Part 7

THE CONFLICT AND ITS SOLUTION.

If we want to put the matter in its broadest sense, we can say that the great conflict of this age is between the extraverted attitude and the introverted, between Christ and Anti-Christ, between Christianity with its democracy, its insistence on good works, its life of activity and service, its concentration, actually, on business, machinery and getting on, and on the other hand, the claims of the individual and the demands of the inner life for an enhancement of art, of research, of philosophy, of spiritual development, of freedom.

It is a conflict between the principle of love and the principle of power, and naturally, it is not only an external thing, but something that takes place in every individual who has made any sort of high development. For it is a psychic law that if we carry anything to an extreme, we meet the opposite.

This is clearly illustrated in Goethe’s Faust. The hero, Faust, has carried his introverted side to a very high development; indeed, so far, that everything he studied and all that he knows now appears lifeless and uninteresting. He is sick of himself, sick of life. It is all nothing. His search for knowledge has led nowhere. In the end all that we know is--that we cannot know. What a pity then that he has squandered his youth on study and meditation and medicine. A kind of death comes over him; which means, psychologically, that he has reached the end of one line of development, and is preparing himself to change over to another and new line.

This soon appears, in the form of a poodle dog who soon shows himself as the Devil. Both these symbols are inevitable. A dog, as shown before, relates to our more extraverted side, and it is this side for which Faust now longs. He has reached the end of his development (for the time being) as an introvert; the longing that now is awakened is for life--that is, for youth, activity, sexuality, love, ardent adventure, etc. Hence, the symbol of the dog as representing the side of himself he has not developed. But this really is also the Devil. That is to say that which is undeveloped is still in a primitive state, and through its long repression, bears the aspect of something ugly and evil. In order, therefore, to reach the “other side,” in order to begin to live out the unlived possibilities of his nature, he must sell himself to the Devil.

That is to say, that when the undeveloped side shows itself and takes command, it cannot be lived unless one is willing to go a path which may often appear evil and which is in direct defiance to what one has previously lived and thought good.

This selling out to the Devil appears as a great danger. It means that he will never be “saved,” never go to heaven. But actually in the prologue of the play, God allows the Devil to make this compact with Faust because the Devil is “a part of that power which wills the bad, but somehow works the good.” That is to say, if one is willing to step over into the undeveloped side, and live it in spite of its evil beginnings, one can only develop oneself and finally come to a higher good.

Such the drama shows. By magic Faust gains wealth and power. He seduces Gretchen, and her end is insanity, infanticide and a death that narrowly escapes the gallows. But Faust goes on, and the whole play shows how, by following the Devil, he brings the neglected side up to the developed side of himself, so that in the end the Devil is defeated and Faust gains that heaven where the two sides of his nature may now be united in harmony.

If Faust outlines the problem, another great work, the “Prometheus and Epimetheus” of Spitteler, shows its solution. Jung is at great pains to analyze this long poem in his book on Psychological Types. Prometheus and Epimetheus stand respectively for introvert and extravert. Prometheus is the idealist who withdraws from the world into himself to love and serve his soul; but Epimetheus is the man of the world, who has common sense, who obeys the conventions and who becomes a king. Epimetheus cannot wean his foolish brother from his obviously perverted way of living. A conflict arises between them, which drives Prometheus all the deeper in himself. Thus a great sickness falls not only upon him, but upon his God (the collective unconscious). His soul then brings him a jewel, a thing of magic, a wonder-child, which will save the world. But this jewel is rejected by the king and by the world, and as a result there is destruction, the king losing his throne.

“The final extinction of Good is prevented by the intervention of Prometheus. He rescues Messias, the last of the sons of God, out of the power of his enemy. Messias becomes the heir to the Divine Kingdom, while Prometheus and Epimetheus, the personifications of the severed opposites, become united in the seclusion of their native valley.... Which means, extraversion and introversion cease to dominate as one-sided lines of direction.... In their stead, a new function appears, symbolically represented by a child named Messias. He is the mediator, the symbol of the new attitude that shall reconcile the opposites.”

What is the exact meaning of this? To begin with, Prometheus and Epimetheus must be thought of, not as two men, but as the two sides of one man, the conflict, in short, between introversion and extraversion. In the normal course of development, like Faust, one develops first one side, then the other. Naturally the time must come when the conflict breaks out in full force: shall one follow the principle of power, of introversion, or that of love, of extraversion? This conflict produces a deadlock, and in this deadlock, a solution is offered by the unconscious in the form of a symbol (the jewel, the wonder-child.) But this is not understood, and there is a breakdown and collapse. However, now a new path is found which leads out.

This path Jung calls the transcendent function; this indeed is the Messias of the poem. It is part of the analytic process, and emerges only at the end of a deep analysis. What it amounts to is an inner guidance.

I have already shown that the collective unconscious is creative, that it is ahead of the race, and projects at times, through geniuses, a vision of what is to be, what is becoming. Just as it does this for the race, it also to a certain extent, and at certain times, is prospective for the individual, laying out the next step he is to take, and forecasting the next phase of his development.

This prospective quality is rarely found in the dream, though sometimes it appears there. It is usually found in the phantasy. The phantasy is a product analogous to the dream, but whereas when we dream we are fully asleep, and hence, unconscious, the phantasy appears between waking and sleeping, when we are really half-asleep. It appears as a sort of dream, sometimes as a clear plastic image, and we know, when we apprehend it, that we are not asleep.

As Jung works out in great detail, the phantasy has a greater value than the dream, for the dream is merely the product of the unconscious, whereas the phantasy is the product of both the conscious and unconscious minds working simultaneously at that moment when we are half-conscious, or between the two. Hence, it contains in symbolic form, our deepest insight, our deepest wish, our clearest foreknowledge of what to do, being in this respect also superior to our conscious working out of the problem.

It is by following the insight gained from our phantasies that we work out the problem of the deep conflict; for if we follow these phantasies, we take the next necessary step and so learn gradually to reconcile the claims of extraversion with those of introversion.

In the great religion of the Hindoos, and in fact, in a religion of the Chinese, we hear much of a Middle Path. The problem as set forth by those religions is that life consists of a pair of opposites; such for instance as spirituality vs. materialism, feminine vs. masculine, love vs. power, divine vs. demonic, etc., and they see clearly that neither extreme can bring peace. If we live one extreme then soon we thirst and hunger for the other, and this brings discord and conflict. The true wisdom of life then is to find a Middle Path, a way between the opposites. This way is not something that can be thought out and entered by violence. It is something found gradually through development in religious ritual.

It is this great thought, this truth which emerges again in modern psychology. But it comes now with a difference. Psycho-analysis is a highly specialized scientific technic. It does not deal with ritual and dogma, it does not lay down general laws to the individual. It recognizes that his problem is different from that of all other individuals, and seeks to guide him, not from without, but from within. From the material which rises naturally from his own psyche, from dream and phantasy and intuition, he gains the insight which he must follow.

Hence, religion ceases to be a mass-matter, but becomes an individual matter. As Jung puts it, every creed attempts to make us all live the phantasies of the founder of the religion. His phantasies may have been very great and very deep; but they were, in the main, his own. Every human being is constantly producing phantasies, and in these lies his own path, and not in those of someone’s else.

What is the goal then of this immense struggle in the human being, this psychic conflict which sometimes goes on to a point of shattering the individual, this inner division that cries out for healing, and which goads us forward to our development? The word that Jung gives us is individuation. We aim, he says, to be individuals in the true sense of the word. Certainly, however, the fragments that Nietzsche saw are not individuals, for an individual is one who contains the many-sidedness of human nature in a state of inner harmony. If then this one-sidedness precludes individuality, the psyche must be constantly urging us on to develop that which has been neglected in order that the undeveloped side may rise level to the developed side, and so that in the end one may be a complete, rounded, harmonious human being.

This is the light which the new psychology offers to the race at a moment of its greatest darkness. It has just fought the bloodiest and most devastating war of all history; it has fought that war in the twilight of the Gods. Its old Gods are disintegrating and vanishing. Everywhere we see the harsh conflict going on, and at the very moment when man has reached his highest point of extraversion, with his machines, his radios and phonographs and aeroplanes, his automobiles and newspapers and movies, his triumph over nature, we see everywhere the sadness and suffering of humanity, the breakdown of white civilization in Europe, the restless stirrings of the East, and an immense increase in neurosis and insanity. A great change is due; a new light has come. This new light however, is not a religion, it is nothing to broadcast and apply en masse. It is a technic which must reach individual by individual, making him known to himself, discovering for him his type with its needs and limitation, showing him his possibilities, directing him to the path of his own development. Naturally such development will be different for each individual. There are not many, as Jung shows, who must go to the painful lengths depicted in the story of Prometheus and Epimetheus, or even in the story of Faust. For the majority, a deeper self-understanding, a knowledge of the types, an ability to understand some of the products of the unconscious, a lifting off of the repressions, a full recognition of one’s own needs and desires, will be enough to bring about a more harmonious, a more fruitful life. But for the few, a higher, deeper suffering is necessary, possibly because of their gifts, which may thus be developed and become a heritage for the race.

VIII.

NOTE.

This booklet has aimed to give a glimpse of a vast territory, merely enough to set the reader toward the complete works on the subject. It has been necessary to condense and suggest, where a deeper understanding would be reached by elaboration and numerous examples. For those who care to study the matter more deeply it is suggested that they begin Jung by reading the second edition of his Papers in Analytical Psychology. This is a difficult book because it contains a series of articles which show his growth, step by step toward a new insight. Much that he writes there he has since discarded. However, it is well to read whatever of it one finds interesting.

The next step is to read The Psychology of the Unconscious, which uncovers the theory of the collective unconscious; and finally Jung’s master-work up to this time, his Psychological Types.

If I have stimulated the reader to the point where he desires to go on to these works, then the purpose with which I wrote this little book is fulfilled.

Transcriber’s Note

Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: italics.