feeling-attitude breaks down and the progression of libido also ceases. The vital feeling that was present before disappears, and in its place the psychic value of certain conscious contents increases in an unpleasant way; subjective contents and reactions press to the fore and the situation becomes full of affect and ripe for explosions. These symptoms indicate a damming up of libido, and the stoppage is always marked by the breaking up of the pairs of opposites. During the progression of libido the pairs of opposites are united in the coordinated flow of psychic processes. Their working together makes possible the balanced regularity of these processes, which without this inner polarity would become one-sided and unreasonable. We are therefore justified in regarding all extravagant and exaggerated behaviour as a loss of balance, because the coordinating effect of the opposite impulse is obviously lacking. Hence it is essential for progression, which is the successful achievement of adaptation, that impulse and counter-impulse, positive and negative, should reach a state of regular interaction and mutual influence. This balancing and combining of pairs of opposites can be seen, for instance, in the process of reflection that precedes a difficult decision. But in the stoppage of libido that occurs when progression has become impossible, positive and negative can no longer unite in coordinated action, because both have attained an equal value which keeps the scales balanced. The longer the stoppage lasts, the more the value of the opposed positions increases; they become enriched with more and more associations and attach to themselves an ever-widening range of psychic material. The tension leads to conflict, the conflict leads to attempts at mutual repression, and if one of the opposing forces is successfully repressed a dissociation ensues, a splitting of the personality, or disunion with oneself. The stage is then set for a neurosis. The acts that follow from such a condition are uncoordinated, sometimes pathological, having the appearance of symptomatic actions. Although in part normal, they are based partly on the repressed opposite which, instead of working as an equilibrating force, has an obstructive effect, thus hindering the possibility of further progress.

The struggle between the opposites would persist in this fruitless way if the process of regression, the backward movement of libido, did not set in with the outbreak of the conflict. Through their collision the opposites are gradually deprived of value and depotentiated. This loss of value steadily increases and is the only thing perceived by consciousness. It is synonymous with regression, for in proportion to the decrease in value of the conscious opposites there is an increase in the value of all those psychic processes which are not concerned with outward adaptation and therefore are seldom or never employed consciously. These psychic factors are for the most part unconscious. As the value of the subliminal elements and of the unconscious increases, it is to be expected that they will gain influence over the conscious mind. On account of the inhibiting influence which the conscious exercises over the unconscious, the unconscious values assert themselves at first only indirectly. The inhibition to which they are subjected is a result of the exclusive directedness of conscious contents. (This inhibition is identical with what Freud calls the “censor.”) The indirect manifestation of the unconscious takes the form of disturbances of conscious behaviour. In the association experiment they appear as complex-indicators, in daily life as the “symptomatic actions” first described by Freud, and in neurotic conditions they appear as symptoms.

Since regression raises the value of contents that were previously excluded from the conscious process of adaptation, and hence are either totally unconscious or only “dimly conscious,” the psychic elements now being forced over the threshold are momentarily useless from the standpoint of adaptation, and for this reason are invariably kept at a distance by the directed psychic function. The nature of these contents is for all the world to read in Freudian literature. They are not only of an infantile-sexual character, but are altogether incompatible contents and tendencies, partly immoral, partly unaesthetic, partly again of an irrational, imaginary nature. The obviously inferior character of these contents as regards adaptation has given rise to that depreciatory view of the psychic background which is habitual in psychoanalytic writings.* What the regression brings to the surface certainly seems at first sight to be slime from the depths; but if one does not stop short at a superficial evaluation and refrains from passing judgment on the basis of a preconceived dogma, it will be found that this “slime” contains not merely incompatible and rejected remnants of everyday life, or inconvenient and objectionable animal tendencies,but also germs of new life and vital possibilities for the future.* This is one of the great merits of psychoanalysis, that it is not afraid to dredge up the incompatible elements, which would be a thoroughly useless and indeed reprehensible undertaking were it not for the possibilities of new life that lie in the repressed contents. That this is and must be so is not only proved by a wealth of practical experience but can also be deduced from the following considerations.

The process of adaptation requires a directed conscious function characterized by inner consistency and logical coherence. Because it is directed, everything unsuitable must be excluded in order to maintain the integrity of direction. The unsuitable elements are subjected to inhibition and thereby escape attention. Now experience shows that there is only one consciously directed function of adaptation. If, for example, I have a thinking orientation I cannot at the same time orient myself by feeling, because thinking and feeling are two quite different functions. In fact, I must carefully exclude feeling if I am to satisfy the logical laws of thinking, so that the thought-process will not be disturbed by feeling. In this case I withdraw as much libido as possible from the feeling process, with the result that this function becomes relatively unconscious. Experience shows, again, that the orientation is largely habitual; accordingly the other unsuitable functions, so far as they are incompatible with the prevailing attitude, are relatively unconscious, and hence unused, untrained, and undifferentiated. Moreover, on the principle of coexistence they necessarily become associated with other contents of the unconscious, the inferior and incompatible quality of which I have already pointed out. Consequently, when these functions are activated by regression and so reach consciousness, they appear in a somewhat incompatible form, disguised and covered up with the slime of the deep.

If we remember that the stoppage of libido was due to the failure of the conscious attitude, we can now understand what valuable seeds he in the unconscious contents activated by regression. They contain the elements of that other function which was excluded by the conscious attitude and which would be capable of effectively complementing or even of replacing the inadequate conscious attitude. If thinking fails as the adapted function, because it is dealing with a situation to which one can adapt only by feeling, then the unconscious material activated by regression will contain the missing feeling function, although still in embryonic form, archaic and undeveloped. Similarly, in the opposite type, regression would activate a thinking function that would effectively compensate the inadequate feeling.

By activating an unconscious factor, regression confronts consciousness with the problem of the psyche as opposed to the problem of outward adaptation. It is natural that the conscious mind should fight against accepting the regressive contents, yet it is finally compelled by the impossibility of further progress to submit to the regressive values. In other words, regression leads to the necessity of adapting to the inner world of the psyche.

Just as adaptation to the environment may fail because of the one-sidedness of the adapted function, so adaptation to the inner world may fail because of the one-sidedness of the function in question. For instance, if the stoppage of libido was due to the failure of the thinking attitude to cope with the demands of outward adaptation, and if the unconscious feeling function is activated by regression, there is only a feeling attitude towards the inner world. This may be sufficient at first, but in the long run it will cease to be adequate, and the thinking function will have to be enlisted too, just as the reverse was necessary when dealing with the outer world. Thus a complete orientation towards the inner world becomes necessary until such time as inner adaptation is attained. Once the adaptation is achieved, progression can begin again.

The principle of progression and regression is portrayed in the myth of the whale-dragon worked out by Frobenius, as I have shown in detail in my book Symbols of Transformation (pars. 307ff.). The hero is the symbolical exponent of the movement of libido. Entry into the dragon is the regressive direction, and the journey to the East (the “night sea journey”) with its attendant events symbolizes the effort to adapt to the conditions of the psychic inner world. The complete swallowing up and disappearance of the hero in the belly of the dragon represents the complete withdrawal of interest from the outer world. The overcoming of the monster from within is the achievement of adaptation to the conditions of the inner world, and the emergence (“slipping out”) of the hero from the monster’s belly with the help of a bird, which happens at the moment of sunrise, symbolizes the recommencement of progression.

It is characteristic that the monster begins the night sea journey to the East, i.e., towards sunrise, while the hero is engulfed in its belly. This seems to me to indicate that regression is not necessarily a retrograde step in the sense of a backwards development or degeneration, but rather represents a necessary phase of development. The individual is, however, not consciously aware that he is developing; he feels himself to be in a compulsive situation that resembles an early infantile state or even an embryonic condition within the womb. It is only if he remains stuck in this condition that we can speak of involution or degeneration.

* It might be objected that dementia praecox is characterized not only by the introversion of sexual libido but also by a regression to the infantile level, and that this constitutes the difference between the anchorite and the schizophrenic. This is certainly correct, but it would still have to be proved that in dementia praecox it is regularly and exclusively the erotic interest which goes into a regression. It seems to me rather difficult to prove this, because erotic interest would then have to be understood as the “Eros” of the old philosophers. But that can hardly be meant. I know cases of dementia praecox where all regard for self-preservation disappears, but not the very lively erotic interests.

* Somewhat after the manner of Hudibras, whose opinion is quoted by Kant (Träume eines Geistersehers, III): “When a hypochondriacal wind is roaring in the bowels, everything depends on the direction it takes. If it goes downwards, it turns into a fart, but if it mounts upwards, it is a vision or a divine inspiration.”

* Though professional satiety with neurotic unrealities makes the analyst sceptical, a generalized judgment from the pathological angle has the disadvantage of being always biased.

Part 3. The Development of the Idea of the Collective Unconscious and of Archetypes

Jung’s deep involvement with schizophrenic patients and his endeavour to understand their psychology led him to conclude that their fantasies and delusional systems could not be explained in terms of their personal biographies.

From “Recent Thoughts on Schizophrenia” CW 3, par. 549

But unlike the contents of a neurosis, which can be satisfactorily explained by biographical data, psychotic contents show peculiarities that defy reduction to individual determinants, just as there are dreams where the symbols cannot be properly explained with the aid of personal data. By this I mean that neurotic contents can be compared with those of normal complexes, whereas psychotic contents, especially in paranoid cases, show close analogies with the type of dream that the primitive aptly calls a “big dream.” Unlike ordinary dreams, such a dream is highly impressive, numinous, and its imagery frequently makes use of motifs analogous to or even identical with those of mythology. I call these structures archetypes because they function in a way similar to instinctual patterns of behaviour. Moreover, most of them can be found everywhere and at all times. They occur in the folklore of primitive races, in Greek, Egyptian, and ancient Mexican myths, as well as in the dreams, visions, and delusions of modern individuals entirely ignorant of all such traditions.

As an example of the kind of observation which led him to this conclusion, Jung quotes a particular case.

From “The Structure of the Psyche” CW 8, pars. 317–21

But as to whether this supra-individual psychic activity actually exists, I have so far given no proof that satisfies all the requirements. I should now like to do this once more in the form of an example. The case is that of a man in his thirties, who was suffering from a paranoid form of schizophrenia. He became ill in his early twenties. He had always presented a strange mixture of intelligence, wrong-headedness, and fantastic ideas. He was an ordinary clerk, employed in a consulate. Evidently as a compensation for his very modest existence he was seized with megalomania and believed himself to be the Saviour. He suffered from frequent hallucinations and was at times very much disturbed. In his quiet periods he was allowed to go unattended in the corridor. One day I came across him there, blinking through the window up at the sun, and moving his head from side to side in a curious manner. He took me by the arm and said he wanted to show me something. He said I must look at the sun with eyes half shut, and then I could see the sun’s phallus. If I moved my head from side to side the sun-phallus would move too, and that was the origin of the wind.

I made this observation about 1906. In the course of the year 1910, when I was engrossed in mythological studies, a book of Dieterich’s came into my hands. It was part of the so-called Paris magic papyrus and was thought by Dieterich to be a liturgy of the Mithraic cult.* It consisted of a series of instructions, invocations, and visions. One of these visions is described in the following words: “And likewise the so-called tube, the origin of the ministering wind. For you will see hanging down from the disc of the sun something that looks like a tube. And towards the regions westward it is as though there were an infinite east wind. But if the other wind should prevail towards the regions of the east, you will in like manner see the vision veering in that direction.” The Greek word for “tube,” means a wind-instrument, and the combination in Homer means “a thick jet of blood.” So evidently a stream of wind is blowing through the tube out of the sun.

The vision of my patient in 1906, and the Greek text first edited in 1910, should be sufficiently far apart to rule out the possibility of cryptomnesia on his side and of thought-transference on mine. The obvious parallelism of the two visions cannot be disputed, though one might object that the similarity is purely fortuitous. In that case we should expect the vision to have no connections with analogous ideas, nor any inner meaning. But this expectation is not fulfilled, for in certain medieval paintings this tube is actually depicted as a sort of hose-pipe reaching down from heaven under the robe of Mary. In it the Holy Ghost flies down in the form of a dove to impregnate the Virgin. As we know from the miracle of Pentecost, the Holy Ghost was originally conceived as a mighty rushing wind, the , “the wind that bloweth where it listeth.” In a Latin text we read: “Animo descensus per orbem solis tribuitur” (They say that the spirit descends through the disc of the sun). This conception is common to the whole of late classical and medieval philosophy.

I cannot, therefore, discover anything fortuitous in these visions, but simply the revival of possibilities of ideas that have always existed, that can be found again in the most diverse minds and in all epochs, and are therefore not to be mistaken for inherited ideas.

I have purposely gone into the details of this case in order to give you a concrete picture of that deeper psychic activity which I call the collective unconscious. Summing up, I would like to emphasize that we must distinguish three psychic levels: (1) consciousness, (2) the personal unconscious, and (3) the collective unconscious. The personal unconscious consists firstly of all those contents that became unconscious either because they lost their intensity and were forgotten or because consciousness was withdrawn from them (repression), and secondly of contents, some of them sense-impressions, which never had sufficient intensity to reach consciousness but have somehow entered the psyche. The collective unconscious, however, as the ancestral heritage of possibilities of representation, is not individual but common to all men, and perhaps even to all animals, and is the true basis of the individual psyche.

Since the collective unconscious is common to all men, archetypal manifestations can be demonstrated in the normal as well as in the insane.

From “On the Psychology of the Unconscious” Two Essays, CW 7, pars. 106–9
THE PERSONAL AND THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

Let us take as an example one of the greatest thoughts which the nineteenth century brought to birth: the idea of the conservation of energy. Robert Mayer, the real creator of this idea, was a physician, and not a physicist or natural philosopher, for whom the making of such an idea would have been more appropriate. But it is very important to realize that the idea was not, strictly speaking, “made” by Mayer. Nor did it come into being through the fusion of ideas or scientific hypotheses then extant, but grew in its creator like a plant. Mayer wrote about it in the following way to Griesinger, in 1844:

I am far from having hatched out the theory at my writing desk. [He then reports certain physiological observations he had made in 1840 and 1841 as ship’s doctor.] Now, if one wants to be clear on matters of physiology, some knowledge of physical processes is essential, unless one prefers to work at things from the metaphysical side, which I find infinitely disgusting. I therefore held fast to physics and stuck to the subject with such fondness that, although many may laugh at me for this, I paid but little attention to that remote quarter of the globe in which we were, preferring to remain on board where I could work without intermission, and where I passed many an hour as though inspired, the like of which I cannot remember either before or since. Some flashes of thought that passed through me while in the roads of Surabaya were at once assiduously followed up, and in their turn led to fresh subjects. Those times have passed, but the quiet examination of that which then came to the surface in me has taught me that it is a truth, which can not only be subjectively felt, but objectively proved. It remains to be seen whether this can be accomplished by a man so little versed in physics as I am.*

In his book on energetics,† Helm expresses the view that “Robert Mayer’s new idea did not detach itself gradually from the traditional concepts of energy by deeper reflection on them, but belongs to those intuitively apprehended ideas which, arising in other realms of a spiritual nature, as it were take possession of the mind and compel it to reshape the traditional conceptions in their own likeness.”

The question now arises: Whence this new idea that thrusts itself upon consciousness with such elemental force? And whence did it derive the power that could so seize upon consciousness that it completely eclipsed the multitudinous impressions of a first voyage to the tropics? These questions are not so easy to answer. But if we apply our theory here, the explanation can only be this: the idea of energy and its conservation must be a primordial image that was dormant in the collective unconscious. Such a conclusion naturally obliges us to prove that a primordial image of this kind really did exist in the mental history of mankind and was operative through the ages. As a matter of fact, this proof can be produced without much difficulty: the most primitive religions in the most widely separated parts of the earth are founded upon this image. These are the so-called dynamistic religions whose sole and determining thought is that there exists a universal magical power** about which everything revolves. Tylor, the well-known English investigator, and Frazer likewise, misunderstood this idea as animism. In reality primitives do not mean, by their power-concept, souls or spirits at all, but something which the American investigator Lovejoy has appropriately termed “primitive energetics.” This concept is equivalent to the idea of soul, spirit, God, health, bodily strength, fertility, magic, influence, power, prestige, medicine, as well as certain states of feeling which are characterized by the release of affects. Among certain Polynesians mulungu – this same primitive power-concept – means spirit, soul, daemonism, magic, prestige; and when anything astonishing happens, the people cry out “Mulungu!” This power-concept is also the earliest form of a concept of God among primitives, and is an image which has undergone countless variations in the course of history. In the Old Testament the magic power glows in the burning bush and in the countenance of Moses; in the Gospels it descends with the Holy Ghost in the form of fiery tongues from heaven. In Heraclitus it appears as world energy, as “ever-living fire”; among the Persians it is the fiery glow of “haoma,” divine grace; among the Stoics it is the original heat, the power of fate. Again, in medieval legend it appears as the aura or halo, and it flares up like a flame from the roof of the hut in which the saint lies in ecstasy. In their visions the saints behold the sun of this power, the plenitude of its light. According to the old view, the soul itself is this power; in the idea of the soul’s immortality there is implicit its conservation, and in the Buddhist and primitive notion of metempsychosis – transmigration of souls – is implicit its unlimited changeability together with its constant preservation.

So this idea has been stamped on the human brain for aeons. That is why it lies ready to hand in the unconscious of every man. Only, certain conditions are needed to cause it to appear. These conditions were evidently fulfilled in the case of Robert Mayer. The greatest and best thoughts of man shape themselves upon these primordial images as upon a blueprint. I have often been asked where the archetypes or primordial images come from. It seems to me that their origin can only be explained by assuming them to be deposits of the constantly repeated experiences of humanity. One of the commonest and at the same time most impressive experiences is the apparent movement of the sun every day. We certainly cannot discover anything of the kind in the unconscious, so far as the known physical process is concerned. What we do find, on the other hand, is the myth of the sun-hero in all its countless modifications. It is this myth, and not the physical process, that forms the sun archetype. The same can be said of the phases of the moon. The archetype is a kind of readiness to produce over and over again the same or similar mythical ideas. Hence it seems as though what is impressed upon the unconscious were exclusively the subjective fantasy-ideas aroused by the physical process. Therefore we may take it that archetypes are recurrent impressions made by subjective reactions. Naturally this assumption only pushes the problem further back without solving it. There is nothing to prevent us from assuming that certain archetypes exist even in animals, that they are grounded in the peculiarities of the living organism itself and are therefore direct expressions of life whose nature cannot be further explained. Not only are the archetypes, apparently, impressions of ever-repeated typical experiences, but, at the same time, they behave empirically like agents that tend towards the repetition of these same experiences. For when an archetype appears in a dream, in a fantasy, or in life, it always brings with it a certain influence or power by virtue of which it either exercises a numinous or a fascinating effect, or impels to action.

Jung’s conception of archetypes and the collective unconscious sprang not only from his observation of patients, but from his own experience. After the break with Freud, Jung passed through a period of mental upheaval which was so intense that he decided that he was “menaced by a psychosis.” Part of this upheaval was connected with Jung’s need to develop his own, independent point of view.

From “Confrontation with the Unconscious” MDR, p. 165/170

After the parting of the ways with Freud, a period of inner uncertainty began for me. It would be no exaggeration to call it a state of disorientation. I felt totally suspended in mid-air, for I had not yet found my own footing. Above all, I felt it necessary to develop a new attitude towards my patients. I resolved for the present not to bring any theoretical premises to bear upon them, but to wait and see what they would tell of their own accord. My aim became to leave things to chance. The result was that the patients would spontaneously report their dreams and fantasies to me, and I would merely ask, “What occurs to you in connection with that?” or, “How do you mean that, where does that come from, what do you think about it?” The interpretations seemed to follow of their own accord from the patients’ replies and associations. I avoided all theoretical points of view and simply helped the patients to understand the dream-images by themselves, without application of rules and theories.

Jung’s disturbance was also connected with something which later became a cornerstone in Jung’s delineation of the stages of life. In July 1913, Jung attained the age of thirty-eight; a time of life at which “mid-life crises” often occur. By this time, Jung had married and fathered a family, and had achieved professional recognition and a position in the world. His conscious attitude had been that, together with Freud, he could develop a new science of the mind which would benefit the world. Now, against his conscious will, his libido was being forced away from involvement in the external world into an exploration of the inner depths of his own psyche.

From “The Stages of Life” CW 8, pars. 772–7

The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal attitudes and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We overlook the essential fact that the social goal is attained only at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many – far too many – aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories; but sometimes, too, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.

Statistics show a rise in the frequency of mental depressions in men about forty. In women the neurotic difficulties generally begin somewhat earlier. We see that in this phase of life – between thirty-five and forty – an important change in the human psyche is in preparation. At first it is not a conscious and striking change; it is rather a matter of indirect signs of a change which seems to take its rise in the unconscious. Often it is something like a slow change in a person’s character; in another case certain traits may come to light which had disappeared since childhood; or again, one’s previous inclinations and interests begin to weaken and others take their place. Conversely – and this happens very frequently – one’s cherished convictions and principles, especially the moral ones, begin to harden and to grow increasingly rigid until, somewhere around the age of fifty, a period of intolerance and fanaticism is reached. It is as if the existence of these principles were endangered and it were therefore necessary to emphasize them all the more.

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; sometimes it grows turbid. All the phenomena mentioned above can best be seen in rather one-sided people, turning up sometimes sooner and sometimes later. Their appearance, it seems to me, is often delayed by the fact that the parents of the person in question are still alive. It is then as if the period of youth were being unduly drawn out. I have seen this especially in the case of men whose fathers were long-lived. The death of the father then has the effect of a precipitate and almost catastrophic ripening.

I know of a pious man who was a churchwarden and who, from the age of forty onward, showed a growing and finally unbearable intolerance in matters of morality and religion. At the same time his moods grew visibly worse. At last he was nothing more than a darkly lowering pillar of the Church. In this way he got along until the age of fifty-five, when suddenly, sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, he said to his wife: ‘Now at last I’ve got it! I’m just a plain rascal.” Nor did this realization remain without results. He spent his declining years in riotous living and squandered a goodly part of his fortune. Obviously quite a likable fellow, capable of both extremes!

The very frequent neurotic disturbances of adult years all have one thing in common: they want to carry the psychology of the youthful phase over the threshold of the so-called years of discretion. Who does not know those touching old gentlemen who must always warm up the dish of their student days, who can fan the flame of life only by reminiscences of their heroic youth, but who, for the rest, are stuck in a hopelessly wooden Philistinism? As a rule, to be sure, they have this one merit which it would be wrong to undervalue: they are not neurotic, but only boring and stereotyped. The neurotic is rather a person who can never have things as he would like them in the present, and who can therefore never enjoy the past either.

As formerly the neurotic could not escape from childhood, so now he cannot part with his youth. He shrinks from the grey thoughts of approaching age, and, feeling the prospect before him unbearable, is always straining to look behind him. Just as the childish person shrinks back from the unknown in the world and in human existence, so the grown man shrinks back from the second half of life. It is as if unknown and dangerous tasks awaited him, or as if he were threatened with sacrifices and losses which he does not wish to accept, or as if his life up to now seemed to him so fair and precious that he could not relinquish it.

Jung’s “confrontation with the unconscious,” as he termed it, turned out to be both extremely disturbing and highly rewarding.

From “Confrontation with the Unconscious” MDR, pp. 167–74/172–81

One fantasy kept returning: there was something dead present, but it was also still alive. For example, corpses were placed in crematory ovens, but were then discovered to be still living. These fantasies came to a head and were simultaneously resolved in a dream.

I was in a region like the Alyscamps near Arles. There they have a lane of sarcophagi which go back to Merovingian times. In the dream I was coming from the city, and saw before me a similar lane with a long row of tombs. They were pedestals with stone slabs on which the dead lay. They reminded me of old church burial vaults, where knights in armour he outstretched. Thus the dead lay in my dream, in their antique clothes, with hands clasped, the difference being that they were not hewn out of stone, but in a curious fashion mummified. I stood still in front of the first grave and looked at the dead man, who was a person of the eighteen-thirties. I looked at his clothes with interest, whereupon he suddenly moved and came to life. He unclasped his hands; but that was only because I was looking at him. I had an extremely unpleasant feeling, but walked on and came to another body. He belonged to the eighteenth century. There exactly the same thing happened: when I looked at him, he came to life and moved his hands. So I went down the whole row, until I came to the twelfth century – that is, to a crusader in chain mail who lay there with clasped hands. His figure seemed carved out of wood. For a long time I looked at him and thought he was really dead. But suddenly I saw that a finger of his left hand was beginning to stir gently.

Of course, I had originally held to Freud’s view that vestiges of old experiences exist in the unconscious.* But dreams like this, and my actual experiences of the unconscious, taught me that such contents are not dead, outmoded forms, but belong to our living being. My work had confirmed this assumption, and in the course of years there developed from it the theory of archetypes.

The dreams, however, could not help me over my feeling of disorientation. On the contrary, I lived as if under constant inner pressure. At times this became so strong that I suspected there was some psychic disturbance in myself. Therefore I twice went over all the details of my entire life, with particular attention to childhood memories; for I thought there might be something in my past which I could not see and which might possibly be the cause of the disturbance. But this retrospection led to nothing but a fresh acknowledgment of my own ignorance. Thereupon I said to myself, “Since I know nothing at all, I shall simply do whatever occurs to me.” Thus I consciously submitted myself to the impulses of the unconscious.

The first thing that came to the surface was a childhood memory from perhaps my tenth or eleventh year. At that time I had had a spell of playing passionately with building blocks. I distinctly recalled how I had built little houses and castles, using bottles to form the sides of gates and vaults. Somewhat later I had used ordinary stones, with mud for mortar. These structures had fascinated me for a long time. To my astonishment, this memory was accompanied by a good deal of emotion. “Aha,” I said to myself, “there is still life in these things. The small boy is still around, and possesses a creative life which I lack. But how can I make my way to it?” For as a grown man it seemed impossible to me that I should be able to bridge the distance from the present back to my eleventh year. Yet if I wanted to re-establish contact with that period, I had no choice but to return to it and take up once more that child’s life with his childish games. This moment was a turning point in my fate, but I gave in only after endless resistances and with a sense of resignation. For it was a painfully humiliating experience to realize that there was nothing to be done except play childish games.

Nevertheless, I began accumulating suitable stones, gathering them partly from the lake shore and partly from the water. And I started building: cottages, a castle, a whole village. The church was still missing, so I made a square building with a hexagonal drum on top of it, and a dome. A church also requires an altar, but I hesitated to build that.

Preoccupied with the question of how I could approach this task, I was walking along the lake as usual one day, picking stones out of the gravel on the shore. Suddenly I caught sight of a red stone, a four-sided pyramid about an inch and a half high. It was a fragment of stone which had been polished into this shape by the action of the water – a pure product of chance. I knew at once: this was the altar! I placed it in the middle under the dome, and as I did so, I recalled the underground phallus of my childhood dream. This connection gave me a feeling of satisfaction.

I went on with my building game after the noon meal every day, whenever the weather permitted. As soon as I was through eating, I began playing, and continued to do so until the patients arrived; and if I was finished with my work early enough in the evening, I went back to building. In the course of this activity my thoughts clarified, and I was able to grasp the fantasies whose presence in myself I dimly felt.

Naturally, I thought about the significance of what I was doing, and asked myself, “Now, really, what are you about? You are building a small town, and doing it as if it were a rite!” I had no answer to my question, only the inner certainty that I was on the way to discovering my own myth. For the building game was only a beginning. It released a stream of fantasies which I later carefully wrote down.

This sort of thing has been consistent with me, and at any time in my later life when I came up against a blank wall, I painted a picture or hewed stone. Each such experience proved to be a rite d’entrée for the ideas and works that followed hard upon it. Everything that I have written this year* and last year, “The Undiscovered Self,” “Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth,” “A Psychological View of Conscience,” has grown out of the stone sculptures I did after my wife’s death.† The close of life, the end, and what it made me realize, wrenched me violently out of myself. It cost me a great deal to regain my footing, and contact with stone helped me.

Towards the autumn of 1913 the pressure which I had felt was in me seemed to be moving outwards, as though there were something in the air. The atmosphere actually seemed to me darker than it had been. It was as though the sense of oppression no longer sprang exclusively from a psychic situation, but from concrete reality. This feeling grew more and more intense.

In October, while I was alone on a journey, I was suddenly seized by an overpowering vision: I saw a monstrous flood covering all the northern and low-lying lands between the North Sea and the Alps. When it came up to Switzerland I saw that the mountains grew higher and higher to protect our country. I realized that a frightful catastrophe was in progress. I saw the mighty yellow waves, the floating rubble of civilization, and the drowned bodies of uncounted thousands. Then the whole sea turned to blood. This vision lasted about one hour. I was perplexed and nauseated, and ashamed of my weakness.

Two weeks passed; then the vision recurred, under the same conditions, even more vividly than before, and the blood was more emphasized. An inner voice spoke. “Look at it well; it is wholly real and it will be so. You cannot doubt it.” That winter someone asked me what I thought were the political prospects of the world in the near future. I replied that I had no thoughts on the matter, but that I saw rivers of blood.

I asked myself whether these visions pointed to a revolution, but could not really imagine anything of the sort. And so I drew the conclusion that they had to do with me myself, and decided that I was menaced by a psychosis. The idea of war did not occur to me at all.

Soon afterwards, in the spring and early summer of 1914, I had a thrice-repeated dream that in the middle of summer an Arctic cold wave descended and froze the land to ice. I saw, for example, the whole of Lorraine and its canals frozen and the entire region totally deserted by human beings. All living green things were killed by frost. This dream came in April and May, and for the last time in June, 1914.

In the third dream frightful cold had again descended from out of the cosmos. This dream, however, had an unexpected end. There stood a leaf-bearing tree, but without fruit (my tree of life, I thought), whose leaves had been transformed by the effects of the frost into sweet grapes full of healing juices. I plucked the grapes and gave them to a large, waiting crowd.

At the end of July 1914 I was invited by the British Medical Association to deliver a lecture, “On the Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology,” at a congress in Aberdeen. I was prepared for something to happen, for such visions and dreams are fateful. In my state of mind just then, with the fears that were pursuing me, it seemed fateful to me that I should have to talk on the importance of the unconscious at such a time!

On 1st August the world war broke out. Now my task was clear: I had to try to understand what had happened and to what extent my own experience coincided with that of mankind in general. Therefore my first obligation was to probe the depths of my own psyche. I made a beginning by writing down the fantasies which had come to me during my building game. This work took precedence over everything else.

An incessant stream of fantasies had been released, and I did my best not to lose my head but to find some way to understand these strange things. I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down upon me. One thunderstorm followed another. My enduring these storms was a question of brute strength. Others have been shattered by them – Nietzsche, and Hölderlin, and many others. But there was a demonic strength in me, and from the beginning there was no doubt in my mind that I must find the meaning of what I was experiencing in these fantasies. When I endured these assaults of the unconscious I had an unswerving conviction that I was obeying a higher will, and that feeling continued to uphold me until I had mastered the task.

I was frequently so wrought up that I had to do certain yoga exercises in order to hold my emotions in check. But since it was my purpose to know what was going on within myself, I would do these exercises only until I had calmed myself enough to resume my work with the unconscious. As soon as I had the feeling that I was myself again, I abandoned this restraint upon the emotions and allowed the images and inner voices to speak afresh. The Indian, on the other hand, does yoga exercises in order to obliterate completely the multitude of psychic contents and images.

To the extent that I managed to translate the emotions into images – that is to say, to find the images which were concealed in the emotions – I was inwardly calmed and reassured. Had I left those images hidden in the emotions, I might have been torn to pieces by them. There is a chance that I might have succeeded in splitting them off; but in that case I would inexorably have fallen into a neurosis and so been ultimately destroyed by them anyhow. As a result of my experiment I learned how helpful it can be, from the therapeutic point of view, to find the particular images which he behind emotions.

I wrote down the fantasies as well as I could, and made an earnest effort to analyse the psychic conditions under which they had arisen. But I was able to do this only in clumsy language. First I formulated the things as I had observed them, usually in “high-flown language,” for that corresponds to the style of the archetypes. Archetypes speak the language of high rhetoric, even of bombast. It is a style I find embarrassing; it grates on my nerves, as when someone draws his nails down a plaster wall, or scrapes his knife against a plate. But since I did not know what was going on, I had no choice but to write everything down in the style selected by the unconscious itself. Sometimes it was as if I were hearing it with my ears, sometimes feeling it with my mouth, as if my tongue were formulating words; now and then I heard myself whispering aloud. Below the threshold of consciousness everything was seething with life.

From the beginning I had conceived my voluntary confrontation with the unconscious as a scientific experiment which I myself was conducting and in whose outcome I was vitally interested. To-day I might equally well say that it was an experiment which was being conducted on me. One of the greatest difficulties for me lay in dealing with my negative feelings. I was voluntarily submitting myself to emotions of which I could not really approve, and I was writing down fantasies which often struck me as nonsense, and towards which I had strong resistances. For as long as we do not understand their meaning, such fantasies are a diabolical mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous. It cost me a great deal to undergo them, but I had been challenged by fate. Only by extreme effort was I finally able to escape from the labyrinth.

In order to grasp the fantasies which were stirring in me “underground,” I knew that I had to let myself plummet down into them, as it were. I felt not only violent resistance to this, but a distinct fear. For I was afraid of losing command of myself and becoming a prey to the fantasies – and as a psychiatrist I realized only too well what that meant. After prolonged hesitation, however, I saw that there was no other way out. I had to take the chance, had to try to gain power over them; for I realized that if I did not do so, I ran the risk of their gaining power over me. A cogent motive for my making the attempt was the conviction that I could not expect of my patients something I did not dare to do myself. The excuse that a helper stood at their side would not pass muster, for I was well aware that the so-called helper – that is, myself – could not help them unless he knew their fantasy material from his own direct experience, and that at present all he possessed were a few theoretical prejudices of dubious value. This idea – that I was committing myself to a dangerous enterprise not for myself alone, but also for the sake of my patients – helped me over several critical phases.

It was during Advent of the year 1913 – 12th December, to be exact – that I resolved upon the decisive step. I was sitting at my desk once more, thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way beneath my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths. I could not fend off a feeling of panic. But then, abruptly, at not too great a depth, I landed on my feet in a soft, sticky mass. I felt great relief,although I was apparently in complete darkness. After a while my eyes grew accustomed to the gloom, which was rather like a deep twilight. Before me was the entrance to a dark cave, in which stood a dwarf with a leathery skin, as if he were mummified. I squeezed past him through the narrow entrance and waded knee deep through icy water to the other end of the cave where, on a projecting rock, I saw a glowing red crystal. I grasped the stone, lifted it, and discovered a hollow underneath. At first I could make out nothing, but then I saw that there was running water. In it a corpse floated by, a youth with blond hair and a wound in the head. He was followed by a gigantic black scarab and then by a red, newborn sun, rising up out of the depths of the water. Dazzled by the light, I wanted to replace the stone upon the opening, but then a fluid welled out. It was blood. A thick jet of it leaped up, and I felt nauseated. It seemed to me that the blood continued to spurt for an unendurably long time. At last it ceased, and the vision came to an end.

I was stunned by this vision. I realized, of course, that it was a hero and solar myth, a drama of death and renewal, the rebirth symbolized by the Egyptian scarab. At the end, the dawn of the new day should have followed, but instead came that intolerable outpouring of blood – an altogether abnormal phenomenon, so it seemed to me. But then I recalled the vision of blood that I had had in the autumn of that same year, and I abandoned all further attempt to understand.

Six days later (18th December, 1913), I had the following dream. I was with an unknown, brown-skinned man, a savage, in a lonely, rocky mountain landscape. It was before dawn; the eastern sky was already bright, and the stars fading. Then I heard Siegfried’s horn sounding over the mountains and I knew that we had to kill him. We were armed with rifles and lay in wait for him on a narrow path over the rocks.

Then Siegfried appeared high up on the crest of the mountain, in the first ray of the rising sun. On a chariot made of the bones of the dead he drove at furious speed down the precipitous slope. When he turned a corner, we shot at him, and he plunged down, struck dead.

Filled with disgust and remorse for having destroyed something so great and beautiful, I turned to flee, impelled by the fear that the murder might be discovered. But a tremendous downfall of rain began, and I knew that it would wipe out all traces of the dead. I had escaped the danger of discovery; life could go on, but an unbearable feeling of guilt remained.

When I awoke from the dream, I turned it over in my mind, but was unable to understand it. I tried therefore to fall asleep again, but a voice within me said, “You must understand the dream, and must do so at once!” The inner urgency mounted until the terrible moment came when the voice said, “If you do not understand the dream, you must shoot yourself!” In the drawer of my night table lay a loaded revolver, and I became frightened. Then I began pondering once again, and suddenly the meaning of the dream dawned on me. “Why, that is the problem that is being played out in the world.” Siegfried, I thought, represents what the Germans want to achieve, heroically to impose their will, have their own way. “Where there is a will there is a way!” I had wanted to do the same. But now that was no longer possible. The dream showed that the attitude embodied by Siegfried, the hero, no longer suited me. Therefore it had to be killed.

After the deed I felt an overpowering compassion, as though I myself had been shot: a sign of my secret identity with Siegfried, as well as of the grief a man feels when he is forced to sacrifice his ideal and his conscious attitudes. This identity and my heroic idealism had to be abandoned, for there are higher things than the ego’s will, and to these one must bow.

These thoughts sufficed for the present, and I fell asleep again.

The small, brown-skinned savage who accompanied me and had actually taken the initiative in the killing was an embodiment of the primitive shadow. The rain showed that the tension between consciousness and the unconscious was being resolved. Although at the time I was not able to understand the meaning of the dream beyond these few hints, new forces were released in me which helped me to carry the experiment with the unconscious to a conclusion.

This dream is typical of dreams occurring in middle life when a change in attitude is demanded. It was about this time (1913) that Jung gave up his position as lecturer (Privatdozent) in the University of Zurich, thus abandoning his academic career. Jung felt that this sacrifice was required of him as surely as the sacrifice of Siegfried was demanded in the dream; but it nevertheless cost him a great deal to make it.

From “Confrontation with the Unconscious” MDR, pp. 185–6/193–4

In the midst of this period when I was so preoccupied with the images of the unconscious, I came to the decision to withdraw from the university, where I had lectured for eight years as Privatdozent (since 1905). My experience and experiments with the unconscious had brought my intellectual activity to a standstill. After the completion of The Psychology of the Unconscious I found myself utterly incapable of reading a scientific book. This went on for three years. I felt I could no longer keep up with the world of the intellect, nor would I have been able to talk about what really preoccupied me. The material brought to light from the unconscious had, almost literally, struck me dumb. I could neither understand it nor give it form. At the university I was in an exposed position, and felt that in order to go on giving courses there I would first have to find an entirely new and different orientation. It would be unfair to continue teaching young students when my own intellectual situation was nothing but a mass of doubts.

I therefore felt that I was confronted with the choice of either continuing my academic career, whose road lay smooth before me, or following the laws of my inner personality, of a higher reason, and forging ahead with this curious task of mine, this experiment in confrontation with the unconscious. But until it was completed I could not appear before the public.

Consciously, deliberately, then, I abandoned my academic career. For I felt that something great was happening to me, and I put my trust in the thing which I felt to be more important sub specie æternitatis. I knew that it would fill my life, and for the sake of that goal I was ready to take any kind of risk.

Siegfried is one characteristic personification of the archetype of the hero. Hero myths are found all over the world; and, from whatever culture they originate, show striking similarities. The archetype does not correspond to the actual manifestation produced by any particular culture; yet it underlies all manifestations produced by all cultures.

From “Psychological Aspects of the Mother Archetype” CW 9 i, par. 155

Again and again I encounter the mistaken notion that an archetype is determined in regard to its content, in other words that it is a kind of unconscious idea (if such an expression be admissible). It is necessary to point out once more that archetypes are not determined as regards their content, but only as regards their form and then only to a very limited degree. A primordial image is determined as to its content only when it has become conscious and is therefore filled out with the material of conscious experience. Its form, however, as I have explained elsewhere, might perhaps be compared to the axial system of a crystal, which, as it were, preforms the crystalline structure in the mother liquid, although it has no material existence of its own. This first appears according to the specific way in which the ions and molecules aggregate. The archetype in itself is empty and purely formal, nothing but a facultas praeformandi, a possibility of representation which is given a priori. The representations themselves are not inherited, only the forms, and in that respect they correspond in every way to the instincts, which are also determined in form only. The existence of the instincts can no more be proved than the existence of the archetypes, so long as they do not manifest themselves concretely. With regard to the definiteness of the form, our comparison with the crystal is illuminating inasmuch as the axial system determines only the stereometric structure but not the concrete form of the individual crystal. This may be either large or small, and it may vary endlessly by reason of the different size of its planes or by the growing together of two crystals. The only thing that remains constant is the axial system, or rather, the invariable geometric proportions underlying it. The same is true of the archetype. In principle, it can be named and has an invariable nucleus of meaning – but always only in principle, never as regards its concrete manifestation. In the same way, the specific appearance of the mother-image at any given time cannot be deduced from the mother archetype alone, but depends on innumerable other factors.

*As the author subsequently learned, the 1910 edition was actually the second, there having been a first edition in 1903.

*Robert Mayer, Kleinere Schriften und Briefe (Stuttgart, 1893), p. 213 (letter to Wilhelm Griesinger, June 16, 1844).

† G. F. Helm, Die Energetik nach ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung (Leipzig, 1898), p. 20.

** Generally called mana.

*Freud speaks of “archaic vestiges.”

*1957.

† 27th November, 1955.

Part 4. Archetypes: Shadow; Anima; Animus; the Persona; the Old Wise Man

In Jung’s dream about Siegfried (quoted in Part 3), it will be recalled that he was accompanied by a “small, brown-skinned savage” who initiated the killing. This figure, Jung affirms, “was an embodiment of the primitive shadow.”

By shadow I mean the “negative” side of the personality, the sum of all those unpleasant qualities we like to hide, together with the insufficiently developed functions and the contents of the personal unconscious. [CW 7, par. 103n]

The shadow is one example of an “unconscious personality” which possesses a certain measure of autonomy. The shadow might be said to be responsible for those slips of the tongue and other “mistakes” which Freud catalogues in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life; mistakes which reveal feelings and motives which the conscious self disowns. The shadow is also often projected on to others. Examination of those attributes which a man most condemns in other people (greed, intolerance, disregard for others etc.) usually shows that, unacknowledged, he himself possesses them.

The shadow is usually the first archetype to be encountered during analysis. In the dreams of Europeans, the shadow appears as a figure of the same sex as the dreamer; usually as dark-skinned, alien or primitive, as in Jung’s own dream. Jung makes the point that making conscious the repressed tendencies and confessing the less desirable aspects of personality which the shadow portrays does not rid us of them.

From Psychology and Religion, CW 11, pars. 130–4

If one discounts the “statistical criminal,” there still remains the vast domain of inferior qualities and primitive tendencies which belong to the psychic structure of the man who is less ideal and more primitive than we should like to be. We have certain ideas as to how a civilized or educated or moral being should live, and we occasionally do our best to fulfil these ambitious expectations. But since nature has not bestowed the same blessings upon each of her children, some are more and others less gifted. Thus there are people who can just afford to live properly and respectably; that is to say, no manifest flaw is discoverable. They either commit minor sins, if they sin at all, or their sins are concealed from them by a thick layer of unconciousness. One is rather inclined to be lenient with sinners who are unconscious of their sins. But nature is not at all lenient with unconscious sinners. She punishes them just as severely as if they had committed a conscious offence. Thus we find, as the pious Henry Drummond* once observed, that it is highly moral people, unaware of their other side, who develop particularly hellish moods which make them insupportable to their relatives. The odour of sanctity may be far reaching, but to live with a saint might well cause an inferiority complex or even a wild outburst of immorality in individuals less morally gifted. Morality seems to be a gift like intelligence. You cannot pump it into a system to which it is not indigenous.

Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it. Furthermore, it is constantly in contact with other interests, so that it is continually subjected to modifications. But if it is repressed and isolated from consciousness, it never gets corrected, and is liable to burst forth suddenly in a moment of unawareness. At all events, it forms an unconscious snag, blocking the most well-meant attempts.

We carry our past with us, to wit, the primitive and inferior man with his desires and emotions, and it is only with an enormous effort that we can detach ourselves from this burden. If it comes to a neurosis, we invariably have to deal with a considerably intensified shadow. And if such a person wants to be cured it is necessary to find a way in which his conscious personality and his shadow can live together.

This is a very serious problem for all those who are themselves in such a predicament or have to help sick people back to normal life. Mere suppression of the shadow is as little of a remedy as beheading would be for headache. To destroy a man’s morality does not help either, because it would kill his better self, without which even the shadow makes no sense. The reconciliation of these opposites is a major problem, and even in antiquity it bothered certain minds. Thus we know of an otherwise legendary personality of the second century, Carpocrates, a Neoplatonist philosopher whose school, according to Irenaeus, taught that good and evil are merely human opinions and that the soul, before its departure from the body, must pass through the whole gamut of human experience to the very end if it is not to fall back into the prison of the body. It is as if the soul could only ransom itself from imprisonment in the somatic world of the demiurge by complete fulfilment of all life’s demands. The bodily existence in which we find ourselves is a kind of hostile brother whose conditions must first be known. It was in this sense that the Carpocratians interpreted Matthew 5:25f. (also Luke 12:58f.): “Agree with thine adversary quickly, whiles thou art in the way with him; lest at any time the adversary deliver thee to the judge, and the judge deliver thee to the officer, and thou be cast into prison. Verily I say unto thee, Thou shalt by no means come out thence, till thou hast paid the uttermost farthing.” Remembering the other Gnostic doctrine that no man can be redeemed from a sin he has not committed, we are here confronted with a problem of the very greatest importance, obscured though it is by the Christian abhorrence of anything Gnostic. Inasmuch as the somatic man, the “adversary,” is none other than “the other in me,” it is plain that the Carpocratian mode of thought would lead to the following interpretation of Matthew 5:22f.: “But I say unto you, That whosoever is angry with himself without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment: and whosoever shall say to himself, Raca, shall be in danger of the council: but whosoever shall say, Thou fool, shall be in danger of hell fire. Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thou hast aught against thyself, leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thyself, and then come and offer thy gift. Agree with thyself quickly, whiles thou art in the way with thyself, lest at any time thou deliverest thyself to the judge.” From here it is but a step to the uncanonical saying: “Man, if indeed thou knowest what thou doest, thou art blessed; but if thou knowest not, thou art cursed, and a transgressor of the law.” But the problem comes very close indeed in the parable of the unjust steward, which is a stumbling-block in more senses than one. “And the lord commended the unjust steward, because he had done wisely” (Luke 16:8). In the Vulgate the word for “wisely” is prudenter, and in the Greek text it is (prudently, sensibly, intelligently). There’s no denying that practical intelligence functions here as a court of ethical decision. Perhaps, despite Irenaeus, we may credit the Carpocratians with this much insight, and allow that they too, like the unjust steward, were commendably aware of how to save face. It is natural that the more robust mentality of the Church Fathers could not appreciate the delicacy and the merit of this subtle and, from a modern point of view, immensely practical argument. It was also dangerous, and it is still the most vital and yet the most ticklish ethical problem of a civilization that has forgotten why man’s life should be sacrificial, that is, offered up to an idea greater than himself. Man can live the most amazing things if they make sense to him. But the difficulty is to create that sense. It must be a conviction, naturally; but you find that the most convincing things man can invent are cheap and ready-made, and are never able to convince him against his personal desires and fears.

If the repressed tendencies, the shadow as I call them, were obviously evil, there would be no problem whatever. But the shadow is merely somewhat inferior, primitive, unadapted, and awkward; not wholly bad. It even contains childish or primitive qualities which would in a way vitalize and embellish human existence, but convention forbids!

Jung goes on to show that confrontation with, and at least partial acceptance of, the shadow leads on to deeper problems and further encounters with other archetypal figures.

From “The Shadow” Aion, CW 9 ii, pars. 13–19

Whereas the contents of the personal unconscious are acquired during the individual’s lifetime, the contents of the collective unconscious are invariably archetypes that were present from the beginning. Their relation to the instincts has been discussed elsewhere. The archetypes most clearly characterized from the empirical point of view are those which have the most frequent and the most disturbing influence on the ego. These are the shadow, the anima, and the animus. The most accessible of these, and the easiest to experience, is the shadow, for its nature can in large measure be inferred from the contents of the personal unconscious. The only exceptions to this rule are those rather rare cases where the positive qualities of the personality are repressed, and the ego in consequence plays an essentially negative or unfavourable role.

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. Indeed, self-knowledge as a psychotherapeutic measure frequently requires much painstaking work extending over a long period.

Closer examination of the dark characteristics – that is, the inferiorities constituting the shadow – reveals that they have an emotional nature, a kind of autonomy, and accordingly an obsessive or, better, possessive quality. Emotion, incidentally, is not an activity of the individual but something that happens to him. Affects occur usually where adaptation is weakest, and at the same time they reveal the reason for its weakness, namely a certain degree of inferiority and the existence of a lower level of personality. On this lower level with its uncontrolled or scarcely controlled emotions one behaves more or less like a primitive, who is not only the passive victim of his affects but also singularly incapable of moral judgment.

Although, with insight and good will, the shadow can to some extent be assimilated into the conscious personality, experience shows that there are certain features which offer the most obstinate resistance to moral control and prove almost impossible to influence. These resistances are usually bound up with projections, which are not recognized as such, and their recognition is a moral achievement beyond the ordinary. While some traits peculiar to the shadow can be recognized without too much difficulty as one’s own personal qualities, in this case both insight and good will are unavailing because the cause of the emotion appears to lie, beyond all possibility of doubt, in the other person. No matter how obvious it may be to the neutral observer that it is a matter of projections, there is little hope that the subject will perceive this himself. He must be convinced that he throws a very long shadow before he is willing to withdraw his emotionally-toned projections from their object.

Let us suppose that a certain individual shows no inclination whatever to recognize his projections. The projection-making factor then has a free hand and can realize its object – if it has one – or bring about some other situation characteristic of its power. As we know, it is not the conscious subject but the unconscious which does the projecting. Hence one meets with projections, one does not make them. The effect of projection is to isolate the subject from his environment, since instead of a real relation to it there is now only an illusory one. Projections change the world into the replica of one’s own unknown face. In the last analysis, therefore, they lead to an autoerotic or autistic condition in which one dreams a world whose reality remains forever unattainable. The resultant sentiment d’incomplétude and the still worse feeling of sterility are in their turn explained by projection as the malevolence of the environment, and by means of this vicious circle the isolation is intensified. The more projections are thrust in between the subject and the environment, the harder it is for the ego to see through its illusions. A forty-five-year-old patient who had suffered from a compulsion neurosis since he was twenty and had become completely cut off from the world once said to me: “But I can never admit to myself that I’ve wasted the best twenty-five years of my life!”

It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going. Not consciously, of course – for consciously he is engaged in bewailing and cursing a faithless world that recedes further and further into the distance. Rather, it is an unconscious factor which spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will completely envelop him.

One might assume that projections like these, which are so very difficult if not impossible to dissolve, would belong to the realm of the shadow – that is, to the negative side of the personality. This assumption becomes untenable after a certain point, because the symbols that then appear no longer refer to the same but to the opposite sex, in a man’s case to a woman and vice versa. The source of projections is no longer the shadow – which is always of the same sex as the subject – but a contrasexual figure. Here we meet the animus of a woman and the anima of a man, two corresponding archetypes whose autonomy and unconsciousness explain the stubbornness of their projections. Though the shadow is a motif as well known to mythology as anima and animus, it represents first and foremost the personal unconscious, and its content can therefore be made conscious without too much difficulty. In this it differs from anima and animus, for whereas the shadow can be seen through and recognized fairly easily, the anima and animus are much further away from consciousness and in normal circumstances are seldom if ever realized. With a little self-criticism one can see through the shadow – so far as its nature is personal. But when it appears as an archetype, one encounters the same difficulties as with anima and animus. In other words, it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognize the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil.

Before proceeding to what Jung has to say about the contrasexual archetypes of animus and anima, it is necessary to outline his conception of the persona, since “a compensatory relationship exists between persona and anima.”

From “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” Two Essays, CW 7, pars. 305–9

The persona is a complicated system of relations between 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. That the latter function is superfluous could be maintained only by one who is so identified with his persona that he no longer knows himself; and that the former is unnecessary could only occur to one who is quite unconscious of the true nature of his fellows. Society expects, and indeed must expect, every individual to play the part assigned to him as perfectly as possible, so that a man who is a parson must not only carry out his official functions objectively, but must at all times and in all circumstances play the role of parson in a flawless manner. Society demands this as a kind of surety; each must stand at his post, here a cobbler, there a poet. No man is expected to be both. Nor is it advisable to be both, for that would be “queer.” Such a man would be “different” from other people, not quite reliable. In the academic world he would be a dilettante, in politics an “unpredictable” quantity, in religion a free-thinker – in short, he would always be suspected of unreliability and incompetence, because society is persuaded that only the cobbler who is not a poet can supply workmanlike shoes. To present an unequivocal face to the world is a matter of practical importance: the average man – the only kind society knows anything about – must keep his nose to one thing in order to achieve anything worth while, two would be too much. Our society is undoubtedly set on such an ideal. It is therefore not surprising that everyone who wants to get on must take these expectations into account. Obviously no one could completely submerge his individuality in these expectations; hence the construction of an artificial personality becomes an unavoidable necessity. The demands of propriety and good manners are an added inducement to assume a becoming mask. What goes on behind the mask is then called “private life.” This painfully familiar division of consciousness into two figures, often preposterously different, is an incisive psychological operation that is bound to have repercussions on the unconscious.

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. The “soullessness” of such an attitude is, however, only apparent, for under no circumstances will the unconscious tolerate this shifting of the centre of gravity. When we examine such cases critically, we find that the excellence of the mask is compensated by the “private life” going on behind it. The pious Drummond once lamented that “bad temper is the vice of the virtuous.” Whoever builds up too good a persona for himself naturally has to pay for it with irritability. Bismarck had hysterical weeping fits, Wagner indulged in correspondence about the belts of silk dressing-gowns, Nietzsche wrote letters to his “dear lama,” Goethe held conversations with Eckermann, etc. But there are subtler things than the banal lapses of heroes. I once made the acquaintance of a very venerable personage – in fact, one might easily call him a saint. I stalked round him for three whole days, but never a mortal failing did I find in him. My feeling of inferiority grew ominous, and I was beginning to think seriously of how I might better myself. Then, on the fourth day, his wife came to consult me … Well, nothing of the sort has ever happened to me since. But this I did learn: that any 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.

These identifications with a social role are a very fruitful source of neuroses. A man cannot get rid of himself in favour of an artificial personality without punishment. Even the attempt to do so brings on, in all ordinary cases, unconscious reactions in the form of bad moods, affects, phobias, compulsive ideas, backslidings, vices, etc. The socially “strong man” is in his private life often a mere child where his own states of feeling are concerned; his public discipline (which he demands quite particularly of others) goes miserably to pieces in private. His “happiness in his work” assumes a woeful countenance at home; his “spotless” public morality looks strange indeed behind the mask-we will not mention deeds, but only fantasies, and the wives of such men would have a pretty tale to tell. As to his selfless altruism, his children have decided views about that.

To the degree that the world invites the individual to identify with the mask, he is delivered over to influences from within. “High rests on low,” says Lao-tzu. An opposite forces its way up from inside; it is exactly as though the unconscious suppressed the ego with the very same power which drew the ego into the persona. The absence of resistance outwardly against the lure of the persona means a similar weakness inwardly against the influence of the unconscious. Outwardly an effective and powerful role is played, while inwardly an effeminate weakness develops in face of every influence coming from the unconscious. Moods, vagaries, timidity, even a limp sexuality (culminating in impotence), gradually gain the upper hand.

The persona, the ideal picture of a man as he should be, is inwardly compensated by feminine weakness, and as 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 weaknesses 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. In return the wife can cherish the illusion, so attractive to many, that at least she has married a hero, unperturbed by her own uselessness. This little game of illusion is often taken to be the whole meaning of life.

The ideal individual, one might postulate, would be consistently the same whatever the circumstances. In practice, most human beings adopt attitudes in public which are different from their attitudes in private. There is a dissociation of personality into “outer” and “inner”; into “mask” and “soul.” Jung affirms that, in men, the inner personality or soul is feminine, and represented as such by female figures in dreams and fantasies; whereas the opposite is true for women.

(The words preceding “q.v.” in the following passage are defined by Jung elsewhere in “Definitions.”)

From “Definitions” Psychological Types, CW 6, pars. 797–811

48. SOUL [Psyche, personality, persona, anima]. I have been compelled, in my investigations into the structure of the unconscious, to make a conceptual distinction between soul and psyche. By psyche I understand the totality of all psychic processes, conscious as well as unconscious. By soul, on the other hand, I understand a clearly demarcated functional complex that can best be described as a “personality.” In order to make clear what I mean by this, I must introduce some further points of view. It is, in particular, the phenomena of somnambulism, double consciousness, split personality, etc., whose investigation we owe primarily to the French school, that have enabled us to accept the possibility of a plurality of personalities in one and the same individual.

[Soul as a functional complex or “personality”]

It is at once evident that such a plurality of personalities can never appear in a normal individual. But, as the above-mentioned phenomena show, the possibility of a dissociation of personality must exist, at least in the germ, within the range of the normal. And, as a matter of fact, any moderately acute psychological observer will be able to demonstrate, without much difficulty, traces of character-splitting in normal individuals. One has only to observe a man rather closely, under varying conditions, to see that a change from one milieu to another brings about a striking alteration of personality, and on each occasion a clearly defined character emerges that is noticeably different from the previous one. “Angel abroad, devil at home” is a formulation of the phenomenon of character-splitting derived from everyday experience. A particular milieu necessitates a particular attitude (q.v.). The longer this attitude lasts, and the more often it is required, the more habitual it becomes. Very many people from the educated classes have to move in two totally different milieus – the domestic circle and the world of affairs. These two totally different environments demand two totally different attitudes, which, depending on the degree of the ego’s identification (q.v.) with the attitude of the moment, produce a duplication of character. In accordance with social conditions and requirements, the social character is oriented on the one hand by the expectations and demands of society, and on the other by the social aims and aspirations of the individual. The domestic character is, as a rule, moulded by emotional demands and an easy-going acquiescence for the sake of comfort and convenience; whence it frequently happens that men who in public life are extremely energetic, spirited, obstinate, wilful and ruthless appear good-natured, mild, compliant, even weak, when at home and in the bosom of the family. Which is the true character, the real personality? This question is often impossible to answer.

These reflections show that even in normal individuals character-splitting is by no means an impossibility. We are, therefore, fully justified in treating personality dissociation as a problem of normal psychology. In my view the answer to the above question should be that such a man has no real character at all: he is not individual (q.v.) but collective (q.v.), the plaything of circumstance and general expectations. Were he individual, he would have the same character despite the variation of attitude. He would not be identical with the attitude of the moment, and he neither would nor could prevent his individuality (q.v.) from expressing itself just as clearly in one state as in another. Naturally he is individual, like every living being, but unconsciously so. Because of his more or less complete identification with the attitude of the moment, he deceives others, and often himself, as to his real character. He puts on a mask, which he knows is in keeping with his conscious intentions, while it also meets the requirements and fits the opinions of society, first one motive and then the other gaining the upper hand.

[Soul as persona]

This mask, i.e., the ad hoc adopted attitude, I have called the persona, which was the name for the masks worn by actors in antiquity. The man who identifies with this mask I would call “personal” as opposed to “individual.”

The two above-mentioned attitudes represent two collective personalities, which may be summed up quite simply under the name “personae.” I have already suggested that the real individuality is different from both. The persona is thus a functional complex that comes into existence for reasons of adaptation or personal convenience, but is by no means identical with the individuality. The persona is exclusively concerned with the relation to objects. The relation of the individual to the object must be sharply distinguished from the relation to the subject. By the “subject” I mean first of all those vague, dim stirrings, feelings, thoughts, and sensations which flow in on us not from any demonstrable continuity of conscious experience of the object, but well up like a disturbing, inhibiting, or at times helpful, influence from the dark inner depths, from the background and underground vaults of consciousness, and constitute, in their totality, our perception of the life of the unconscious. The subject, conceived as the “inner object,” is the unconscious. Just as there is a relation to the outer object, an outer attitude, there is a relation to the inner object, an inner attitude. It is readily understandable that this inner attitude, by reason of its extremely intimate and inaccessible nature, is far more difficult to discern than the outer attitude, which is immediately perceived by everyone. Nevertheless, it does not seem to me impossible to formulate it as a concept. All those allegedly accidental inhibitions, fancies, moods, vague feelings, and scraps of fantasy that hinder concentration and disturb the peace of mind even of the most normal man, and that are rationalized away as being due to bodily causes and suchlike, usually have their origin, not in the reasons consciously ascribed to them, but in perceptions of unconscious processes. Dreams naturally belong to this class of phenomena, and, as we all know, are often traced back to such external and superficial causes as indigestion, sleeping on one’s back, and so forth, in spite of the fact that these explanations can never stand up to searching criticism. The attitude of the individual in these matters is extremely varied. One man will not allow himself to be disturbed in the slightest by his inner processes – he can ignore them completely; another man is just as completely at their mercy – as soon as he wakes up some fantasy or other, or a disagreeable feeling, spoils his mood for the whole day; a vaguely unpleasant sensation puts the idea into his head that he is suffering from a secret disease, a dream fills him with gloomy forebodings, although ordinarily he is not superstitious. Others, again, have only periodic access to these unconscious stirrings, or only to a certain category of them. For one man they may never have reached consciousness at all as anything worth thinking about, for another they are a worrying problem he broods on daily. One man takes them as physiological, another attributes them to the behaviour of his neighbours, another finds in them a religious revelation.

These entirely different ways of dealing with the stirrings of the unconscious are just as habitual as the attitudes to the outer object. The inner attitude, therefore, is correlated with just as definite a functional complex as the outer attitude. People who, it would seem, entirely overlook their inner psychic processes no more lack a typical inner attitude than the people who constantly overlook the outer object and the reality of facts lack a typical outer one. In all the latter cases, which are by no means uncommon, the persona is characterized by a lack of relatedness, at times even a blind inconsiderateness, that yields only to the harshest blows of fate. Not infrequently, it is just these people with a rigid persona who possess an attitude to the unconscious processes which is extremely susceptible and open to influence. Inwardly they are as weak, malleable, and “soft-centred” as they are inflexible and unapproachable outwardly. Their inner attitude, therefore, corresponds to a personality that is diametrically opposed to the outer personality. I know a man, for instance, who blindly and pitilessly destroyed the happiness of those nearest to him, and yet would interrupt important business journeys just to enjoy the beauty of a forest scene glimpsed from the carriage window. Cases of this kind are doubtless familiar to everyone, so I need not give further examples.

[Soul as anima]

We can, therefore, speak of an inner personality with as much justification as, on the grounds of daily experience, we speak of an outer personality. The inner personality is the way one behaves in relation to one’s inner psychic processes; it is the inner attitude, the characteristic face, that is turned towards the unconscious. I call the outer attitude, the outward face, the persona; the inner attitude, the inward face, I call the anima. To the degree that an attitude is habitual, it is a well-knit functional complex with which the ego can identify itself more or less. Common speech expresses this very graphically: when a man has an habitual attitude to certain situations, an habitual way of doing things, we say he is quite another man when doing this or that. This is a practical demonstration of the autonomy of the functional complex represented by the habitual attitude: it is as though another personality had taken possession of the individual, as though “another spirit had got into him.” The same autonomy that very often characterizes the outer attitude is also claimed by the inner attitude, the anima. It is one of the most difficult educational feats to change the persona, the outer attitude, and it is just as difficult to change the anima, since its structure is usually quite as well-knit as the persona’s. Just as the persona is an entity that often seems to constitute the whole character of a man, and may even accompany him unaltered throughout his entire life, the anima is a clearly defined entity with a character that, very often, is autonomous and immutable. It therefore lends itself very readily to characterization and description.

As to the character of the anima, my experience confirms the rule that it is, by and large, complementary to the character of the persona. The anima usually contains all those common human qualities which the conscious attitude lacks. The tyrant tormented by bad dreams, gloomy forebodings, and inner fears is a typical figure. Outwardly ruthless, harsh, and unapproachable, he jumps inwardly at every shadow, is at the mercy of every mood, as though he were the feeblest and most impressionable of men. Thus his anima contains all those fallible human qualities his persona lacks. If the persona is intellectual, the anima will quite certainly be sentimental. The complementary character of the anima also affects the sexual character, as I have proved to myself beyond a doubt. A very feminine woman has a masculine soul, and a very masculine man has a feminine soul. This contrast is due to the fact that a man is not in all things wholly masculine, but also has certain feminine traits. The more masculine his outer attitude is, the more his feminine traits are obliterated: instead, they appear in his unconscious. This explains why it is just those very virile men who are most subject to characteristic weaknesses; their attitude to the unconscious has a womanish weakness and impressionability. Conversely, it is often just the most feminine women who, in their inner lives, display an intractability, an obstinacy, and a wilfulness that are to be found with comparable intensity only in a man’s outer attitude. These are masculine traits which, excluded from the womanly outer attitude, have become qualities of her soul.

If, therefore, we speak of the anima of a man, we must logically speak of the animus of a woman, if we are to give the soul of a woman its right name. Whereas logic and objectivity are usually the predominant features of a man’s outer attitude, or are at least regarded as ideals, in the case of a woman it is feeling. But in the soul it is the other way round: inwardly it is the man who feels, and the woman who reflects. Hence a man’s greater liability to total despair, while a woman can always find comfort and hope; accordingly a man is more likely to put an end to himself than a woman. However much a victim of social circumstances a woman may be, as a prostitute for instance, a man is no less a victim of impulses from the unconscious, taking the form of alcoholism and other vices.

As to its common human qualities, the character of the anima can be deduced from that of the persona. Everything that should normally be in the outer attitude, but is conspicuously absent, will invariably be found in the inner attitude. This is a fundamental rule which my experience has borne out over and over again. But as regards its individual qualities, nothing can be deduced about them in this way. We can only be certain that when a man is identical with his persona, his individual qualities will be associated with the anima. This association frequently gives rise in dreams to the symbol of psychic pregnancy, a symbol that goes back to the primordial image (q.v.) of the hero’s birth. The child that is to be born signifies the individuality, which, though present, is not yet conscious. For in the same way as the persona, the instrument of adaptation to the environment, is strongly influenced by environmental conditions, the anima is shaped by the unconscious and its qualities. In a primitive milieu the persona necessarily takes on primitive features, and the anima similarly takes over the archaic (q.v.) features of the unconscious as well as its symbolic, prescient character. Hence the “pregnant,” “creative” qualities of the inner attitude.

Identity (q.v.) with the persona automatically leads to an unconscious identity with the anima because, when the ego is not differentiated from the persona, it can have no conscious relation to the unconscious processes. Consequently, it is these processes, it is identical with them. Anyone who is himself his outward role will infallibly succumb to the inner processes; he will either frustrate his outward role by absolute inner necessity or else reduce it to absurdity, by a process of enantiodromia (q.v.). He can no longer keep to his individual way, and his life runs into one deadlock after another. Moreover, the anima is inevitably projected upon a real object, with which he gets into a relation of almost total dependence. Every reaction displayed by this object has an immediate, inwardly enervating effect on the subject. Tragic ties are often formed in this way (v. Soul-image).

49. SOUL-IMAGE [Anima / Animus]. The soul-image is a specific image (q.v.) among those produced by the unconscious. Just as the persona (v. Soul), or outer attitude, is represented in dreams by images of definite persons who possess the outstanding qualities of the persona in especially marked form, so in a man the soul, i.e., anima, or inner attitude, is represented in the unconscious by definite persons with the corresponding qualities. Such an image is called a “soul-image.” Sometimes these images are of quite unknown or mythological figures. With men the anima is usually personified by the unconscious as a woman; with women the animus is personified as a man. In every case where the individuality (q.v.) is unconscious, and therefore associated with the soul, the soul-image has the character of the same sex. In all cases where there is an identity (q.v.) with the persona, and the soul accordingly is unconscious, the soul-image is transferred to a real person. This person is the object of intense love or equally intense hate (or fear). The influence of such a person is immediate and absolutely compelling, because it always provokes an affective response. The affect (q.v.) is due to the fact that a real, conscious adaptation to the person representing the soul-image is impossible. Because an objective relationship is non-existent and out of the question, the libido (q.v.) gets dammed up and explodes in an outburst of affect. Affects always occur where there is a failure of adaptation. Conscious adaptation to the person representing the soul-image is impossible precisely because the subject is unconscious of the soul. Were he conscious of it, it could be distinguished from the object, whose immediate effects might then be mitigated, since the potency of the object depends on the projection (q.v.) of the soul-image.

For a man, a woman is best fitted to be the real bearer of his soul-image, because of the feminine quality of his soul; for a woman it will be a man. Wherever an impassioned, almost magical, relationship exists between the sexes, it is invariably a question of a projected soul-image. Since these relationships are very common, the soul must be unconscious just as frequently – that is, vast numbers of people must be quite unaware of the way they are related to their inner psychic processes. Because this unconsciousness is always coupled with complete identification with the persona, it follows that this identification must be very frequent too. And in actual fact very many people are wholly identified with their outer attitude and therefore have no conscious relation to their inner processes. Conversely, it may also happen that the soul-image is not projected but remains with the subject, and this results in an identification with the soul because the subject is then convinced that the way he relates to his inner processes is his real character. In that event the persona, being unconscious, will be projected on a person of the same sex, thus providing a foundation for many cases of open or latent homosexuality, and of father-transferences in men or mother-transferences in women. In such cases there is always a defective adaptation to external reality and a lack of relatedness, because identification with the soul produces an attitude predominantly oriented to the perception of inner processes, and the object is deprived of its determining power.

If the soul-image is projected, the result is an absolute affective tie to the object. If it is not projected, a relatively unadapted state develops, which Freud has described as narcissism. The projection of the soul-image offers a release from preoccupation with one’s inner processes so long as the behaviour of the object is in harmony with the soul-image. The subject is then in a position to live out his persona and develop it further. The object, however, will scarcely be able to meet the demands of the soul-image indefinitely, although there are many women who, by completely disregarding their own lives, succeed in representing their husband’s soul-image for a very long time. The biological feminine instinct assists them in this. A man may unconsciously do the same for his wife, though this will prompt him to deeds which finally exceed his capacities whether for good or evil. Here again the biological masculine instinct is a help.

If the soul-image is not projected, a thoroughly morbid relation to the unconscious gradually develops. The subject is increasingly overwhelmed by unconscious contents, which his inadequate relation to the object makes him powerless to assimilate or put to any kind of use, so that the whole subject-object relation only deteriorates further. Naturally these two attitudes represent the two extremes between which the more normal attitudes lie. In a normal man the soul-image is not distinguished by any particular clarity, purity, or depth, but is apt to be rather blurred. In men with a good-natured and unaggressive persona, the soul-image has a rather malevolent character. A good literary example of this is the daemonic woman who is the companion of Zeus in Spitteler’s Olympian Spring. For an idealistic woman, a depraved man is often the bearer of the soul-image; hence the “saviour fantasy” so frequent in such cases. The same thing happens with men, when the prostitute is surrounded with the halo of a soul crying for succour.

From “The Relations between the Ego and the Unconscious” Two Essays, CW 7, pars. 296–301, 314–16
ANIMA AND ANIMUS

Among all possible spirits the spirits of the parents are in practice the most important; hence the universal incidence of the ancestor cult. In its original form it served to conciliate the revenants, but on a higher level of culture it became an essentially moral and educational institution, as in China. For the child, the parents are his closest and most influential relations. But as he grows older this influence is split off; consequently the parental imagos become increasingly shut away from consciousness, and on account of the restrictive influence they sometimes continue to exert, they easily acquire a negative aspect. In this way the parental imagos remain as alien elements somewhere “outside” the psyche.

In place of the parents, woman now takes up her position as the most immediate environmental influence in the life of the adult man. She becomes his companion, she belongs to him in so far as she shares his life and is more or less of the same age. She is not of a superior order, either by virtue of age, authority, or physical strength. She is, however, a very influential factor and, like the parents, she produces an imago of a relatively autonomous nature – not an imago to be split off like that of the parents, but one that has to be kept associated with consciousness. Woman, with her very dissimilar psychology, is and always has been a source of information about things for which a man has no eyes. She can be his inspiration; her intuitive capacity, often superior to man’s, can give him timely warning, and her feeling, always directed towards the personal, can show him ways which his own less personally accented feeling would never have discovered. What Tacitus says about the Germanic women is exactly to the point in this respect.*

Here, without a doubt, is one of the main sources for the feminine quality of the soul. But it does not seem to be the only source. 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 unhesitatingly 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 has manifestly married his own worst weakness. This would explain some highly remarkable conjunctions.

It seems to me, therefore, that apart from the influence of woman there is also the man’s own femininity to explain the feminine nature of the soul complex. There is no question here of any linguistic “accident,” of the kind that makes the sun feminine in German and masculine in other languages. We have, in this matter, the testimony of art from all ages, and besides that the famous question: habet mulier animam? Most men, probably, who have any psychological insight at all will know what Rider Haggard means by “She-who-must-be-obeyed,” and will also recognize the chord that is struck when they read Benoît’s description of Antinéa.* Moreover they know at once the kind of woman who most readily embodies this mysterious factor, of which they have so vivid a premonition.

The wide recognition accorded to such books shows that there must be some supra-individual quality in this image of the anima, something that does not owe a fleeting existence simply to its individual uniqueness, but is far more typical, with roots that go deeper than the obvious surface attachments I have pointed out. Both Rider Haggard and Benoît give unmistakable utterance to this supposition in the historical aspect of their anima figures.

As we know, there is no human experience, nor would experience be possible at all, without the intervention of a subjective aptitude. What is this subjective aptitude? Ultimately it consists in an innate psychic structure which allows man to have experiences of this kind. Thus the whole nature of man presupposes woman, both physically and spiritually. His system is tuned in to woman from the start, just as it is prepared for a quite definite world where there is water, light, air, salt, carbohydrates, etc. The form of the world into which he is born is already inborn in him as a virtual image. Likewise parents, wife, children, birth, and death are inborn in him as virtual images, as psychic aptitudes. These a priori categories have by nature a collective character; they are images of parents, wife, and children in general, and are not individual predestinations. We must therefore think of these images as lacking in solid content, hence as unconscious. They only acquire solidity, influence, and eventual consciousness in the encounter with empirical facts, which touch the unconscious aptitude and quicken it to life. They are in a sense the deposits of all our ancestral experiences, but they are not the experiences themselves. So at least it seems to us, in the present limited state of our knowledge. (I must confess that I have never yet found infallible evidence for the inheritance of memory images, but I do not regard it as positively precluded that in addition to these collective deposits which contain nothing specifically individual, there may also be inherited memories that are individually determined.)

An inherited collective image of woman exists in a man’s unconscious, with the help of which he apprehends the nature of woman. This inherited image is the third important source for the femininity of the soul.

. . . .

Now, everything that is true of the persona and of all autonomous complexes in general also holds true of the anima. She likewise is a personality, and this is why she is so easily projected upon a woman. So long as the anima is unconscious she is always projected, for everything unconscious is projected. The first bearer of the soul-image is always the mother; later it is borne by those women who arouse the man’s feelings, whether in a positive or a negative sense. Because the mother is the first bearer of the soul-image, separation from her is a delicate and important matter of the greatest educational significance. Accordingly among primitives we find a large number of rites designed to organize this separation. The mere fact of becoming adult, and of outward separation, is not enough; impressive initiations into the “men’s house” and ceremonies of rebirth are still needed in order to make the separation from the mother (and hence from childhood) entirely effective.

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 the 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 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.

From “The Syzygy: Anima and Animus” Axon, CW 9 ii, pars. 24–40

In the case of the son, the projection-making factor is identical with the mother-imago, and this is consequently taken to be the real mother. The projection can only be dissolved when the son sees that in the realm of his psyche there is an imago not only of the mother but of the daughter, the sister, the beloved, the heavenly goddess, and the chthonic Baubo. Every mother and every beloved is forced to become the carrier and embodiment of this omnipresent and ageless image, which corresponds to the deepest reality in a man. It belongs to him, this perilous image of Woman; she stands for the loyalty which in the interests of life he must sometimes forgo; she is the much needed compensation for the risks, struggles, sacrifices that all end in disappointment; she is the solace for all the bitterness of life. And, at the same time, she is the great illusionist, the seductress, who draws him into life with her Maya – and not only into life’s reasonable and useful aspects, but into its frightful paradoxes and ambivalences where good and evil, success and ruin, hope and despair, counterbalance one another. Because she is his greatest danger she demands from a man his greatest, and if he has it in him she will receive it.

This image is “My Lady Soul,” as Spitteler called her. I have suggested instead the term “anima,” as indicating something specific, for which the expression “soul” is too general and too vague. The empirical reality summed up under the concept of the anima forms an extremely dramatic content of the unconscious. It is possible to describe this content in rational, scientific language, but in this way one entirely fails to express its living character. Therefore, in describing the living processes of the psyche, I deliberately and consciously give preference to a dramatic, mythological way of thinking and speaking, because this is not only more expressive but also more exact than an abstract scientific terminology, which is wont to toy with the notion that its theoretic formulations may one fine day be resolved into algebraic equations.

The projection-making factor is the anima, or rather the unconscious as represented by the anima. Whenever she appears, in dreams, visions, and fantasies, she takes on personified form, thus demonstrating that the factor she embodies possesses all the outstanding characteristics of a feminine being.* She is not an invention of the conscious, but a spontaneous product of the unconscious. Nor is she a substitute figure for the mother. On the contrary, there is every likelihood that the numinous qualities which make the mother-imago so dangerously powerful derive from the collective archetype of the anima, which is incarnated anew in every male child.

Since the anima is an archetype that is found in men, it is reasonable to suppose that an equivalent archetype must be present in women; for just as the man is compensated by a feminine element, so woman is compensated by a masculine one. I do not, however, wish this argument to give the impression that these compensatory relationships were arrived at by deduction. On the contrary, long and varied experience was needed in order to grasp the nature of anima and animus empirically. Whatever we have to say about these archetypes, therefore, is either directly verifiable or at least rendered probable by the facts. At the same time, I am fully aware that we are discussing pioneer work which by its very nature can only be provisional.

Just as the mother seems to be the first carrier of the projection-making factor for the son, so is the father for the daughter. Practical experience of these relationships is made up of many individual cases presenting all kinds of variations on the same basic theme. A concise description of them can, therefore, be no more than schematic.

Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious has, so to speak, a masculine imprint. This results in a considerable psychological difference between men and women, and accordingly I have called the projection-making factor in women the animus, which means mind or spirit. The animus corresponds to the paternal Logos just as the anima corresponds to the maternal Eros. But I do not wish or intend to give these two intuitive concepts too specific a definition. I use Eros and Logos merely as conceptual aids to describe the fact that woman’s consciousness is characterized more by the connective quality of Eros than by the discrimination and cognition associated with Logos. In men, Eros, the function of relationship, is usually less developed than Logos. In women, on the other hand, Eros is an expression of their true nature, while their Logos is often only a regrettable accident. It gives rise to misunderstandings and annoying interpretations in the family circle and among friends. This is because it consists of opinions instead of reflections, and by opinions I mean a priori assumptions that lay claim to absolute truth. Such assumptions, as everyone knows, can be extremely irritating. As the animus is partial to argument, he can best be seen at work in disputes where both parties know they are right. Men can argue in a very womanish way, too, when they are anima-possessed and have thus been transformed into the animus of their own anima. With them the question becomes one of personal vanity and touchiness (as if they were females); with women it is a question of power, whether of truth or justice or some other “ism” – for the dressmaker and hairdresser have already taken care of their vanity. The “Father” (i.e., the sum of conventional opinions) always plays a great role in female argumentation. No matter how friendly and obliging a woman’s Eros may be, no logic on earth can shake her if she is ridden by the animus. Often the man has the feeling – and he is not altogether wrong – that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary power of persuasion. He is unaware that this highly dramatic situation would instantly come to a banal and unexciting end if he were to quit the field and let a second woman carry on the battle (his wife, for instance, if she herself is not the fiery war horse). This sound idea seldom or never occurs to him, because no man can converse with an animus for five minutes without becoming the victim of his own anima. Anyone who still had enough sense of humour to listen objectively to the ensuing dialogue would be staggered by the vast number of commonplaces, misapplied truisms, clichés from newspapers and novels, shop-soiled platitudes of every description interspersed with vulgar abuse and brain-splitting lack of logic. It is a dialogue which, irrespective of its participants, is repeated millions and millions of times in all the languages of the world and always remains essentially the same.

This singular fact is due to the following circumstance: when animus and anima meet, the animus draws his sword of power and the anima ejects her poison of illusion and seduction. The outcome need not always be negative, since the two are equally likely to fall in love (a special instance of love at first sight). The language of love is of astonishing uniformity, using the well-worn formulas with the utmost devotion and fidelity, so that once again the two partners find themselves in a banal collective situation. Yet they live in the illusion that they are related to one another in a most individual way.

In both its positive and its negative aspects the anima/animius relationship is always full of “animosity,” i.e., it is emotional, and hence collective. Affects lower the level of the relationship and bring it closer to the common instinctual basis, which no longer has anything individual about it. Very often the relationship runs its course heedless of its human performers, who afterwards do not know what happened to them.

Whereas the cloud of “animosity” surrounding the man is composed chiefly of sentimentality and resentment, in woman it expresses itself in the form of opinionated views, interpretations, insinuations, and misconstructions, which all have the purpose (sometimes attained) of severing the relation between two human beings. The woman, like the man, becomes wrapped in a veil of illusions by her demon-familiar, and, as the daughter who alone understands her father (that is, is eternally right in everything), she is translated to the land of sheep, where she is put to graze by the shepherd of her soul, the animus.

Like the anima, the animus too has a positive aspect. Through the figure of the father he expresses not only conventional opinion but – equally – what we call “spirit,” philosophical or religious ideas in particular, or rather the attitude resulting from them. Thus the animus is a psychopomp, a mediator between the conscious and the unconscious and a personification of the latter. Just as the anima becomes, through integration, the Eros of consciousness, so the animus becomes a Logos; and in the same way that the anima gives relationship and relatedness to a man’s consciousness, the animus gives to woman’s consciousness a capacity for reflection, deliberation, and self-knowledge.

The effect of anima and animus on the ego is in principle the same. This effect is extremely difficult to eliminate because, in the first place, it is uncommonly strong and immediately fills the ego-personality with an unshakable feeling of rightness and righteousness. In the second place, the cause of the effect is projected and appears to lie in objects and objective situations. Both these characteristics can, I believe, be traced back to the peculiarities of the archetype. For the archetype, of course, exists a priori. This may possibly explain the often totally irrational yet undisputed and indisputable existence of certain moods and opinions. Perhaps these are so notoriously difficult to influence because of the powerfully suggestive effect emanating from the archetype. Consciousness is fascinated by it, held captive, as if hypnotized. Very often the ego experiences a vague feeling of moral defeat and then behaves all the more defensively, defiantly, and self-righteously, thus setting up a vicious circle which only increases its feeling of inferiority. The bottom is then knocked out of the human relationship, for, like megalomania, a feeling of inferiority makes mutual recognition impossible, and without this there is no relationship.

As I said, it is easier to gain insight into the shadow than into the anima or animus. With the shadow, we have the advantage of being prepared in some sort by our education, which has always endeavoured to convince people that they are not one-hundred-per-cent pure gold. So everyone immediately understands what is meant by “shadow,” “inferior personality,” etc. And if he has forgotten, his memory can easily be refreshed by a Sunday sermon, his wife, or the tax collector. With the anima and animus, however, things are by no means so simple. Firstly, there is no moral education in this respect, and secondly, most people are content to be self-righteous and prefer mutual vilification (if nothing worse!) to the recognition of their projections. Indeed, it seems a very natural state of affairs for men to have irrational moods and women irrational opinions. Presumably this situation is grounded on instinct and must remain as it is to ensure that the Empedoclean game of the hate and love of the elements shall continue for all eternity. Nature is conservative and does not easily allow her courses to be altered; she defends in the most stubborn way the inviolability of the preserves where anima and animus roam. Hence it is much more difficult to become conscious of one’s anima/animus projections than to acknowledge one’s shadow side. One has, of course, to overcome certain moral obstacles, such as vanity, ambition, conceit, resentment, etc., but in the case of projections all sorts of purely intellectual difficulties are added, quite apart from the contents of the projection which one simply doesn’t know how to cope with. And on top of all this there arises a profound doubt as to whether one is not meddling too much with nature’s business by prodding into consciousness things which it would have been better to leave asleep.

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