Part 4

This then is the typical experience of those who carry their development to any height. What is its meaning psychologically?

There is no understanding of it, says Jung, unless we broaden the conception of the unconscious. And with this he introduces his theory of the collective unconscious.

The human body is the product of millions of years of evolution, and in it is written the history of life. It is not a sudden creation. If this is true of the body, how can it be anything but true of the mind, which is a function of the body? The mind, too, is a product of millions of years of evolution, and just as the history of life is written in the flesh, so too the history of man’s spirit, his adventure, is summed up in the mind. In other words, the new born babe does not present a mind like a blank sheet of paper on which his personal experience will begin to write; he is born with the great inheritance of the race, the collective unconscious, in which is stored the wisdom of the ages as well as the great instincts, and what Jung calls “the residues of our animal ancestry.”

How do we know this? Because the mind of a man today, a man even ignorant and unread, will, on certain occasions, produce the same myths, the same supernatural figures, the same psychic phenomena as those produced thousands of years ago, and the same in every part of the earth among the most widely separated nations and races.

In short, the unconscious contains typical images and typical stories. And whence did these arise? It is quite natural that the presence in our own unconscious of a wisdom greater than ours and at the same time of animal instincts sometimes overwhelming in their destructiveness, should give the savage, for instance, a sense of the nearness of supernatural powers of good and evil, of some supernatural wisdom that helped him (in the form of revelation or inspiration) and of some demonic lust or passion, which, if it swept over him, led to the orgy, the murder or insanity. Hence, these experiences would be pictured as the work of beings like those he knew, only greater. Wisdom was a Great Mother or a Great Father, a God, in short; evil was a Devil, a Demon, like a bad man, only greater and worse. And certain experiences would be pictured in the form of monsters, great strange animals, sometimes animals part human and part beast.

Thus we see an explanation for the origin of the many religions on earth, all of which have certain things in common. Some sensitive man experienced his own unconscious in the form of dreams and hallucinations. Moses for instance heard the voice of God and saw the burning bush. Psychologically, this would mean that what Moses thought was outside himself, came from within himself, came from the unconscious and was, in the technical language, projected, the vision of fire upon the bush, the voice into the air. He heard and saw something out of his own depths.

Every religion makes this projection. Heaven is up in the sky, hell under the earth; the Gods are on high, the Devils below. It has remained for modern psychology not only to locate these phenomena as in the brain itself, but also to divest them of their miraculous coating, and to explain them as something having a direct meaning in the patient’s life.

According to Jung, the collective unconscious is more or less dormant in all of us, except under certain circumstances or after certain experiences. The average man goes on unaware of his own demonic and divine attributes. But in a lynching-bee or in battle the devil will suddenly awake and transform him from something human into something monstrous. On the other hand, the youth falling headlong in love, the man who sustains the death of his loved one and similar great experiences of life, will encounter the presence of ineffable wisdom and power, so that he feels he is visited by something beyond the human.

But the process of analysis also leads to the experience of the collective unconscious. Psycho-analysis is self-discovery. One goes deeper and deeper into oneself. One goes back on the track of the years to one’s childhood. One exhausts in the process one’s personal memories. One goes down, as it were, beyond the personal layers of the unconscious, to the impersonal. At this point the manifestations of the collective unconscious begin, and the dreams are now loaded with mythological conceptions, and images of the supernatural.

This deep entering into oneself Jung defines as introversion, a self descent, and a means of development, a discipline not only in the wisdom of all time, but in overcoming the undeveloped tendencies in oneself. It is at this point that the hero is devoured by the monster, the unconscious, and makes that voyage that leads to his rebirth.

Dante depicts this in his Divine Comedy. The hero, Dante, is led by Virgil, down through the depth of Inferno (the evil side of the unconscious), up the mount of Purgatory (the overcoming) and finally reaches Paradise, where he finds Beatrice, an image of his soul, and a new wisdom, a new life are his.

Naturally one cannot do justice to so deep a conception within the space allotted. But we can see at a glance that much that is otherwise inexplicable, save on the ground of something miraculous and supernatural, is now given a more natural explanation. We can understand the genius as one who has the gift of tapping his unconscious and bringing forth works which are impossible to the run of men. We can understand why man has always needed a religion. We can understand those intuitions which lead to new discoveries in science. Man has a storehouse of wisdom in himself.

We can also understand the strange aberrations of insanity, of those unfortunates who are caught, as it were, in the collective unconscious, and live only in a world of demons and divinities and uncanny myths. We can understand too the demonic outbreaks in war, and the cause of many crimes. I know of the case of a man who was a clergyman, and who, each time he had finished an impassioned sermon which passed through the audience like a rousing electricity, immediately went to a brothel and indulged in an orgy of drink and sexuality. He was a man under the complete dominance of the collective unconscious. First the divine side appeared, with its marvelous inspirations; then the demonic, dragging him in the mud.

It must not be thought, from the foregoing, that Jung rejected the sexual theory of Freud. What he did was to modify this theory, holding that not all cases of neurosis registered sexual repression or maladjustment. He fully agreed however, that the Oedipus complex appears as one of the great problems, but instead of interpreting dreams of this nature to mean that the son actually had incestuous longings for the mother, he took such dreams, like all others, to be symbolic. If a man dreams that a monster devours him, it does not mean that he is literally eaten by a large animal. It means that he has made a deep introversion. So too a dream of incest means that the son has reunited himself with the mother. But what does the mother mean? She may symbolize that period of his life when he actually was united with her spiritually, the time of early childhood, a time when he was irresponsible, taken care of, sheltered, helped. His dream may mean then that he longs to be like a child again; he longs to escape from the hardships of adaptation and his present problems.

On the other hand the mother may have a deeper meaning. She may appear with a supernatural air about her, and stand for the collective unconscious itself, which is the source (or mother) of our conscious life. The longing of the son for the mother, from this standpoint, is the longing for descent into self, for deep introversion. It has the meaning of the sun-myth where the setting sun is devoured by the monster and starts on his journey toward rebirth.

Since there is great danger in the withdrawal from life, in an introversion that in a way shuts one in oneself, whether one does this as an escape from responsibility or from a longing for self-development, it is natural that the myth should represent this incest-longing as taboo, as forbidden, just as real incest is, and that it is only the hero who can overcome this taboo and make that great descent which Dante pictures in his Inferno, and which in Faust is shown as the perilous descent to the Mothers.

THE INTROVERT VS. THE EXTRAVERT.

If the reader has compared Freud’s sexual theory with Adler’s power theory, he must have been struck by the fact that both theories sound plausible. It is certainly true that the conventional morality of civilization causes us to suppress certain instinctive desires. If a man is by nature polygamous, and is taught the ideal of monogamy in such a way as to believe that even the thought of illicit love is a sin, it is reasonable to think that he may repress his polygamous tendencies, thus paving the way for an unconscious conflict and a neurosis.

But, on the other hand, who has not, at least at times, had the painful feeling of inferiority and not been stirred by an ambition to get on top? What seems more natural than that the stammerer, Demosthenes, should strive to achieve greatness as an orator, or that a club-footed Byron should attempt to make himself a conqueror of women and a famous poet? Certainly the struggle for power is as widespread and clearly discernible in life as the instinctive drive for sexuality and a full love-life.

It is at this point that the greatness of Jung emerges. He had, in the course of his investigations, come upon a startling divergence of reaction among his patients, so that he was forced to conclude that there were two kinds of human being, as different, if not more different, from each other, than the two sexes. These two types he named the extravert and the introvert.

He next discovered that these two types had long been noted by men of genius under such designations as objective and subjective, romantic and classical, realistic and idealistic, materialistic and spiritual. William James called them the tough-minded and the tender-minded. William Blake, the English poet, said of them:

“There are two classes of men: the prolific and the devouring. Religion is an endeavor to reconcile the two.”

Jung interprets prolific here to mean, “the fruitful, who brings forth out of himself”; and “the devouring, as the man who swallows up and takes into himself.”

Needless to say the prolific type, which has appeared under the designations of the objective, romantic, realistic, materialistic and tough-minded, is, more exactly defined, the extravert, and the devouring type which was also called the subjective, classical, idealistic, spiritual and tender-minded, is the introvert.

What characterizes the extravert is that his interest is normally centered on things outside himself. An excellent example was our own Theodore Roosevelt. He was thoroughly extraverted, with instant response to the world about him. His attention was given wholeheartedly to anything that caught it. He was a man with an immense diversity of interests, from birds and flowers, to simplified spelling, from a local political fight to an international war; poetry, Greek coins, history, hunting, sports, finance,--the list was almost endless. And into each of these interests he could throw himself full force, and with astonishing power. He was as interested in men as in things, and his friends included people from every walk of life. He was well adapted to life, and made himself at home almost anywhere. What characterized him chiefly was that he gave himself without stint, went into action at a moment’s notice, had a tendency to practicality and common sense which kept him from being an extremist; was, in short, an excellent opportunist, knowing, very often, just when to strike, just what to say, with a decisiveness that won through. He was the fighting man, the man of action, the man of his own time, his own age, his own country.

He was, in other words, a man “orientated by the object.” That is to say, his life was determined by things and thoughts and ideas coming to him from the outside, in the main. If an enemy showed his head, he struck; if a friend, he clasped hands; if a popular movement appeared, he led it; if there was a war he wanted to be in it; if someone else originated a good idea (not too radical) he took it over and made it his.

It will be seen from this that the extravert is normally a man who is a harmonious part of the world as it is. This does not mean, of course, that he will be merely a conservative; for the world is in constant change, and an intelligent extravert will be one-to-one with the forward tide. But since he is, to a large extent, bound up in the things outside himself, he is, mainly, a reflection of the world. He could almost say of himself, “I am--what I love.”

His shortcomings are obvious. He covers a lot of ground, but necessarily in a shallow way. He cannot be deep, because depth implies a certain slowness, a certain amount of meditation and constant study, a brooding and solitude. He originates but little, for it is the thoughts and ideas of others which interest him. He is an enemy to anything really new, anything pregnant with the future, because it collides with the world as it is, which is the world he loves. Finally, he lacks an inner life, the more creative and profound life; a fact which the keen-sighted Roosevelt knew very well, for he said of himself, “My danger is that I forget I have a soul.”