4. THE RETURN OF THE GODS
Those powers of the human soul which the ancients called gods and demons are not deprived of their magic by changing their names. For they retain the same godlike and demonic characteristics, even though in fact they may not wear halos and wings or horns and spiked tails. In calling them gods and demons the ancients may have been fanciful, but at least they were aware of an important fact which we too often overlook, namely, that those powers have a life of their own which is altogether independent of our conscious desire and will. This is what we are so apt to forget when trying to deal with our moods—when, for instance, a powerful depression lays hold on us or when we are seized with a sudden, violent hatred. Such phenomena are not peculiar to individuals; whole nations or continents may be possessed in the same way, and a people may be led into war or other forms of political madness despite the strongest protests of conscious reason. Nowadays we say that such people have lost their self-control; the ancients would have said that they were possessed by devils, and between those two diagnoses there is all the difference in the world. For the former implies no more than a mere failure of conscious will, whereas the latter recognizes that many more factors than conscious will have to be taken into account in the ordering of human life.
The Language of the Unconscious
But, as we have already seen, there is a tendency among us to recognize our gods and demons again, a tendency represented by the growing popularity of the psychology of the unconscious. This new science has not only revealed the unconscious origin of such familiar states of mind as moods and phobias; it has also revealed gods and demons almost totally lost to consciousness, as for instance the Freudian Oedipus Complex and even more remote powers described by Jung as the anima, the animus, the Shadow, the Terrible Mother, the Wise Old Man, and the Mana-Personality.1 Their very names call to mind the myths and legends of the ancient world. These “unconscious contents” are various aspects of what we have described as man’s unknown, inner universe, and the aim of psychological science is to bring them to consciousness in order that we may define a conscious relationship to them instead of being their unwitting instruments. This science originally came into being to assist in the cure of psychotic and neurotic conditions, but subsequently many of its followers have seen in it the possibilities of greater development of personality for so-called “normal” people as well. In cases of lunacy and psychosis we see the conscious ego completely overwhelmed by forces that enter but slightly or not at all into normal consciousness. At any moment a sudden shock may sweep the ego off its feet and leave any one of us a prey to mental mechanisms which in the ordinary way the ego keeps in their place. For it seems as if the ego were the organizing faculty whose function is to “make sense” out of a collection of chaotic powers. But when it is unaware of those powers it is liable at any time to surreptitious invasion or even to “open aggression,” and at the same time there is always the dim awareness of conflict between ourselves and our demons. This awareness becomes more acute when we are in the throes of a mood, but for the sake of comfort we usually do our best to banish the sense of conflict and to forget that our souls contain subversive elements which must constantly be kept in order.
But all attempts to ignore the internal conflict lead us into trouble. This may be clarified by a simple illustration, typical of many cases that come to the psychologist’s attention. A man finds himself unaccountably unhappy in his marriage and goes to a psychologist for advice. The psychologist asks him many questions about the situation, and discovers that the man is upset because there is a mysterious “something” which his wife fails to give him. Stimulated by discussing the problem with another person, he dreams the following night that he comes home from his office to find that his wife is out. He thinks he will take a bath while waiting for her to come back for dinner, but on going to the bathroom he finds the tub already filled with dirty, soapy water. He is just about to pull out the stopper when an octopus emerges and wraps its tentacles around his wrist. He wakes in terror. Questioned by the psychologist he remarks that his wife is often in the habit of taking a bath at the time he returns from work. Instead of her he finds the octopus, but does that mean that his marriage is unhappy because his wife is a vampire, is just out for his money, and will discard him when she has sucked him dry? On the contrary, the symbols of the unconscious which we meet in dreams refer to one’s own attitude to the situation, and in any case the man does not feel this to be at all true of his wife. The psychologist then asks him about his attitude to his mother, and discovers that he was very much attached to her and moreover that she was in the habit of protecting him as much as possible from responsibility—a protection which he secretly enjoyed. In fact, with his own connivance, his mother did not allow him to live his own life. Thereupon the psychologist suggests that the octopus represents his mother who virtually sucked away his manly virility, his capacity to face the world on his own feet. But why does he find the octopus where he would ordinarily find his wife? Perhaps this gives a clue to the mysterious “something” which he finds lacking in her, which he desires so much and the absence of which is making his marriage unhappy. Indeed it does, for the trouble is that his wife will not mother him and relieve him of responsibilities. He married her under the unconscious delusion that she would take the place of his mother, and the dream shows him his desire to return to maternal protection in the form of an octopus.
Now the octopus, the spider, and the crab are familiar symbols for the “Terrible Mother,” which is the name given to an irrational desire to regress to an infantile condition, to return to the protected irresponsibility of the infant or to the comfortable, sleepy darkness of the womb. The desire appears under these terrible symbols because, from the conscious standpoint, it is a demon which denies the power of the ego and the rational ideal of progress to greater and greater heights of independence and self-direction. Thus there is always a conflict between the ego and this regressive desire, this principle of inertia and backsliding which the Hindus called tamas. If that conflict is repressed and left unrecognized, the desire tricks the ego into situations where the conflict will be continued and intensified in various disguises. Thus, in the above case, the conflict between husband and wife was the continuation of an unresolved conflict between the husband and his desire to slip back to infantile irresponsibility, to the protection of the mother.