Within the mind, Jung identified certain fixed structures. These structures aren't learned, Freudian introjections. In Jung's view, they are there from our birth. They evolved as a part of the human mind, just as the hand or eye evolved. Like the hand and eye, almost all of us share these structures in common. He therefore called them the archetypes of the collective unconscious. By
collective, he meant nothing metaphysical; he was merely referring to what he saw as their commonality among all human beings.
The first of these structures Jung called the self. For Jung, the self encompasses all of the possibilities of your life, the energies, the potentiali-everything that you are capable of becoming.
The total self is what your life would be if it were entirely fulfilled.
Jung regards the total potential of the individual's psyche as an entity. Jung describes the self as a circle, its center unknown to you. That center, which is deep in the unconscious mind, is pushing you, your capacities, and your instincts. It gradually wakes during the first part of your life and gradually goes to sleep again in later stages. This is going on in you, and you have no control over it.
Now, this self opens out into nature and the universe because it is simply a part of nature. Yet the particular body has particular capacities, organs, and incapacities, commits you to a certain mode of experiencing that great consciousness of which you are an instrument. So your self will be peculiar to you, and yet it will be simply a local inflection of the model; you have a particular realization and sensibility of the great mystery. As you act as an infant, you are impelled by that self. This is the instinct system operating, purely biological.
The young girl in adolescence—and I taught them for thirty-eight years at Sarah Lawrence—is simply startled at what a wonderful thing she is. She didn't
do it, but whenever she looks in the mirror, she sees the miracle of something that happened to her that is called by her name. Hen- is this thing that comes into being. This is the whole flower of the sell. But our little consciousness rides on top of that like a ship on an ocean.
As you become aware of your self, your ego comes into birth. In Jung's schema, the ego is your conscious identification with your particular body, its experiences, and its memories. Memory and experience, limited to a body and identified in terms of the temporal continuity of that body, of which you are consciously aware: this is the ego.
By the time you've learned to walk and talk, write and drive, you've already got a lot of wishes of which you are unconscious, but because you have never fulfilled them or not kept your mind on them, they've fallen into the depths of the self, into the unconscious. The self is the whole context of potentials.
The ego is your consciousness of your self, what you think you are, what you think you're capable of, and its blocked by all of these unconsciously retained memories of incapacity, prohibitions, and so forth.
So, you have a dawning consciousness; you can watch this awakening in a little baby as it begins to realize itself as ego. The self and ego are not the same. The ego is the center of conscious mind only; it encompasses your awareness of your self and your world.
Now, when your ego has a plan, and you commit some absurd fumble that breaks the plan up, it's as though someone had intruded and destroyed your plan. You're interrupting yourself; you forgot something. Freud dealt with this very well; this semi-intentional forgetting is now known as a Freudian slip. You are simply keeping yourself from doing what you only thought you wanted to do. The other side of you is talking. This is coming from that unconscious aspect of the self. The self is the totality, and if you think of it as a circle, the center of the circle would be the center of the self. But your plane of consciousness is above the center, and your ego's up above that plane of consciousness, so there's a subliminal aspect of the self of which you do not know. And that is in play constantly with the ego.
Now, Jung's is a slightly different definition of ego from Freud's, though it is related. For Jung, ego is your notion of your self. It defines the center of your consciousness and relates you to the world; it is the "I" you experience as acting on the world around you.
It has nothing to do, however, with the unconscious portion of the self. The ego normally stays above the line of consciousness. Now, suppose you're driving a car: you're on the left side of the road, at the wheel; meanwhile, you don't know that there's another side there. In fact, you don't even recognize that you're on one side; you think you're in the middle. Most people drive their lives in this way, according to Jung. They think their ego is who they are. They go driving that way, and, of course, the car is knocking people down on the other side of the road. How are you going i to enable yourself to see that other side? Do you put another wheel up and have a friend drive you? Do you put the wheel in the middle? No! You have to know what's over there; you have to learn to see three-dimensionally, to use the parallax principle.
So, we have the self, which is the total potentiality, you might say. You have the ego, which emerges gradually in the course of childhood to a comparatively firm notion of itself.
Until that ego is more or less confirmed, it is very dangerous to have experiences that the ego can't handle. It can be blown, and you lose the ego's grip on conscious reality entirely. Then you're in a schizophrenic condition. You've got to have your ego in play. We hear so much talk now, particularly from the Orient, about ego-lessness. You are trying to smash this thing which is the only thing that keeps you in play. There's got to be somebody up there; otherwise you're not oriented to anything. The self, that's the great circle, the ship, and the ego is the little captain on the bridge.
Now, as you grow up, your family says you belong to this social circle, and you must behave as we do here. Then you go to school, and you begin to find that there's a certain career dawning, a certain kind of life you're going to lead. This begins tightening you down.
In other words, the circumstances of the society in which you are living are beginning to force you into a certain role, a certain costume.
There are certain things the ego must learn to do in order to function in the society you live in.
There's no point in learning to live in a society that does not exist or that lives over on the other side of the Iron Curtain. This which you have around you is it, my friend.
And the first problem of the early stage of life is to learn to live in this society in a way that will relate you to the objective world in terms that make sense now.
The critical function can come a little later, but first you've got to learn to function here and now. And this is the great task of childhood and youth: the terror, the demands, the restrictions of your will, and so forth have to be faced and assimilated. If you avoid these challenges early on, you will simply have to face them later or go slithering along, partially realized as a human entity, never having had the experiences of playing in a serious situation.
Society has a number of roles it needs us to play. We assume these roles just as an actor might slip into the different pieces of a costume. Society imprints on us its ideals, a wardrobe of acceptable behavior. Jung calls these personae.
Persona is the Latin word for the mask worn by an actor on the stage.
Say you're a teacher: when you're at work, you put on a teacher mask—you are a Teacher. Suppose you go home and think you're still a Teacher, not just a fellow who teaches. Who would want to be around you?
The mask has to be left in the wardrobe, in the green room, as it were. You've got to know what play you're in at any one time. You've got to be able to separate your sense of yourself—your ego—from the self you show the rest of the world—your persona.
You find this first big tension within the psyche between the dark inner potential of the self s unconscious portions on the one hand and the persona system on the other. The ego learns about the outside and inside and tries to reconcile them.
Now, one of the great dangers, from Jung's standpoint, is to identify yourself with your persona. In dramatic contrast to the aim of education in the Orient, Jung declares the ego must distinguish itself from its role.
This is a concept that does not exist in the East. As Freud put it, the ego is that function which puts you in touch with the empirical actualities of the world in which you live; it is the reality function. And it's from developing ego that you develop your own value system. Your judgments, your critical faculties, and so forth are functions of your ego. In the Orient, the individual is asked not to develop his critical faculties, not to observe the world in a new way, but to accept without question the teaching of his guru and to assume the mask that the society puts on him. This is the fundamental law of karmic birth. You are born into exactly that role which is proper to you. The society will give you the mask to wear. You are to identify with it completely, canceling out every creative thought.
In traditional India, China, or Japan, you
are your role. The secret is to embody that role perfectly, whether as a mendicant monk or a grieving widow throwing herself on the pyre. You are to become
sati.
What Jung says is that you should play your role, knowing that it's not you. It's a quite different point of view. This requires individuation, separating your ego, your image of yourself, from the social role. This doesn't mean that you shouldn't play the social role; it simply means that no matter what you choose to do in life, whether it's to cop out or to cop in, you are playing a role, and don't take it too damned seriously. The persona is merely the mask you're wearing for this game.
The people who know best how to change roles are Occidental women. They dress in a different costume and step into a transformed personality. My wife, who is a dancer, is a past master at this. She's much inclined to be very cold when it's snowy. But when she dresses with almost nothing on and goes out in the middle of the winter to a party, she does not shiver at all. She is completely there; her whole personality has put itself into the role—and voila.
It goes even further than this, because the whole persona complex includes your moral principles. Ethics and social mores are internalized as part of the persona order, and Jung tells us that you must take that lightly, too. Just remember, Adam and Eve fell when they learned the difference between good and evil. So the way to get back is
not to know the difference. That's an obvious lesson, but it's not one that's very clearly preached from pulpits. Yet Christ told his disciples, "Judge not, that ye be not
judged."
You judge according to your persona context, and you will be judged in terms of it. Unless you can learn to look beyond the local dictates of what is right and what is wrong, you're not a complete human being. You're just a part of that particular social order.
So, here we have the self with all the potentialities. You have a growing ego consciousness with which you identify yourself, and this is developing in relation to the costumes you have to put on, the personae. It's
good to have a lot of costumes, so long as each costume fits your conscience. The moral order is part of your persona.
There's a lot in you that's neither being carried into this persona system nor into your ego, as part of what you perceive as "you." Just opposite to the ego, buried in the unconscious, is what Jung calls the shadow.
Now, the society will give you a role to play, and this means that you've got to cut out of your life many of the things that you, as a person, might think or do. These potentials get shunted down into the unconscious. Your society tells you, "You should do this, you should do that"; but it also says, "You mustn't do this, you mustn't do the other thing." Those things you'd like to do, which are really not very nice things to want to do, those get placed down in the unconscious, too. This is the center of the personal unconscious.
The shadow is, so to say, the blind spot in your nature. It's that which you won't look at about yourself. This is the counterpart exactly of the Freudian unconscious, the repressed recollections as well as the repressed potentialities in you.
The shadow is that which you might have been had you been born on the other side of the tracks: the other person, the other you. It is made up of the desires and ideas within you that you are repressing—all of the introjected id. The shadow is the landfill of the self. Yet it is also a sort of vault: it holds great, unrealized potentialities within you.
The nature of your shadow is a function of the nature of your ego. It is the backside of your light side. In the myths, the shadow is represented as the monster that has to be overcome, the dragon. It is the dark thing that comes up from the abyss and confronts you the minute you begin moving down into the unconscious. It is the thing that scares you so that you don't want to go down there. It knocks from below. Who's that down there? Who's that up there? This is all very, very mysterious and frightening.
If your personal role is too thin, too narrow—if you've buried too much of yourself within your shadow—you're going to dry up. Most of your energies are not available to you. A lot can get gathered there in the depths. And eventually, enantiodromia is going to hit, and that unrecognized, unheeded demon is going to come roaring up into the light.
The shadow is the part of you that you don't know is there. Your friends see it, however, and it's also why some people don't like you. The shadow is you as you might have been; it is that aspect of you which might have been if you had allowed yourself to fulfill your unacceptable potential.
Society, of course, does not recognize these aspects of your potential self. You are not recognizing these aspects of yourself either; you don't know that they're there or that you have repressed them.
If you think of the self as a great circle with a center, and you think of consciousness as well above that center, then the ego is up in the center of consciousness, and the shadow would be way down opposite in the deep unconscious. The shadow is interred down there for a reason;
it is that aspect of yourself that your ego doesn't know about, which you bury because it doesn't fit how you perceive yourself to be. The shadow is that part of you that you won't allow to show through, that includes good—I mean potent—as well as dangerous and disastrous aspects of your potential.
Now, typically, all these archetypes come out personified in myths and dreams. We personify the mystery of the universe as God. The ego becomes the hero or heroine figure. The unconscious self becomes the wise man or woman. The shadow becomes personified, too, as a kind of Mephistophelian figure. Evidently, the shadow holds not only what is good for you but what is bad as well. It swallows those things that it would be dangerous for you to express, such as the murderous intent that you have for that son of a gun over there who's been interrupting you all evening, the urge to steal, to cheat, to destroy, and so on. But it also holds potentialities that your ego and the persona system don't want to accept.
In your dreams, and in the myths of your society, these urges are represented in the shadow, and the shadow is always of your own sex; it is always to be seen as a threat.
You can recognize who it is by simply thinking of the people you don't like. They correspond to that person whom you might have been—otherwise they wouldn't mean very much to you. People who excite you either positively or negatively have caught something projected from yourself: "I do not love thee, Dr. Fell. The reason why I cannot tell, But this alone I know full well, I do not love thee, Dr. Fell?"
Why? Because he's my shadow. I don't know whether you've had similar experiences in your life, but there are people I despise the minute I see them. These people represent those aspects of myself, the existence of which I refuse to admit to myself. The ego tends to identify itself with the society, forgetting this shadow. It thinks it's you. That's the position society puts us in. Society does not give a darn whether you crack up when it's through with you—that's your problem.
I remember hearing one clergyman say to me, "If I didn't believe in God and Christ and the Church, I would be a terrible person." Well, I said, "What do you think you'd do?" He couldn't think. I said, "I bet I can tell you what you think you'd do, but I won't tell you. All I can tell you is you'd get tired pretty soon, and you'd find you're just another old drag in the world, and you wouldn't have blown it up at all. And even if you did blow up some little portion of it, that would soon be built up and you would have been no great menace to the world. So let yourself go. Do some of those things. You'd find that they're not all so bad at all either, and you won't be saying things like that anymore."
You should find a way to realize your shadow in your life somehow.
Next comes the problem of gender. Every man has to be a manly man, and all of the things that society doesn't allow him to develop he attributes to the feminine side.
These parts of himself he represses in his unconscious. This is the counterplayer to the persona. They become what Jung calls the anima: the female ideal in the masculine unconscious.
Likewise, the woman carries the animus in her unconscious: the male aspect in herself. She's a woman, and the society gives her certain things to do. All that is in her that she has associated with the masculine mode of life is repressed within the animus.
The interesting thing is that—biologically and psychologically—we have both sexes in us; yet in all human societies, one is allowed to accent only one. The other is internalized within us. Furthermore, our imagery and notions of the other are functions of our biography. This biography includes two aspects. One is general to the human species: nearly everybody has a mother and a father. The other aspect is peculiar to yourself: that your mother should have been as she was and your father as he was. There is a specification of the male and female roles as experienced, and this has committed, has determined, the quality of our experience of these great, great bases which everyone experiences. Everyone experiences Mother; everyone experiences Father.
In both cases, the buried ideal tends to be projected outward. We usually call this reaction falling in love: projecting your own ideal for the opposite sex onto some person who, by some kind of magnetism, causes your anima/animus to emerge. Now, you can go to a dance and there's some perfectly decent, nice-looking girl who's sitting all alone. Then there's some other little bumblebee with everybody all around her. What's she got? Well, it's something about the way her eyes are set that just evokes anima projections from all the males in the neighborhood. There are ways to present yourself that way; yet we don't always know what they are or how to achieve them. I've seen people who are perfectly good anima objects so make themselves up that they repel the anima projection.
Two people meet and fall in love. Then they marry, and the real Sam or Suzy begins to show through the fantasy, and, boy, is it a shock. So a lot of little boys and girls just withdraw their anima or animus. They get a divorce and wait for another receptive person, pitch the woo again, and, uh-oh, another shock. And so on and so forth.
Now the one undeniable fact: this disillusion is inevitable. You had an ideal. You married that ideal, then along comes a fact that doesn't correspond to that ideal. You suddenly notice things that don't quite fit with your projection. So what are you going to do when that happens? There's only one attitude that will solve the situation: compassion. This poor, poor fact that I married does not correspond to my ideal; it's only a human being. Well, I'm a human being, too. So I'll meet a human being for a change; I'll live with it and be nice to it, showing compassion for the fallibilities that I myself have certainly brought to life as a human being.
Perfection is inhuman. Human beings are not perfect. What evokes our love—and I mean love, not lust—is the imperfection of the human being. So, when the imperfection of the real person, compared to the ideal of your animus or anima, peeks through, say, this is a challenge to my compassion. Then make a try, and something might begin to get going here. You might begin to be quit of your fix on your anima. It's just as bad to be fixed on your anima and miss as to be fixed on your persona: you've got to get free of that.
And the lesson of life is to release you from it. This is what Jung calls individuation, to see people and yourself in terms of what you indeed are, not in terms of all these archetypes that you are projecting around and that have been projected on you.
Of course, Saint Paul says, "Love beareth all things," but you may not be equal to God. To expect too much compassion from yourself might be a little destructive of your own existence. Even so, at least make a try, and this goes not only for individuals but also for life itself. It's so easy.
It's a fashionable idiocy of youth to say the world has not come up to your expectations. "What? I was coming, and this is all they could prepare for me?" Throw it out. Have compassion for the world and those in it. Not only political life but all life stinks, and you must embrace that with compassion.
In his early novel
Tonio Kroger, Thomas Mann has given us the answer of what to do when reality shines through the projected mask.He tells the story of a young man who discovers this fact, this need for compassion. In the novel, Tonio Kroger is born in northern Germany, into a town where everybody was blue-eyed and blond and healthy and strong and at ease with their particular world. They were incarnations, you might say, of the persona. Tonio's mother was Italian or of Mediterranean birth. His very name tells you what a mixed-up mess he is. He is dark-eyed and dark-haired and has inherited a certain nervous sensibility that makes him potentially an artist and writer. Although he's devoted to these blond, here-and-now people, he can't play with them; he's in the observer's position all the time. He does, however, see how wonderful they are. When he goes to dances, they're wonderful to watch: the girls dance so well. The boys dance so well. And when he dances, he thinks, I want just to dream and she wants just to dance. And the girls he gets are the ones who fall down when they dance. And so he finds himself on the outside.
When he grows up a bit, he decides he's going to be an artist, he's going away; he's going to another world. So he heads south, probably to Munich, and gets involved in a bohemian community there, in what we would call a hippie community. And there he finds people who have great ideals about what life should be; along with that, they have a wonderful vocabulary of incrimination through which they devalue everything that actually is doing well in the world. These are people who have a lot of ideas and find that the world doesn't live up to those ideas and who have withdrawn their projection, their love for the world, and been disillusioned by it. They're cold, they're disdainful, and they're cynical. Tonio finds that this doesn't work for him, either. He's an intellectual, too, he respects ideas, but he does love those blue-eyed blonds.
Tonio is a young man who is stuck between two worlds: the world of unimaginative doers that he was born into and the world of intellectual bohemian critics with whom he has been wandering. He ultimately discovers that anybody who is in the world is imperfect, and that imperfection is what keeps the person here. He realizes that nothing alive fits the ideal. If you are going to describe a person as an artist, you must describe the person with ruthless objectivity. It is the imperfections that identify them. It is the imperfections that ask for our love.
The thing that turns what Mann calls a
litterateur—that's a person who writes for a New York magazine, say—into a poet or an artist, a person who can give humanity the images to help it live, is that the artist recognizes the imperfections around him with compassion.
The principle of compassion is that which converts disillusionment into a participatory companionship. So when the fact shows through the animus or anima, what you must render is compassion. This is the basic love, the charity, that turns a critic into a living human being who has something to give to—as well as to demand of—the world.
This is how one is to deal with animus and anima disillusionment. This disappointment will evoke. That's reality evoking a new depth of reality in yourself, because you're imperfect, too. You may not know it. The world is a constellation of imperfections, and you, perhaps, are the most imperfect of all. By your love for the world you name it accurately and without pity and love what you have thus named. Mann calls this opposition erotic irony. This discovery can help you save your marriage.
So, what have we got? We have the self, which is this great unwritten page. We have the ego, which is a consciousness becoming gradually more and more expanded in its field of experience and light. We have the persona, which is the field of the
Volkergedanken, the local, ethnic way of living life.
If the imagery of the society doesn't bring your unconscious into play in its conscious world, you have a kind of dead situation; you become lost in a wasteland.
Among the archetypes, the first to turn threatening is the shadow. That's what you're holding down, and holding that down has made you capable of living the life that the society wills you to live.
The next challenge is the opposite sex. And here is the great fascination. Freud was certainly right here. Particularly in puberty, the allure and mystery of life are epitomized in the quality of the opposite sex.
Now comes the great psychological thing. One falls in love at first sight. Now, what in heaven's name does that mean? You don't even know the person. Everybody, I hope, has had the experience. Somebody walks in the room, and your heart stops.
Thomas Mann writes some beautiful examples of this. In his first published story, "Der KJeine Herr Friedmann," the little gentleman of the title has a cathartic experience. He's a funny little fellow, and he has never been able in one way or another to get into relationship to life at all. One day, this gorgeous, statuesque blonde appears. And what does he say? "My God, my God." The heart has stopped, and he has realized that he has not lived life. The world has opened up. This is the appearance of the guiding anima.°
Now, whether you like it or not, that's going to work on you. Well, one of the boldest things you could possibly do would be to marry that ideal that you've fallen for. Then you face a real job, because everything has been projected onto him or her. This goes beyond lust; this is something that goes way down. It pulls everything out. This anima/animus is the fish line that has caught your whole unconscious, and everything's going to come up—the Midgard Serpent, everything down in the bottom. This is what you marry.
There was a gentleman who has since become a Jungian analyst. This chap told Dr. Jung of a dream. In it there was a great cliff, and over the cliff there came the head of a serpent. The serpent came down—and it was enormous—it came down, and down, and it just seemed endless. And Jung said, "That's Miss So-and-so. Marry her." And the chap did. It was a very happy marriage.
But what goes on when you marry this love-at-first-sight situation? Well, what you have married is a projection. You have married something that has been projected from yourself: the mask that you've put over the other person.
What is the sensible thing to do in a circumstance like this? What is the pedagogically advisable thing to do in a situation like this?
What shows itself through the mask of the projection is a fact. The mask is your ideal. This fact does not coincide with the ideal; it is imperfect.What do you do about what is imperfect?
Jung believed that the idea is to reject all projections. Not to identify the women you meet with your anima projection. Not to identify yourself with your persona projection. To release all projections and ideals. This is what Jung means by individuation.
Jung calls the individual who identifies himself with his persona a mana personality; we would call him a stuffed shirt. That's a person who is nothing but the role he or she plays. A person of this sort never lets his actual character develop. He remains simply a mask, and as his powers fail—as he makes mistakes and so forth—he becomes more and more frightened of himself, puts more and more of an effort into keeping up the mask. Then the separation between the persona and the self takes place, forcing the shadow to retreat further and further into the abyss.
You are to assimilate the shadow, embrace it. You don't have to act on it, necessarily, but you must know it and accept it.
You are not to assimilate the anima/animus—that's a different challenge. You are to relate to it through the other.
The only way one can become a human being is through relationships to other human beings. And they will be male or female, and you will be an other, too. The males will always have, for the female, animus associations, one way or the other, and the females for the male, anima associations. And the first way is that of compassion. This is not desire. This is not fear. Buddha, Christ, and the rest have made it very clear that we've got to
get past those two.
Now, when you go down into the unconscious, you're pulling up not only the shadow and anima, but also those faculties for experiencing and judging that have not been employed in your life.
You come to integrate the inferior functions and attitudes, so that any enantiodromia is merely a matter of realizing your full potential, not a wreck on the Sirens' rocks.
There are four kinds of crisis that can bring about a very serious enantiodromia. One is that you have passed from one life stage to another and you didn't know it—the late-middle-aged gentleman who's obsessed about his golf score and has not moved into the phase of the later half of life.
Jung says life is like the day of a solar journey. The first part of it is up, moving from birth to the society. And the second part of it is down, moving from participation in the world and the society to death. And whereas the threat of the first half of life was life, the threat of the second half is death, and all the symbols are changing meaning.
Through the remaining part of life, Jung says, the great problem is integrating the inferior with the superior functions. That's the great task of your later years. So let's just think of the imagery of the union of opposites. The same symbol that for an extrovert will have sexual content, for an introvert will resonate with battle. Once one begins to reach individuation and integration, one finds the conjunction of those two aspects of one's own psyche.
The crisis of passing from one life stage to another without being ready to move on arrests this process. This is the difficulty for the forty-year-old infant and for the sixty-year-old who thinks he is still thirty-five. Life brought you up to the solar apex, then it began to curve—and you think you're still up at the peak? Oh, no, boy. You're way down here. And what a drop you're going to have. Much better to know when you've started down and enjoy the ride; there are nice things down here, too.
The second kind of crisis is a relaxation of life requirements. You worked like hell to become the shoelace czar of the universe. You own every shoelace factory in the world. And now, at the age of forty-odd, you don't have to put that energy into it anymore. The thing's going all by itself, and you've got secretaries who are not only taking the job in hand but also looking a little better to you than you thought little girls should look, and suddenly there's a lot of distraction. You have all of this disposable libido. And where does it go?
The eros-oriented extrovert turns around and suddenly becomes a power monster. Good old Uncle Harry, the shoelace king, the introverted power man, becomes an old lecher—that kind of thing. But the tragedy about this crisis is the deep sense that it's all too late. Nothing is as it should be, and it's because you're doing the wrong thing.
Another kind of crisis is the loss of confidence in your moral ideals; this form of enantiodromia is something that one finds often among young people in college. The young person is living with a roommate who comes Irom another order of society altogether, either the poor person who's living with the wealthy or the wealthy with the poor, or the Christian with the atheist, or the Jew with the Buddhist. You find out that here is a perfectly decent person also. It's not that the other person seduces you into sin; it's that getting to know them makes you question your own moral principles. And since those moral principles—the persona complex—are holding your ego in place, when they relax all the rest comes out.
There's the threat or the allure of becoming a terrible person: what I call the knock knock of the shadow from underneath. That's your own dark person talking. You might also get what I call the twinkle twinkle of the anima/animus: come, little boy, it's interesting around the corner. You've never seen girls like this.
Well, says Jung, let it come. Let it go. But don't do it with such abandon that your ego is entirely shattered. Imagine one of my college students. She's had her first few classes in a sociology course, and she discovers that her father's fortune is built on blood and bones. She goes home for the Thanksgiving dinner, and the family wonders what has happened. The student begins coming to her conferences and classes looking like a wreck. She lets her hair go. She has gone over to the other side. She has tipped over. It's enantiodromia. She has assumed partisanship for the opposite side— she's waving the banner of the downtrodden proletariat. And that's just as extreme as being on the side she was on before, in blissful ignorance.
Well, it's not a bad thing to happen, because you do get to experience all that's over on the other side. It's just like the underside of the rug coming up. In fact, my students sometimes looked a bit like the underside of a rug. And it's good to have a thing like that happen in an institution like a college, where you can somewhat protect the person, because the idea is, eventually, to integrate the two halves.
Now, there's one other crisis, and this is a very serious challenge: the intolerable decision where you really have to do something that you regard as immoral, beneath your dignity, something you're totally ashamed of. The great example, of course, is Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. The voice of God invited him to kill his son, and he faced an impossible decision. He was forced either to disobey what he took to be God or to kill his son. If he didn't sacrifice Isaac, he would have disobeyed God, and if he did kill Isaac, he would have violated the first principle of human decency. Father should not kill their sons.
Well, this is an intolerable decision. And intolerable decisions may meet you. I had friends during the Depression who had families and jobs; they had to do some things that they would not, as people in charge of their own lives, have wished to do for the maintenance of their families. These are the sorts of things that bust up your ego and bring up the whole content of the unconscious.
Now the problem of individuation for Jung, the challenge of the middle-life crisis, lies in cutting these projections loose. When you realize that moral ideals—the moral life to which you are supposed to be committed—are embodied in the persona, you realize the depth and threat of this psychology.
You are to put your morals on and take them off according to propriety, the propriety of the moment; you are not to identify these morals with cosmic truths. The laws of society, therefore, are social conventions, not eternal laws, and they are to be handled and judged in terms of their appropriateness to what they are intended to do. The individual makes his own judgment as to how he acts. Then he has to look out to be sure that the guardians of the social order do not misunderstand or make things difficult for him because he is not totally playing their game.
But the main problem of integration is to find relationships to the outside world and to live a rich life in full play. In effect, the individual must learn to live by his or her own myth.
from "Pathways to Bliss - Mythology and Personal Transformation" by Joseph Campbell
