The undiscovered self, p.1
The Undiscovered Self, page 1
THE UNDISCOVERED SELF
with
SYMBOLS AND
THE INTERPRETATION
OF DREAMS
from
The Collected Works of C. G. Jung
VOLUMES 10, 18
BOLLINGEN SERIES XX
THE UNDISCOVERED SELF
with
SYMBOLS AND THE
INTERPRETATION
OF DREAMS
C. G. Jung
With a new foreword by
Sonu Shamdasani
Translated and revised by R.F.C. Hull
BOLLINGEN SERIES
COPYRIGHT © 1990 BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
FOREWORD TO THE 2010 EDITION COPYRIGHT © 2011
BY SONU SHAMDASANI
PUBLISHED BY PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 41 WILLIAM STREET,
PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540
PRESS.PRINCETON.EDU
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
First Princeton/Bollingen Paperback printing, 1990
Paperback reissue, with a new foreword by Sonu Shamdasani, 2010
“The Undiscovered Self” is © 1957, 1958, by C. G. Jung, and the present text, translated and revised by R.F.C. Hull, is excerpted from Volume 10 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Civilization in Transition (Second Edition), © 1970 by Princeton University Press. The present text of “Symbols and Interpretations of Dreams,” revised by R.F.C. Hull, is excerpted from Volume 18 of the Collected Works of C. G. Jung, The Symbolic Life, copyright 1950, 1953, and copyright 1955, 1958, 1959, 1963, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1973, 1976 by Princeton University Press
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2010934717
ISBN: 978-0-691-15051-2
Printed on acid-free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
FOREWORD TO THE 2010 EDITION
The Undiscovered Self
Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams
FOREWORD TO THE 2010 EDITION
READING JUNG AFTER THE RED BOOK
With the publication of Liber Novus—Jung’s Red Book1—a new chapter opens in the reading of Jung’s works. For the first time, one is in a position to grasp the constitution of Jung’s work from 1914 onward, and to trace the intimate connections between his self-experimentation and his attempts to determine the typical features of this process through his work with his patients and translate his insights into a language acceptable to a medical and scientific public. Thus, reading Liber Novus brings with it the task of rereading Jung’s Collected Works—much of which appears in a wholly new light.
In the winter of 1913, Jung embarked on a process of self-experimentation. He deliberately gave free rein to his fantasy thinking and carefully noted what ensued. He later called this process “active imagination.” He wrote down these fantasies in the Black Books. These are not personal diaries, but rather the records of a self-experimentation. The dialogues that form these active imaginations can be regarded as a type of thinking in a dramatic form.
When World War I broke out, Jung considered that a number of his fantasies were precognitions of this event. This led him to compose the first draft of Liber Novus, which consisted of a transcription of the main fantasies from the Black Books, together with a layer of interpretive commentaries and lyrical elaboration. Here Jung attempted to derive general psychological principles from the fantasies, as well as to understand to what extent the events portrayed in the fantasies presented, in a symbolic form, developments that were to occur in the world.
Jung recopied the manuscript in an ornate Gothic script into a large red leather folio volume, which he illustrated with his own paintings. The overall theme of the book is how Jung regains his soul and overcomes the contemporary malaise of spiritual alienation. This is ultimately achieved by enabling the rebirth of a new image of God in his soul and developing a new worldview in the form of a psychological and theological cosmology.
Between 1916 and 1928, Jung published a number of works in which he attempted to translate some of the themes of Liber Novus into contemporary psychological language. In 1928, the sinologist Richard Wilhelm sent him a copy of the Taoist alchemical treatise The Secret of the Golden Flower, inviting him to write a commentary. Struck by the parallelism between the imagery of the text and some of his own mandalas, Jung finally decided to set aside his work on Liber Novus and not publish it. Instead he devoted himself to the cross-cultural study of the individuation process, focusing on medieval alchemy in particular, using parallels with his own material as a means to present the process in an indirect and allegorical form. Until now, this has presented formidable challenges for readers outside of Jung’s inner circle.
THE UNDISCOVERED SELF
In the aftermath of World War II, with the advent of the Cold War, the erection of the Berlin Wall, and the explosion of the hydrogen bomb, Jung found himself once again confronted with “An apocalyptic age filled with images of universal destruction,”2 as he had been when he composed Liber Novus during World War I. Articulating there a direct linkage between what took place in the individual and in society at large, he argued that the only solution to the seemingly catastrophic developments in the world lay in the individual turning within and resolving the individual aspects of the collective conflict: “[T]he spirit of the depths wants this struggle [the War] to be understood as a conflict in every man’s own nature.”3 In his personal confrontation, Jung’s endeavor was one of resolving the conflicts that were reflected on the world stage within himself. In 1917, he wrote,
This war has pitilessly revealed to civilized man that he is still a barbarian. . . . But the psychology of the individual corresponds to the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each individual, and so long as the individual does it, the nation also does it. Only the change in the attitude of the individual is the beginning of the change in the psychology of the nation.4
In the decades that followed, Jung’s attempts to develop a psychology and psychotherapy of individuation were dedicated to this task. By the 1950s, modern history had shown that the predicament confronting the individual was even more extreme than in 1917. In 1956, Jung took up these themes once more, in a short work entitled in German Present and Future (retitled in English The Undiscovered Self). Articulating these themes within the contemporary historical context, he argued that only self-knowledge and religious experience could provide resistance to the totalitarian mass society. In this regard, the individual had been failed by modern science on one side, and by organized religion on the other. What was required was a psychology that facilitated self-knowledge by reconnecting individuals with their dreams and the symbols that spontaneously emerged from within—which was the theme of Jung’s last written work, “Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams,” designed to convey his conceptions to a general public.
1 C. G. Jung, The Red Book, edited and introduced by Sonu Shamdasani and translated by Mark Kyburz, John Peck, and Sonu Shamdasani, Philemon Series (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009).
2 See § 488, p. 94.
3 The Red Book, p. 253.
4 The Psychology of the Unconscious Processes, Collected Works 7, p. 4.
I
THE UNDISCOVERED SELF
(Present and Future)
1. THE PLIGHT OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN MODERN SOCIETY
488
What will the future bring? From time immemorial this question has occupied men’s minds, though not always to the same degree. Historically, it is chiefly in times of physical, political, economic, and spiritual distress that men’s eyes turn with anxious hope to the future, and when anticipations, utopias, and apocalyptic visions multiply. One thinks, for instance, of the chiliastic expectations of the Augustan age at the beginning of the Christian era, or of the spiritual changes in the West which accompanied the end of the first millennium. Today, as the end of the second millennium draws near, we are again living in an age filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction. What is the significance of that split, symbolized by the “Iron Curtain,” which divides humanity into two halves? What will become of our civilization, and of man himself, if the hydrogen bombs begin to go off, or if the spiritual and moral darkness of State absolutism should spread over Europe?
489
We have no reason to take this threat lightly. Everywhere in the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelligent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its upper limit at about forty per cent of the electorate. A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.
490
Rational ar
491
Most people confuse “self-knowledge” with knowledge of their conscious ego-personalities. Anyone who has any ego-consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself. But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious and its contents. People measure their self-knowledge by what the average person in their social environment knows of himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche behaves like the body, of whose physiological and anatomical structure the average person knows very little too. Although he lives in it and with it, most of it is totally unknown to the layman, and special scientific knowledge is needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the body, not to speak of all that is not known, which also exists.
492
What is commonly called “self-knowledge” is therefore a very limited knowledge, most of it dependent on social factors, of what goes on in the human psyche. Hence one is always coming up against the prejudice that such and such a thing does not happen “with us” or “in our family” or among our friends and acquaintances. On the other hand, one meets with equally illusory assumptions about the alleged presence of qualities which merely serve to cover up the true facts of the case.
493
In this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is immune to conscious criticism and control, we stand defenceless, open to all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dangers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only when we know what is attacking us, and how, where and when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of getting to know the individual facts, theories are of very little help. For the more a theory lays claim to universal validity, the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts. Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid, though it need not necessarily occur in reality. Despite this it figures in the theory as an unassailable fundamental fact. The exceptions at either extreme, though equally factual, do not appear in the final result at all, since they cancel each other out. If, for instance, I determine the weight of each stone in a bed of pebbles and get an average weight of five ounces, this tells me very little about the real nature of the pebbles. Anyone who thought, on the basis of these findings, that he could pick up a pebble of five ounces at the first try would be in for a serious disappointment. Indeed, it might well happen that however long he searched he would not find a single pebble weighing exactly five ounces.
494
The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individuality. Not to put too fine a point on it, one could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity.
495
These considerations must be borne in mind whenever there is talk of a theory serving as a guide to self-knowledge. There is and can be no self-knowledge based on theoretical assumptions, for the object of this knowledge is an individual—a relative exception and an irregular phenomenon. Hence it is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in the last analysis can be neither known nor compared with anything else. At the same time man, as member of a species, can and must be described as a statistical unit; otherwise nothing general could be said about him. For this purpose he has to be regarded as a comparative unit. This results in a universally valid anthropology or psychology, as the case may be, with an abstract picture of man as an average unit from which all individual features have been removed: But it is precisely these features which are of paramount importance for understanding man. If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas knowledge of man, or insight into human character, presupposes all sorts of knowledge about mankind in general.
496
Now whether it is a question of understanding a fellow human being or of self-knowledge, I must in both cases leave all theoretical assumptions behind me. Since scientific knowledge not only enjoys universal esteem but, in the eyes of modern man, counts as the only intellectual and spiritual authority, understanding the individual obliges me to commit the lèse majesté, so to speak, of turning a blind eye to scientific knowledge. This is a sacrifice not lightly made, for the scientific attitude cannot rid itself so easily of its sense of responsibility. And if the psychologist happens to be a doctor who wants not only to classify his patient scientifically but also to understand him as a human being, he is threatened with a conflict of duties between the two diametrically opposed and mutually exclusive attitudes of knowledge on the one hand and understanding on the other. This conflict cannot be solved by an either/or but only by a kind of two-way thinking: doing one thing while not losing sight of the other.
497
In view of the fact that, in principle, the positive advantages of knowledge work specifically to the disadvantage of understanding, the judgment resulting therefrom is likely to be something of a paradox. Judged scientifically, the individual is nothing but a unit which repeats itself ad infinitum and could just as well be designated with a letter of the alphabet. For understanding, on the other hand, it is just the unique individual human being who, when stripped of all those conformities and regularities so dear to the heart of the scientist, is the supreme and only real object of investigation. The doctor, above all, should be aware of this contradiction. On the one hand, he is equipped with the statistical truths of his scientific training, and on the other, he is faced with the task of treating a sick person who, especially in the case of psychic suffering, requires individual understanding. The more schematic the treatment is, the more resistances it—quite rightly—calls up in the patient, and the more the cure is jeopardized. The psychotherapist sees himself compelled, willy-nilly, to regard the individuality of a patient as an essential fact in the picture and to arrange his methods of treatment accordingly. Today, over the whole field of medicine, it is recognized that the task of the doctor consists in treating the sick person, not an abstract illness.
