'The
Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man' by Carl Jung (1931)
A
selection from a lecture given by Carl Jung in Cologne in 1933 titled The
Meaning of Psychology for Modern Man.
...the
collective unconscious [is] the sea upon which the ego rides like a ship. [...]
Just as the sea stretches its broad tongues between the continents and laps
them round like islands, so our original unconscious presses round our
individual consciousness. In the catastrophe of mental disease the storm-tide
of the sea surges over the island and swallows it back into the depths. In
neurotic disturbances there is at least a bursting of dikes, and the fruitful
lowlands are laid waste by flood. Neurotics are all shore-dwellers-- they are
the most exposed to the dangers of the sea. So-called normal people live
inland, on higher, drier ground, near placid lakes and streams. No flood
however high reaches them, and the circumambient sea is so far away that they
even deny its existence. Indeed, a person can be so identified with his ego
that he loses the common bond of humanity and cuts himself off from all others.
[...]
But
even the inland dwellers, the inhabitants of the normal world who forgot the
sea, do not live on firm ground. The soil is so friable that at any moment the
sea can rush in through continental fissures and maroon them.
We
can hardly deny that ours is a time of dissociation and sickness. [...] The
word "crisis," so often heard, is a medical expression which always
tells us that the sickness has reached a dangerous climax.
[...]
It is difficult to estimate the sickness of the age in which we live. But if we
glance back at the clinical history of mankind, we shall find earlier bouts of
sickness which are easier to survey. One of the worst attacks was the malaise
that spread through the Roman world in the first centuries after Christ. [...]
If we reduced humanity as it then was to a single individual, we would see
before us a highly differentiated personality who, after mastering his
environment with sublime self-assurance, split himself up in the pursuit of his
separate occupations and interests, forgetting his own origins and traditions,
and even losing all memory of his former self, so that he seemed to be now one
thing and now another, and thus fell into a hopeless conflict with himself. In
the end the conflict led to such a state of enfeeblement that the world he had
conquered broke in like a devastating flood and completed the process of
destruction.
[...]
...the
sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same time a process of
recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the
throes of birth. A time of dissociation such as prevailed during the Roman
Empire is simultaneously an age of rebirth. Not without reason do we date our
era from the age of Augustus, for that epoch saw the birth of the symbolical
figure of Christ, who was invoked by the early Christians as the Fish, that
Ruler of the Aeon of Pisces which had just begun. He became the ruling spirit
of the next two thousand years. Like the teacher of wisdom in Babylonian
legend, Oannes, he rose up from the sea, from the primeval darkness, and
brought a world-period to an end. [...]
Our
distance in time puts us in the favourable position of being able to see these
historical events quite clearly. Had we lived in those days we would probably
have been among the many who overlooked them. The Gospel, the joyful tidings,
were known only to the humble few; on the surface everything was politics,
economic questions, and sport. Religion and philosophy tried to assimilate the
spiritual riches that poured into the Roman world from the newly conquered
East. Few noticed the grain of mustard-seed that was destined to grow into a
great tree.
In
classical Chinese philosophy there are two contrary principles, the bright yang
and the dark yin. Of these it is said that always when one principle reaches
the height of its power, the counter-principle is stirring within it like a
germ. This is another, particularly graphic formulation of the psychological law
of compensation by an inner opposite. Whenever a civilization reaches its
highest point, sooner or later a period of decay sets in. But the apparently
meaningless and hopeless collapse into a disorder without aim or purpose, which
fills the onlooker with disgust and despair, nevertheless contains within its
darkness the germ of a new light.
But
let us go back for a moment to our earlier attempt to construct a single
individual from the period of classical decay. [...] Let us suppose that this
man came to me for a consultation. I would make the following diagnosis: “You
are suffering from overstrain as a result of your numerous activities and
boundless extraversion. In the profusion and complexity of your business,
personal, and human obligations you have lost your head. You are a kind of Ivar
Kreuger, who is a typical representative of the modern European spirit. You
must realize, my dear Sir, that you are rapidly going to the dogs.”
[...]
Our
patient is an intelligence man. He has tried all the patent medicines, both
good and bad, every kind of diet, and all the bits of advice given him by all
the clever people.
[...]
We
must direct our patient's attention to the place where the germ of unity is
growing within him, the place of creative birth, which is the deepest cause of
all the rifts and schisms on the surface. A civilization does not decay, it
regenerates. In the early centuries of our era a man of discernment could have
cried out with unshakable certainty amid the political intrigue and wild
speculation of the Caesar-worshipping, circus-besotted Roman world: "The
germ of the coming era has even now been born in the darkness, behind all this
aimless confusion; the seed of the Tree that will overshadow the nations of the
North to Sicily, and unite them in one belief, one culture, and one
language."
That
is the psychological law. My patient, in all probability, will not believe a
word of it. At the very least he will want to have experienced these things for
himself. And here our difficulties begin, for the compensation always makes its
appearance just where one would least expect it, and where, objectively
considered, it seems least plausible. Let us now suppose that our patient is
not the pale abstraction of a long-dead civilization, but a flesh-and-blood man
of our own day, who has the misfortune to be a typical representative of our
modern European culture. We shall then find that our compensation theory means
nothing to him. He suffers most of all from the disease of knowing everything
better; there is nothing that he cannot classify and put in the correct
pigeonhole. As to his psyche, it is essentially his own invention, his own
will, and it obeys his reason exclusively; and if it should happen that it does
not do so , if he should nevertheless have psychic symptoms, such as
anxiety-states, obsessional ideas, and so on, then it is a clinically
identifiable disease with a thoroughly plausible, scientific name. Of the
psyche as an original experience which cannot be reduced to anything else he
has no knowledge at all and does not know what I am talking about, but he
thinks he has understood it perfectly and even writes articles and books in
which he bemoans the evils of "psychologism."
This
kind of mentality, barricading itself behind a thick wall of books, newspapers,
opinions, social institutions, and professional prejudices, cannot be argued
with. Nothing can break through its defences, least of all that little germ of
the new which would make him at one with the world and himself. [...] Where,
then, must we lead our patient in order to give him at least a glimmer of an
inkling of something different, something that would counterbalance the
everyday world he knows only too well? We must guide him, by devious ways at
first, to a dark, ridiculously insignificant, quite unimportant corner of his
psyche.... . That corner of the psyche is the dream, which is 'nothing but' a
fleeting, grotesque phantom of the night, and the path is the understanding of
dreams.
With
Faustian indignation my patient will cry out...
This witch’s quackery disgusts my soul!
Is this your promise then, that I be healed
By crooked counsel in this crazy hole,
In truth by some decrepit dame revealed?
. . . .
Cannot you brew an ichor of your own?
To
which I shall reply: “Haven’t you tried one remedy after another? Haven’t you
seen for your self that all your efforts have only led you round in a circle,
back to the confusion of your present life? So where will you get that other
point of view from, if it cannot be found anywhere in your world? ”
Here
Mephistopheles murmurs approvingly, "That's where the witch comes
in," thus giving his own devilish twist to Nature's secret and perverting
the truth that the dream is an inner vision, "mysterious still in open
light of day." The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most
secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche
long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no
matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is
isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars,
and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation,
even though it reaches to the fartherest nebulae among the stars. All
consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more
universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial
night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable
from nature and bare of all egohood.
It
is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so
childish, grotesque, and immoral. So flowerlike is it in its candor and
veracity that it makes us blush for the deceitfulness of our lives. No wonder
that in all the ancient civilizations an impressive dream was accounted a
message from the gods! It remained for the rationalism of our age to explain
the dream as the remnants left over from the day, as the crumbs that fell into
the twilit world from the richly laden table of our consciousness. These dark
depths are then nothing but an empty sack, containing no more than what falls
into it from above. [...] It would be far truer to say that our consciousness
is that sack, which has nothing in it except what chances to fall into it. We
never appreciate how dependent we are on lucky-ideas-- until we find to our
distress that they will not come. A dream is... a lucky idea that comes to us
from the dark, all-unifying world of the psyche. What would be more natural,
when we have lost ourselves amid the endless particulars and isolated details
oft he world's surface, than to knock at the door of dreams and inquire of them
the bearings which would bring us closer to the basic facts of human existence.
Here
we encounter the obstinate prejudice that dreams are so much froth, they are
not real, they lie, they are mere wish-fulfillments. All this is but an excuse
not to take dreams seriously, for that would be uncomfortable. Our intellectual
hybris of consciousness loves isolation despite all its inconveniences, and for
this reason people will do anything rather than admit that dreams are real and
speak the truth. There are some saints who had very rude dreams. Where would
their saintliness be, the very thing that exalts them above the vulgar rabble,
if the obscenity of a dream were a real truth? But it is just the most squalid
dreams that emphasize our blood-kinship with the rest of mankind, and most
effectively damp down the arrogance born of an atrophy of the instincts. Even
if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never
be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the
more this unity is strengthened in the depths.
I
admit that I fully understand the disappointment of my patient and of my public
when I point to dreams as a source of information in the spiritual confusion of
our modern world. Nothing is more natural than that such a paradoxical gesture
should strike one as completely absurd. What can a dream do, this utterly
subjective and nugatory thing, in a world brimful of overpowering realities?
Realities must be countered with other, equally palpable realities, and not
with dreams, which merely disturb our sleep or put us in a bad mood the next
day. You cannot build a house with dreams, or pay taxes, or win battles, or
overcome the world crisis. Therefore my patient, like all other sensible
people, will want me to tell him what can be done in this insufferable
situation, and with appropriate, common-sense methods. The only snag is that
all the methods that seems appropriate have already been tried out with no
success whatever... .
[...]
My
patient, and perhaps our whole age, is in this situation. Anxiously he asks me,
"What can I do?" And I must answer, "I don't know either."
[...]
So
when I counsel my patient to pay attention to his dreams, I mean: "Turn
back to the most subjective part of yourself, to the source of your being.... .
Your dreams are an expression of your inner life, and they can show you through
what false attitude you have landed yourself in this blind alley."
Dreams
are impartial, spontaneous products of the unconscious psyche, outside the
control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished,
natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an
attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has
strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse.
To
concern ourselves with dreams is a way of reflecting on ourselves-- a way of
self-reflection. It is not our ego-consciousness reflecting on itself; rather,
it turns its attention to the objective actuality of the dreams as a
communication or message from the unconscious, unitary soul of humanity. It
reflects not on the ego but on the self; it recollects that strange self, alien
to the ego, which was ours from the beginning, the trunk from which the ego
grew. It is alien to us because we have estranged ourselves from it through
the... conscious mind.
[...]
Dream-interpretation...
was... among the black arts persecuted by the Church. even though we of the
twentieth century are rather more broad minded in this respect, so much
historical prejudice still attaches to the whole idea of dream-interpretation
that we do not take kindly to it. Is there, one may ask, any reliable
method of dream-interpretation? [...] I
admit that I share these misgivings to the full, and I am convinced that there
is in fact no absolutely reliable method of interpretation.
[...]
One
would do well, therefore, to treat every dream as though it were a totally
unknown object. Look at it from all sides, take it in your hand, carry it about
with you, let your imagination play round it, and talk about it with other
people. [...] Treated in this way, the dream suggests all manner of ideas and
associations... .
[...]
If...
we bear in mind that the unconscious contains everything that is lacking to
consciousness, that the unconscious therefore has a compensatory tendency, then
we can begin to draw conclusions... .
[...]
As
individuals we are not completely unique, but are like other men. Hence a dream
with a collective meaning is valid in the first place for the dreamer, but it
expresses at the same time the fact that his momentary problem is also the
problem of other people. This is often of great practical importance, for there
are countless people who are inwardly cut off from humanity and oppressed by
the thought that nobody else has their problems. Or else they are those
all-too-modest souls who, feeling themselves nonentities, have kept their claim
to social recognition on too low a level. Moreover, every individual problem is
somehow connected with the problem of the age, so that practically every
subjective difficulty has to be viewed from the standpoint of the human
situation as a whole. But this is permissible only when the dream really is a
mythological one and makes use of collective symbols.
[...]
No
one who does not know himself can know others. And in each of us there is
another whom we do not know. He speaks to us in dreams and tells us how
differently he sees us from the way we see ourselves. When, therefore, we find
ourselves in a difficult situation to which there is no solution, he can
sometimes kindle a light that radically alters our attitude-- the very attitude
that led us into the difficult situation.
[...]
Small
and hidden is the door that leads inward, and the entrance is barred by
countless prejudices, mistaken assumptions, and fears. Always one wishes to
hear of grand political and economic schemes, the very things that have landed
every nation in a morass. Therefore it sounds grotesque when anyone speaks of
hidden doors, dreams, and a world within. What has this vapid idealism got to
do with gigantic economic programs, with the so called problems of reality?
[...]
The
layman can hardly conceive how much his inclinations, moods, and decisions are
influenced by the dark forces of his psyche, and how dangerous or helpful they
may be in shaping his destiny. Our cerebral consciousness is like an actor who
has forgotten that he is playing a role. But when the play comes to an end, he
must remember his own subjective reality, for he can no longer continue to live
as Julius Caesar or as Othello, but only as himself, from whom he has become
estranged by a momentary sleight of consciousness. He must know once again that
he was merely a figure on the stage who was playing a piece by Shakespeare, and
that there was a producer as well as a director in the background who, as
always, will have something very important to say about his acting.
