Naturally the unconscious is an unfamiliar realm and for most people the descriptive language of Jungian psychology is so much mysterious jargon. We read a lot about animus, anima, inferior functions, archetypes, mandala, key dreams, and so forth, and begin to wonder whether someone is not a little crazy. Of course, to understand these various “denizens of the deep” we have to have personal experience of them, and this is most effectively had in dreams and in the conscious assimilation of dream symbols. For in dreaming the conscious is a little sleepy and incompetent; it is not interfering so efficiently with other mental processes, and, as everyone knows, between sunset and dawn is the ghosts’ playtime. But does this mean that before ordinary men and women can achieve any genuine spiritual development they must take careful notes of all their dreams, learn the meaning of their symbols, and even go to an analyst for assistance? I know someone who has been instructed by her analyst to set her alarm clock to ring every hour during the night so that she can wake up and write her dreams in a notebook. Yet it is very easy to be unfair in this matter for the whole technique lends itself to caricature in the hands both of analysts and of hostile satirists. The only important question is not whether the process is a nuisance but whether it works. Does it make possible the re-creation of the individual?
The Meaning of Individuation
First of all, we must ask what, in plain language as distinct from jargon, it proposes to do. It proposes to adapt the individual to his inner universe, to the unconscious natural urges within himself in such a way that his entire being is made into a total, related organism with a conscious center of gravity and balance. It presupposes that the unconscious, being nature in man, is the source of vitality, and assumes that its creative power can be most effectively handled when the ego provides it with an unobstructed but nevertheless directed channel. Whereas the neurotic genius finds his energy in escape and the natural genius in “possession” by unconscious forces (“which is to madness close allied”), the integrated genius would supposedly be able to draw upon the unconscious life-sources quite freely and consciously. I do not know how this can be expressed more concretely, and I believe this language must remain an utter mystery to those who have no feeling whatever of an unconscious life within themselves. When your life is centered wholly in consciousness it is naturally impossible to understand the meaning of another kind of center. If you were aware only of your head, it would be impossible to have any feeling for your solar plexus.
But there is, perhaps, one other way in which it may be related to ordinary, everyday experience. Many people feel at times that they have more than one soul; this is particularly true of children and primitives. Lafcadio Hearn describes a conversation on this subject with a Japanese peasant who tells him that a man may have as many as nine souls, the number varying in accordance with his spiritual perfection. The more souls the better, but it is important that however many souls you may be given you should keep them together. “Sometimes,” he says, “they may be separated. But if the souls of a man be separated, that man becomes mad. Mad people are those who have lost one of their souls.”6 This feeling of a multiplicity of souls seems to be a rudimentary awareness of the unconscious and more especially of the independent character of its forces. Children feel changes in their personality from day to day; in many cases one finds, for instance, the most remarkable changes in their handwriting, and it is marvelous to see how sincerely they can play at being other people and things. But as adults we are apt to forget our many souls, and in passing from adolescence to adulthood become more settled and centered in our mental behavior. I think the re-creation of the personality might fairly be described as becoming conscious again of our plurality, of our many souls, and having them all contribute to our being instead of one at a time. “Genius,” said Novalis, “is perhaps nothing more than the result of inward Plurality.” One is reminded, too, of the words of Shakespeare’s Richard II:
My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,
My soul the father: and these two beget
A generation of still-breeding thoughts,
And these same thoughts people this little world,
In humors like the people of this world,
For no thought is contented. The better sort,—
As thoughts of things divine,—are intermixed
With scruples, and do set the word itself
Against the word.
The Danger of Bewitchment
But now we are left with the question: Does this method of analytical psychology work? Have the symbols of spiritual attainment which may be experienced in dreams any relation to actual fact, to the individual’s deepest responses to life—in short, to his happiness? Actually this is not quite a fair question, because it is never just to judge a system by all the people who follow it. I have no doubt at all that it works, with the right people. The Chinese have a saying that “when the wrong man uses the right means, the right means work in the wrong way.”7 Jung himself is the first to admit the truth of this saying, for, in his own words, “when it comes to things like these, everything depends on the man and little or nothing on the method.” But the system of analytical psychology does not always seem to attract the right people, and this is often true of those who go into it with a view to becoming analysts.
Fortunately, however, there are those in Jung’s school who are keenly aware of this danger, and it is well that they should watch it, not only for their own sake, but also because similar difficulties lie in the path of every other venture into the unconscious mind, and for that matter in the path of every human being who seeks adaptation to his inner universe. Jung has gone far more deeply into the nature of the unconscious than did Freud,8 and his system is bound up with aspects of the human soul which have a peculiar magic. Indeed, he goes so deeply that to follow him, not in ideas alone but in experience, is an extremely serious undertaking which involves the gravest risks for those whose feet are not planted on solid earth. And here “fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” The deeper images and forces of the unconscious have a fascination, an irresistible glamour which casts a spell on those who are not, as we say, “plain tough.” I believe Jung himself to be very conscious of this danger, and were he a less competent man his work might have the most unfortunate results. For he is open to the same dangers of personal adulation and misuse of his discoveries that threaten the work of all great leaders in spiritual adventure. These dangers are somewhat intensified by the nature of analytical work, but nothing worthwhile was ever achieved without risk. As long as he and his immediate colleagues continue to insist, as they do, that analysis is no substitute for actual living, and that it certainly must not be indulged in for the sake of its powerful glamour, they will be doing all in their power to rid the system of its abuses. Every system, whether of psychology or religion, has its abusers, but analytical psychology contains particularly strong dynamite which it will always do well to guard.
There are those who go a long way in the re-creative work of analytical psychology and yet have all spoiled by their inability to shake off the spell of the unconscious and its mystical figures. When this happens the process defeats its own purpose. It is intended to make the individual a free, genuine person in his own right; but under the spell he becomes utterly dependent on the system as such, goes in for the study of psychology in a big way, and generally wallows around in its captivating atmosphere. Certainly it provides glamour and mystery which seem rather lacking in the stark realities of ordinary life, but when the system becomes an end instead of a means it is a millstone about one’s neck instead of a liberator. At this point the analyst has to bring his patient back to earth with a bump. This fascination is a danger constantly besetting the professional teacher or practitioner of religion or psychology. The study of the unconscious for its own sake is only safe for those who can forget the subject completely without feeling that they are suffering any loss. A Chinese allegory of the spiritual life known as the Ten Oxherding Pictures represents the use of religion in the form of catching and herding an ox.9 But when the herdsman has caught it and ridden home on its back, he does not take it into his house with him; he puts it away and forgets it. The commentary to the picture reads: “When you know that what you need is not the snare or setnet but the hare or fish, it is like gold separated from the dross, it is like the moon rising out of the clouds.” The system, which carries you on its back for a while, is the ox, but if you can’t get rid of it you would have done better never to have gone after it, unless, of course, you are compelled to accept this thralldom as the lesser of two evils. Unfortunately the mysteries of analytical psychology so captivate certain types of people that they mistake such bewitchment for the feeling of a vocation to be a psychologist.