Psychic energy : its source and its
transformation
1. Psychic energy : its source and its transformation
2. PSYCHIC ENERGY
3. C. G .Jung
4. THE Source
5. Transformation of Instinctive Drives 25
6. Transformation of Instinctive Drives 35
7. 48
8. 7 2
9. 7 6
10. Self-Defence
11. Self-Defence pp
12. Self-Defence
13. Self-Defence 109
14. Self-Defence u$
15. Reproduction
16. *34
17. 154
18. Reproductioti: Sexuality 159
19. Reproduction
20. '74
21. The Ego and the Power Problem
22. The Ego and the Power Problem 209
23. The Ego and the Power Problem
24. The Ego and the Power Problem
25. The Ego and the Power Problem 233
26. 234
27. The Rescue of the Black Man from the Sea
28. Vajra Mandala
29. The Transformation
30. The Ego and the Power Problem 23 7
31. THE Transformation
32. The Inner Conflict 301
33. The Psyche as a Whole
34. 34 6
35. The Psyche as a Whole 357
36. The Reconciliation of the Opposites
37. 39 8
38. 4<>4
39. The Transformation of the Libido
40. 434
41. 452
42. Transformation of the Libido 467
43. 41 *
44. 413
45. 414
46. Bibliography 477
47. 483
48. 4 $ 4
49. 486
50. 488
51. 489
52. 4M
53. 496
Psychic energy : its source
and its transformation
Harding, M. Esther (Mary Esther), 1888-1971
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OLLINGEN SERIES X
“The Sea is the Body, the two Fishes arc the Spirit
and the Soul”
From a manuscript of The Booh of Lambspring
M. ESTHER HARDING
4
PSYCHIC ENERGY
Its Source and Its Transformation
WITH A FOREWORD BY C. G. Jung
BOLLINGEN SERIES X
PANTHEON BOOKS
Copyright ippi by Bollingen Foundation, Washington, D. C.
New material in second edition copyright © 1963 by
Bollingen Foundation, New York, N. Y.
Distributed by Pantheon Books, a Division of Random House,
Inc.
THIS IS THE TENTH IN A SERIES OF BOOKS SPONSORED AND
PUBLISHED BY BOLLINGEN FOUNDATION
First Edition: Psychic Energy: Its Source and Goal, 1948
Second Printing, 1950 Second Edition, revised and enlarged,
1963
Library of Congress Catalogue Card Number 63-10412
Printed in the United States of America by Quinn & Boden
Company, Inc., Rahway, New Jersey Designed by Andor
Braun
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
in the fifteen years since this volume was first published, a
number of books of the first importance have appeared on
the subject of analytical psychology. Dr. Erich Neumann’s
The Origins and History of Consciousness (1949; English tr.,
1954) g ave an illuminating account of the relation of
consciousness to the unconscious and showed how the
consciousness of man has emerged from its hidden depths
in the unconscious by definite steps, through which he has
gradually freed himself from the hold of the primordial ways
of nature and acquired some degree of freedom. These
steps are recorded in myths found in varying form all over
the world. They are stories or accounts of the ways in which
the archetypal patterns of the psyche have presented
themselves to man’s consciousness, although the
happenings they record were projected outside of man to
mythic or divine beings. And only now is it becoming
apparent that what was going on was a psychological and
not a mythical happening. In further support of his thesis,
Dr. Neumann followed this book by a study of one of the
most important archetypes, The Great Mother (1955), using
this time not myths as illustration but cult objects of all
epochs gathered from all over the world. This work enlarged
on the same theme that I had previously explored in my
Woman's Mysteries, Ancient and Modern (1935, revised
1955) , illustrating the meaning and function of the Eros
principle of woman. Dr. Neumann later wrote a study of
feminine psychology, 1 which has not yet been published in
English.
1. Zwr Psychologie des Weiblichen (Zurich, 1953).
v
But, to the sorrow of his many friends, the further
development of his creative thought has been cut short by
his untimely death.
A new study of the process of individuation in a woman
undergoing analysis by the Jungian method has recently
come from the pen of Dr. Gerhard Adler. In this book 2 he
demonstrates the application of Jung’s method of
interpreting dreams and shows how the conscious problem
of the individual is but the surface manifestation of a deeper
underlying problem, namely, that of finding one’s self as a
whole individual. He shows that this can be accomplished by
establishing a positive relation to the archetypal images
arising from the unconscious, if they are rightly understood.
These and other works have served to clarify and enrich the
field of analytical psychology. But by far the greatest
contribution to the whole subject has come from Dr. Jung
himself. I wrote my book during the war years when we in
America were cut off from communication with Switzerland,
except for rare letters, so it was not until 1948 that I was
able to come into contact with the new developments of Dr.
Jung’s thought. During that time the Psychology of
Transference (Zw Psychology der Ubertragung, 1946) was
published in German, though not accessible in English till
1954; Psychology and Alchemy was published in English in
1953 (in German, 1944); these were followed in 1959 by
Aion (German, 1951) and The Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious, and Mysterium Coniunctionis is promised to
appear in the Collected Works in the near future.
I mention these particular books rather than give a
complete list of the volumes of the Collected Works that
have been appearing during this period, because these are
the ones that contain the radically new work of this prolific
author and set forth the core of his research into the deeper
regions of the unconscious psyche.
In this new edition, a number of footnote references have
been added to the text as a guide to the student who may
wish to consult Jung’s later works. Although the text has not
been
2. The Living Symbol (New York and London, 1961).
Preface to the Second Edition vii
materially altered, considerable additional material has
been incorporated to bring the work up to date. The
references have been made to conform with the published
volumes of the Collected Works, and a number of new
illustrations have been added, as well as a new bibliography
and index.
*
Dr. Jung’s concern Vith alchemy and his laborious work of
collecting and translating rare and inaccessible texts must
seem
,in its scope all the vast reaches of the psyche that are
ordinarily unconscious; it therefore is not merely a personal
consciousness but a nonpersonal one as well. Achievement
of this level has been regarded by most of the great
religions of the world as the supreme goal. It is expressed in
such terms as “finding the God within.” For the Self, the
centre of this new kind of consciousness, is felt to be distinct
from the ego and to possess an absolute authority within
the psyche. It speaks with a voice of command exerting a
power over the individual as great as that of the instincts.
When it functions strongly in a human being, it produces a
preoccupation with the inner, subjective life that may
appear to the onlooker to be auto-erotic self-absorption; but
if the individual makes a clear differentiation between the
personal self, the autos or the ego, and this
5. In the naive stage of consciousness, somatic or bodily
perceptions form the content of consciousness. It is this
element that speaks when the individual says “I.”
Sometimes it is called the auto-erotic factor; but there is no
term in common use to distinguish this I from the ego, which
rules the next stage of consciousness. The Greek autos may
possibly serve. It is the basis of such words as automatic,
auto-erotic, autonomous, all referring to functionings of this
somatic I, while the child who has never outgrown the
domination of the autos is diagnosed as autistic. Freud’s
term “id” comes perhaps nearest to this idea of autos.
Freud, however, seems to postulate that the individual
speaks from the position of the ego observing the id, the
instinctive drives, within himself; in my observation this
differentiation is by no means always made. Not only in the
young child but also in the adult, the I that speaks is often
merely the voice of instinct, for no conscious ego capable of
holding the auto-erotic or autonomous impulses in check
has as yet been developed. For this reason I think it helpful
to differentiate the autos as an early and immature centre
of consciousness. The term ego can then be reserved for the
next and more conscious stage of development, in relation
to which such words as egocentric and egotistic are in fact
used as discriminating between somatic reactions and
responses connected with personal consciousness and
greater sophistication.
^5
Travis formation of Instinctive Drives
centre of nonpersonal compelling power, the activity is
certainly not auto-erotic but reflects a concern with a
superordinated value of the utmost significance for the
development of the psyche and therefore also for mankind.
These successive stages of development distinguish the
kinds of consciousness enjoyed by different persons. An
individual living entirely in the auto-erotic stage cannot
conceive of the greater awareness and greater freedom of
one whose consciousness has been modified by emergence
of the ego. For example, a person who has never outgrown
his dependence on bodily comfort cannot understand the
self-discipline of one who can voluntarily lay aside the
claims of ease and luxury in order to devote himself
unstintingly to his work. Such a disciplined devotion is
incomprehensible to the pleasure seeker, and even if he
wished to do so, he would probably find it beyond his power
to emulate it. For while the more evolved man is naturally
aware of the claims of his body, he is no longer completely
dominated by his instinctive urges. But he in turn is unable
to understand the nature of that consciousness which
prevails when the Self has replaced the ego even in
moderate degree.
A complete replacement either of the autos by the ego, or of
the ego by the Self, is as a matter of fact never observed in
life. Indeed, a practical continuation of life would hardly be
possible for one entirely freed from the demands of the
body or completely emptied of ego desires. These urges
pertain to human existence, and without them the life of the
body and the life of the conscious personality would come to
an end. Therefore when we speak of the pre-emption of the
centre of consciousness by a nonpersonal Self, it must be
remembered that this replacement means not the
annihilation of biological desire but its relegation to a
subservient position. Through this process the instincts,
which were originally in complete control, become relative,
and their compulsory character is modified by gradual
psychization, that is to say, their energy is transferred in
part from the biological to the psychic sphere. Part of the
power of the instincts is wrested from them in this process,
but only a fraction becomes available for the
conscious personality of the individual; by far the larger
share passes over to a new determinant of objective psychic
nature.
It is interesting to observe that the Buddhists of the
Mahayana sect also distinguish three stages of human
consciousness, which correspond to a surprising degree to
the stages we have differentiated here. The naive stage,
ruled over by the autos, in which the individual is
completely dominated by his bodily needs and desires,
marks the “man of little intellect.” The consciousness of
such a man is exceedingly narrow, being bounded by the
limits of his own biological desirousness. For him, the
Buddhists say, “the best thing is to have faith in the law of
cause and effect.” 6 He is admonished to observe the
outcome of his preoccupation with his auto-erotic desires.
The man in the ego stage of development is called by the
Buddhists the “man of ordinary intellect.” His attention is
wholly directed to controlling his environment for his
personal satisfaction and advantage. He has gained some
control over his instinctive drives and for him the ego is now
king; he classifies everything in terms of his own wishes,
taking the good and rejecting the evil, not realizing that
what he discards falls into the unconscious and does not
cease to exist. In this stage, the Buddhists say, “the best
thing is to recognize, both within and without oneself, the
workings of the law of opposites.”
The state of the individual whom the Buddhists call the
“man of superior intellect” corresponds to the third stage of
our psychological classification. In him the identification of
the ego with the supreme value has been dissolved. In
consequence he experiences the inner dynamic factor as
something other than the conscious ego, though definitely
within the psyche. For his state, according to the Buddhists,
“the best thing is to have a thorough comprehension of the
inseparableness of the knower, the object of knowledge,
and the act of knowing.”
It must be borne in mind always that the psychological
6. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, bk.
1, “The Supreme Path of Discipleship,” p. 85.
development we are discussing does not pertain to the
individual’s conscious personality nor to his outer mask or
persona. A man may have acquired exemplary manners, his
behaviour may be courteous and correct, he may be highly
educated and have all the appearances of culture, but his
instinctive and natural reactions, could they be seen when
he is alone, might reveal him as a very different person. Or
in times of stress, physical or mental, he fhight astonish his
friends and even himself by the undisciplined and primitive
reactions that suddenly usurp the attitudes of the well-
drilled persona. Such reactions do not come from the
conscious part of the psyche; they arise from the
nonpersonal part and reveal not the conscious character but
the stage of development that the nonpersonal psyche has
reached. A man’s instinctive reactions, being ectopsychic in
origin, are largely beyond the control of his conscious ego;
their nature and character will be determined not by his
conscious manners and opinions nor even by his moral
convictions, but by the extent to which the instincts
themselves have undergone psychic modification
,in him—a
process depending in the first place, as noted above, on the
functioning of the instinct (or urge) to reflect.
The gradual change in form of these instinctive drives
reveals itself also in the evolution of religions, for the
compelling and all-powerful factors' of the unconscious are
personified in the divine figures of the various beliefs. Man,
as has been most aptly said, makes God in his own image—
in the image not of his conscious self but of that objective
psychological factor which rules supreme in the unconscious
part of the psyche. The gradual transformation that has
taken place in the religions of the world runs parallel with
the slow transformation of the nonpersonal and instinctive
part of man’s psyche. In the earliest days the gods were
conceived of as entirely external to man. They lived a life of
their own in some spirit world, and the purpose of ritual was
to build a bridge between mankind and these powerful and
unpredictable overlords, who had to be propitiated to the
end that they would grant food and protection from enemies
and bestow fertility on man and beast. This signifies that the
gods repre
sented the power of nature—nature outside of man and also
the instinctive nature within man.
Before he had learned to control his natural inertia and
unpredictable impulses, man felt himself entirely dependent
on the whim of the gods for obtaining the necessities of life.
But as his psyche gradually emerged from its instinctive
bondage and his power to control both himself and his
environment grew greater, his religion also changed,
passing through the stage in which the divine power was
conceived of as a personal God concerned with the welfare
of his worshippers but hating the heathen who did not serve
him. This theological concept corresponds to the ego stage
of psychological development. In all the more evolved
religions, the central teaching has advanced beyond this
stage and is concerned with the experience of a God within
the psyche. Usually, however, it is reserved for the initiated,
who have been prepared by special instruction and
discipline, to experience revelations of this God personally.
These come to the initiated as a subjective experience; they
are realized as being such and are understood as emanating
not from a God in the heavens but from a God within. They
correspond to the objective part of the unconscious psyche.
The exoteric teaching that postulates a God without, a
denizen of heaven who looks down on his children from his
celestial abode, caring for the bodily needs of man —and
from whom “all good things do come,” including spiritual
thoughts, the blessing of divine grace, and redemption from
sin—is usually considered more appropriate for the
uninitiated worshipper.
The subjective experience of the esoteric aspect of the more
highly evolved religions is expressed in varying terms. In
Christianity it is the experience of Christ dwelling in the
heart, to the end that “not I may live, but Christ may live in
me.” Throughout the centuries, Christian mystics have left
records of their authentic experiences of finding this “other”
within their own hearts. Sometimes the presence is called
Christ, sometimes simply God. It is thought of as something
other than the soul in which it comes to dwell. The
initiations of the antique mystery cults sought to produce a
somewhat
similar experience, but here the initiate felt that he himself
actually became a god and indeed was hailed as such in the
ritual. In Egypt in much the same way the Pharaoh became
Osiris. The thought here is that the individual is transformed
into God. In the Oriental religions, the discipline is directed
to producing a realization of the inner God, for the Atman is
believed to have been always within, the very essence of
the human being, though veiled from the consciousness of
the uninitiated, so that all that is needed is to reveal him by
overcoming the mists of avidya, or unknowing.
These formulations are attempts to express psychological
experiences whose reality cannot be denied, even though
the terms in which they are couched are foreign to the
psychologist. The experiences are real 7 and must be
approached with the open mind of the scientist. The
dogmatic representations used to define the experiences
obviously cannot be taken as objective facts but must rather
be regarded as subjective expressions of inner experience.
The psychologist must ask himself in all seriousness what
the nature of these experiences is. Evidently they refer to an
encounter with an absolute and nonpersonal determinant
within the psyche that acts with all the power and
incontrovertibility of an instinct, but that is an expression of
a psychic, not of a biological imperative. This factor is not
connected with consciousness; it is not under the control of
the conscious ego, but acts as an other within the psyche. It
has always seemed to man to be a numinous phenomenon,
having all the attributes of a tremendum. For the most part
psychologists have ignored experiences of this type, on the
ground that religion does not come within the field of
science. It is to Jung’s work that we owe whatever
understanding we have of this nonpersonal factor within the
psyche, which so evidently exerts a powerful influence on
man’s destiny.
It has been tacitly assumed in the Occident that the
individual is born with either crude instincts or refined ones.
He is either naturally a boor or innately a gentleman, and
his con
7. Jung, “Psychology and Religion,” in Psychology and
Religion: West and East (C.W. u), p. 12.
50
dition is assumed to be unalterable. As the popular saying
has it, “You cannot make a velvet purse of a sow’s ear.” A
barbarian at heart will always remain barbaric, no matter
how much he is trained in the traditions of gentle behaviour.
In the East, however, it is believed to be possible to achieve
a transformation of these basic elements in the human
being through a special training and discipline. The various
forms of yoga 8 impose a physical and psychological
discipline the aim of which is “to cool the fires of desire” or
“to eat the world.” This might be translated into
psychological language as “to bring to pass a
transformation of the instincts.” It has not been adequately
realized by Western psychology that such a radical change
can take place; therefore this aspect of human development
has been neglected by psychologists and pedagogues alike.
The hypothesis that such a transformation may occur was
first put forward by modern depth psychologists in
attempting to explain certain phenomena observed
empirically in the course of analysis of the unconscious. It is
now recognized that transformation is essential if the
analysis is to meet with fundamental success. It is not easy,
however, to present the evidence in a convincing way,
because the change that takes place is so largely a
subjective matter, a change in the inner reactions and
impulses that arise spontaneously and constitute the
background of an individual’s experience of life.
The change is usually initiated by a frustration of the
individual’s instinctive desires, an impasse that throws him
back on himself and stimulates the impulse to reflection. He
reflects on his experience and so discovers the opposing
elements in the situation. This leads to conflict, and in the
effort to resolve the conflict, further reflection is demanded.
By this process the subject’s psychic energy, his libido, is
turned inward upon himself and begins to exercise its
creative function within him.
Individuals in whom the urge to reflect is weak are often
8. The yoga here referred to is of course not the popular
variety displayed by the fakir and wonder-worker of the
bazaars. It is the teaching practised secretly by the holy
men who seek release from the bondage of desirousness
through years of religious discipline. Cf. Evans-Wentz,
Tibetan Yoga
,and Secret Doctrines, p. 26,
content to go through life bounded completely by the
limitations of the auto-erotic stage of development. For
them the satisfactions of the body suffice; if these fail, they
spend their energy in complaining of their ill luck and find a
perverted satisfaction in self-pity. For them the pleasure-
pain principle is the criterion of right and wrong, good and
bad, and by it they order their lives-Others, for whom these
satisfactions have proved insufficient, or who have found it
impossible invariably to choose pleasure and have therefore
come into collision with unwanted pain, have found the way
of ego development, which has provided an acceptable
escape from the dilemma. They have disciplined the autos
and discovered a new kind of satisfaction in ambition,
prestige, or power; these motivations may remain on the
egotistic level, or may be mobilized in the service of a highly
refined idealism. This level of being accounts for perhaps
the largest group of men and women in Western civilization,
and very many live and die on this plane. They have learned
the laws of cause and effect but have not yet realized the
workings of the law of opposites within and without
themselves.
But on this stage too the satisfactions may not suffice to
bring happiness. The individual may discover the workings
of the opposites, finding that there is no gain without a
corresponding loss, that every good is balanced by an evil,
or the gains themselves may pall. Flis capacity to pursue his
aims may wane through illness or increasing age, or long-
cherished hopes and ambitions may fail. And conflicts may
arise within him, owing to an inner dissatisfaction—perhaps
on account of a moral scruple or an unsatisfied hunger, a
yearning for he knows not what—leading once more to the
necessity for reflection, which is the beginning of
consciousness.
For consciousness of a new stage of development is always
presaged by a sense of lack. Euclid defines a point as that
which has position but no length. What does consciousness
limited to a point know about length? From the vantage of a
point, length does not exist; it is an unknowable dimension,
and the point cannot even assert that length is or is not,
unless within itself there exists the latent possibility of
length-an
emptiness, a bindu point, as the Hindus would call it, that
can be compensated only by something beyond its
knowledge and yet dimly adumbrated within itself. It is just
such a dim precursor of a higher stage of awareness that so
often makes an individual dissatisfied with the good fortune
he has sought wholeheartedly—or at least he has thought
himself to be so doing—and creates within him that conflict
which will be the turning point in his life.
Once such a conflict arises, it is likely to grow, gathering
into itself a larger and larger proportion of the life energy,
till it may come to occupy the major place in consciousness.
No aspect of the life is free from involvement in such a
conflict. Wherever the individual turns he is confronted by
its antinomies, and no amount of compromise, no attempt
at repression, no effort of the will suffices to release him
from its impasse. This is the crucial momentpfor if he can
face the conflict squarely, holding both sides of it in
consciousness, the reconciling symbol may arise from the
depths of the unconscious and point to the hidden and
unexpected way that can lead him out of his prison. This
theme is a constant one in legend and myth: in the moment
of the hero’s final despair, the unexpected solution is
brought to him by a tiny clue, a stunted or despised animal,
a dwarf or a child, showing him the secret path out of his
dilemma, which he himself has overlooked.
Similarly, to the ordinary man of today, caught in an
inescapable problem, the solution may come perhaps
through a dream or phantasy that he would usually
disregard; or some small object that he finds in his path,
some slight incident of no apparent importance attracting
his attention, may, by the magic of the unconscious, reveal
to him the one possible way out of his difficulty. Such a thing
becomes for him a symbol. For it is not its obvious meaning
or value that has power to release him; it is rather that this
insignificant thing by some subtle suggestion releases the
creative power in the unconscious whereby the opposites
within him can be reconciled. Thus it becomes for him the
reconciling symbol that arises from the
unconscious to show the way whenever a serious conflict is
faced unflinchingly.
The value of such a symbol is by no means always
recognized by the layman, for its meaning is usually hidden.
The ancients under similar circumstances would have
consulted a seer or questioned a wise man as to its
meaning. The modem way is to consult aru analyst 9 when
an insoluble problem brings the life to a halt. If Jung’s
method is used in the analysis, the change initiated by the
conflict proceeds under the guidance of the individual’s own
unconscious. The analyst does not assume that he knows
the answer to the problem but sets out with his patient to
explore the unconscious and seek the solution. He is
necessary to the proceeding because he has a technique for
interpreting the obscure unconscious material thrown up in
the dreams and phantasies; also, he is needed as a fixed
point to which the patient can cling during the transition,
when all values are under question and all landmarks may
disappear.
The instruction given to the patient is that he become aware
of what is happening in his own psyche and order his life in
accordance with the truth as he finds it. The analyst makes
no attempt to draw up a program similar to a course of
study in college, for he himself does not know by what steps
the process will unfold, nor in exactly what way the solution
of the individual’s life problem will emerge. The process of
individuation is unique in each person and cannot be
foreseen or prescribed.
In one respect, however, it does resemble a college course,
for the process demands time and attention that must be
withdrawn from other aspects of life in themselves
wholesome and desirable, and devoted to the inner culture
of the individual. To an onlooker, if he does not understand
the goal and is unaware of any similar need for inner
development in himself, the absorption of one following this
road may seem selfish and
9. A psychoanalyst or analytical psychologist is one who
practises that science of the human psyche which takes
cognizance of the unconscious and explores its contents,
seeking to relate them to the conscious personality.
morbid. The desire for this kind of inner experience and
selfdevelopment arises from a psychic urge, a spiritual
hungerakin to the need of satisfying the hunger of the body
—that is present in very different degrees in different
persons. It is an expression of the instinctive drive to self-
preservation on a psychic, not a biological level. Those in
whom it has been aroused are compelled to strive for the
satisfaction of its demands or endure the pangs of spiritual
hunger and eventual starvation.
Those who do not seek release from the bondage of the
instinctive drives by the road of inner development remain
the slaves of their own passionate desirousness or suffer the
sterility resulting from its ruthless repression. In any time of
crisis these persons have no power to curb their own
barbaric reactions; for though we can pass on our scientific
knowledge to our children, we cannot save them frbm the
pain and suffering caused by not-knowing in the
psychological sphere.
It is recorded that Buddha was much concerned with just
this problem. When, before his final enlightenment, he was
meditating under the Bo Tree, he asked himself: Why are
there these endlessly repeated lives? Why do people, and
animals as well, go on with the senseless round of birth and
suffering and death? Why
,does life continue exactly the
same—why do men not outgrow this barbaric and immature
stage? What is the cause of things? His meditation grew
deeper and deeper, until at last he had a vision that
revealed the answer. He saw the wheel of life, consisting of
the endless round of existences, of births and deaths and
rebirths, of heavens and hells, and of the earth with its
many faces. In the centre were three animals, whose
constant circling kept the whole wheel revolving: these were
a pig, a snake, and a dove , 10 representing selfishness,
anger, and lust, or, in the terms of the present discussion,
greed, ego power, and sexuality.
The revelation that came to Buddha through his vision was
io. The dove as the symbol of erotic love is the constant
companion of Astarte and Aphrodite, goddesses of sexual
love. In later representations of the wheel, the dove is
replaced by a cock as a more fitting symbol for lust.
Transformation of
Instinctive Drives 35
that it is these instinct forces that motivate the endless
cycle of life. So long as man seeks after the satisfaction of
these, so long will mankind be bound on the wheel. These
instinct powers are more ancient than the psyche of man,
being rooted in the very substance and nature of the living
organism, in the essence, the spirit, the life of protoplasm
itself. For this reason they dominate the functioning of all
living creatures, who repeat endlessly the senseless round.
In animals the instincts rule unchecked, but with the gradual
awakening of consciousness man developed a psychic
counterpart to the instincts. The animal acts, not knowing
that he acts; man not only acts, he knows that he acts and,
in addition, he retains a memory of his past actions. And
even beyond this, he has developed a certain degree of free
will that enables him to choose, at least to some extent,
how he shall act. So in man a new power has arisen, the
capacity to know and to understand—consciousness—that
has acquired sufficient strength to set itself over against the
compulsion of instinct. The coming of consciousness
enabled man to create a new relation to the life spirit within
him.
It is this step that marks the transition from the complete
self-centredness of the autos to the beginnings of ego-
consciousness. Or as the Buddhists say: the “man of little
intellect” develops to the stage of the “man of ordinary
intellect.” The “man of little intellect” needs to learn the law
of cause and effect, that is, he must observe what happens
when he follows his instinctive desires unthinkingly; the one
“of ordinary intellect” discovers the law of the opposites. For
him the instinct drives and the psychic images—the
archetypes—related to them, manifest themselves in
opposites. In the following chapters we will consider these
instinctual urges in their dual form, their complementary
opposition. First, inertia, that manifests itself in sloth and
restlessness, corresponding to the first law of Newton
dealing with the inertia of physical objects; second, hunger
experienced in both want and greed; third, self-defence,
that produces enmity and also friendship; and, lastly,
reproduction, that gives rise to both lust and love in its
sexual phase, and
that may be either nourishing or devouring, life-giving or
death-dealing in its maternal phase.
In the later chapters we will consider the possibility of
developing from this stage to that of the “man of superior
intellect,” who has found a way to reconcile the opposites
and so has achieved consciousness of the Self.
SLOTH AND RESTLESSNESS
4
A sympathetic Yankee once asked a Southern Negro working
in a cotton field: “Sam, don’t you get tired working all day in
the sun?”
“No sir,” replied Sam, “I don’t get tired; I goes to sleep
first.”
In South America there are primitives who are incapable of
performing even a small task unless they have what is
called gana for it. If a boy who has been ordered to do
something replies that he has no gana ,»he is exonerated
until his gana returns. These instances are conspicuous
because of the contrast between the primitives and their
more civilized neighbours. But a similar condition of
subservience to instinct prevails in all primitive
communities. Hunting, sowing, war, all have to be prepared
for by rituals—dances or magic ceremonials designed to stir
up the slumbering energies of men who cannot of their own
free will do what is necessary.
This seems very strange to us; for one of the chief
characteristics differentiating civilized man from his more
primitive brothers, and indeed from his own more primitive
ancestors, is the fact that within certain limits he can do
what he wants to do. He can even do things he does not
want to do, if he knows that it is wise or expedient to do
them. For example, he can get up in the morning despite his
almost overwhelming desire to take another nap, or he can
apply himself to work
57
when he would like to go fishirig. In other words, some of his
energy, his libido, is no longer completely at the mercy of
his unconscious impulses and natural desires, but is instead
at the disposal of his conscious ego. He has achieved a
certain freedom from the compulsiveness of his own innate
impulses, a freedom that it has taken mankind thousands of
years to acquire, and that has to be won again by every
individual member of the race today. This power is, without
question one of man’s greatest and most costly
attainments. In acquiring it he has gained his first taste of
freedom; for now he can do what he himself wants to do,
instead of being the slave of the uncontrollable forces of
instinct within him. Of first importance is his new-found
ability to work and create what he deems to be desirable,
even though the unregenerate man in him wants to dream
away the hours.
But this freedom is in fact only v a partial freedom. For while
most people have almost unlimited desire and energy
available for following their spontaneous impulses, the
amount they are able to summon to fulfill the dictates of the
conscious ego is always limited—usually very limited
indeed. For example, an individual sets himself a task that
ordinarily would not seem too hard. But if it runs counter to
his instinctive wishes, it may prove to be impossibly hard.
The very idea of the task may become repugnant to him,
and no sooner does he set about it than he is assailed by an
intolerable heaviness and inertia. Only by the greatest effort
can he keep his eyelids from closing, while mentally he is
engulfed in a dark and heavy mood that weights his
thoughts and chokes his desires. This is the old enemy of
mankind, inertia, evidence of lack of psychological energy.
The requisite energy has either never emerged from the
hidden depths of the psyche, where it has its source, or else
has fallen back again into those same depths. In either case
it is not available for life. The light of awareness has been
extinguished temporarily or has never been kindled and the
psyche remains dark and heavy. For sloth is equivalent to
unawareness, unconsciousness, stupidity.
The individual who is suffering from this condition may not
be actually unconscious in the ordinary meaning of the
Inertia ^ y
word; he is not asleep, and he is probably more or less
aware of what is going on around him. But nothing really
penetrates his consciousness, and he remains dull and
totally unaware of the significance of what is passing. He is
unwilling or unable to arouse himself to undertake the task
at hand or to feel adequate interest in it. His state is like a
half waking, a half dreaming. He is sunk in his inert mood as
in a swamp, and to rouse him we instinctively call on him to
“wake up,” as if he were asleep.
Because this condition of inertia runs counter to the cultural
effort of mankind and is a regression, a pullback to a more
primitive psychological condition, it has been combated by
all the forces, social
,and religious, that seek to raise the
psychological level of man. The Christian church with its
moralistic attitude reckons sloth among the deadly sins. The
Chinese describe it as the dark, heavy earth spirit that
clings to the fleshly heart and reigns supreme whenever a
man sleeps; for then the bright spirit that gives him
lightness and joy sleeps in his liver and must be aroused by
discipline and the work of religious meditation if he is to
become free . 1
Buddhists, with their more detached attitude, speak not of
the sin of sloth but rather of avidya—unknowing,
unconsciousness, or stupidity; they teach, that man is held
in bondage to the instincts only because he does not
understand, does not realize the true meaning of things.
When he has attained to insight, become conscious of the
inevitable law of cause and effect, when the higher
consciousness of the Atman, or Self, has been released in
him, he will no longer be subject to the heavy earth-bound
impulses that prevent his rising as a free individual. To
achieve this he needs to extinguish or “cool” the three fires
of desire—lust, anger, and stupidity. Thus he will evolve out
of the torpid state of passive obedience to his unconscious
instincts and become a “conqueror of existence.” 2
Even the laziest man is roused to action when he really
understands that the consequences of inertia will be painful
1. R. Wilhelm and C. G. Jung, The Secret of the Golden
Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, p. 114. This book is an
interpretative rendering of an esoteric Taoist text dating
probably from the eighth century.
2. Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines, p. 8.
40
or disastrous. A soldier exhausted beyond endurance can
yet take immediate action for his own safety at the sound of
approaching enemy aircraft. Dog-tired but disciplined troops
will stagger into line at the command to fall in, summoning
from some unknown source within them the power to go on,
even though they are not personally endangered. Their
obedience shows that they have achieved a considerable
degree of disidentification from their natural desires. To this
extent they are released from the compulsion of the
instincts and enabled to bear themselves with the dignity of
free human beings.
In his struggles against sloth, an individual—I refer now to
the everyday problems of the everyday person—is very apt
to get caught in a moralistic attitude. His heritage from
puritan ancestors, who regarded sloth as a sin, makes him
feel inferior and “in the wrong” when he succumbs to its
lure; yet because the cause of his inertia lies hidden below
the threshold of consciousness, he cannot combat it
successfully without a deeper understanding. His moralistic
reaction actually plays into the hands of the enemy, for
nothing saps a man’s energy faster than a vague and
unfocused feeling of guilt. Or perhaps, being in revolt
against the puritanism of his fathers, he condones his
laziness as a natural and harmless indulgence, flattering
himself that he can throw it off at will when the time comes.
But for many persons this time never comes, or, when the
need for conscious and continued effort does arise, they find
themselves unable to meet life’s demand, for they have not
developed the necessary moral fibre.
Sloth is indeed a deadly sin if we regard the question of
bondage and freedom as a moral problem, perhaps even as
the moral problem of mankind. But to regard sloth as a
problem of inner freedom is very different from taking the
moralizing attitude—one “ought not” to be slothful—as if
that were the end of the matter. For laziness is not
overcome by a pious hope of virtue, nor is it exorcised by a
statement that it ought not to be. Recognition of the
shortcoming will result in the state of hopelessness and
depression described above, or it will lead to an attempt to
release oneself from the lower and more unconscious,
instinctive side of the psyche, which is amoral—
perhaps premoral is the better term—by identifying oneself
with the upper or moral side of the personality, in a futile
attempt to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps. Such an
attitude usually leads to a compulsive and useless activity
that is the opposite of sloth, though just as unfree; or it
produces a paralysing sense of guilt and inferiority that
results in an inactivity not far removed from the original
condition.
This is obviously the wrong way of attacking the problem,
for sloth is a manifestation of a primary and primitive inertia
based on an archaic attitude—a reaction appropriate to the
conditions of life that prevailed on the earth in remote
times. Crocodiles and other cold-blooded creatures that
have not evolved much beyond the state of their remote
saurian ancestors dream their lives away, lying by the hour
utterly inert, seeming no more alive than the logs of wood
they simulate. Even in warm-blooded animals sleep reigns
over an amazingly large proportion of the twenty-four hours.
Inactivity further plays an important part in self-protection in
some of those animals which, like the rabbit, are not
endowed with fighting weapons. When threatened they
“play dead”; that is to say, their physiological reaction to
danger consists in temporary paralysis—an apparent
cessation of life producing a purposive though involuntary
inactivity* Such reactions are adapted to the conditions
these creatures have to meet, and have been developed to
further life’s ends.
The instinctive impulse to react in a similar way may arise in
human beings, but quiescence in face of difficulties is no
longer appropriate for man. An unconscious and instinctive
reaction does not necessarily accord with the requirements
for survival of either the individual or the race. The
development of ego consciousness and the attainment of
will power have brought to civilized man other means for
meeting the problems of his life. The ancient tendency to
passivity and inertia has become a danger that man must
overcome, since otherwise he perishes.
there is, however, another aspect of this problem that must
not be overlooked. The attitude of passivity underlying sloth
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
42
has a positive side and under certain circumstances may
even be lifesaving. And beyond this it can have another
value, for through it the individual may be brought in touch
with the vegetative processes on which ultimately all life
depends, and from which we tend to become separated
through identification with the ego and its conscious aims.
On the physical plane the necessity of relaxing in order to
replenish the body’s powers is well recognized. But because
our emancipation from psychological sloth is more recent
and incomplete, and therefore more precarious than the
corresponding achievement in regard to physical inertia, it is
not so generally recognized that a similar process may be
necessary for the psyche. The bodily resources and reserves
are replenished in sleep night by night, though the
conscious life and all willed effort have been laid aside. In
convalescence, too, the lassitude that takes possession of
the field of consciousness is not only the result of the illness,
which has depleted the reserves of vital energy, but also
nature’s beneficent gift for cure. The convalescent’s
reluctance to undertake any sort of exertion—a mood about
which he may bitterly complain—acts as a curb on the
impulses to activity arising either in response to outer
demands or from an inner moral reaction to his apparent
laziness. Here the natural instinct is really to be trusted,
rather than the conscious opinion of the patient, for this is
nature’s way of safeguarding the organism against too great
strain before it has had time to recuperate fully.
In the long history of the race, illness and convalescence
have been experienced many hundreds of times, and the
instinctive reaction is based on the unconscious wisdom
thus acquired. But the individual
,himself may have had no
previous experience of the particular illness he has suffered,
and so misinterprets his own feelings. He tries to substitute
book knowledge or personal opinion for the instinctive
counsel of his own body, not realizing that the lassitude,
arising as an expression of the completely unconscious life
wisdom of the organism, is disregarded only at the peril of
doing damage to it. This is a positive aspect of “laziness”
that has a helpful, healthgiving effect. But should an
individual be faced at such a
moment with a task actually essential to life, he will
obviously be hampered by this instinctive reaction. Not only
will he have to struggle against his physical handicap; he
will also be weighed down by his lassitude. If he fights
successfully against it he may be able to force himself to
accomplish the task without feeling any immediate ill
effects. But it is quite possible that he will unknowingly
overstep the bounds of his physical endurance, and so will
have to suffer for his disregard of his own instinct in a
prolonged or possibly incomplete convalescence.
Thus man’s ability to disregard nature’s warning is at once a
valuable achievement and a danger. If for instance in a
crisis one is inhibited from putting out one’s last ounce of
strength, one may fall a helpless victim to fate; but if one
continues to disregard the warnings of nature and obeys
only the dictates of will, one may unwittingly drive oneself
to death. It is said that it is impossible to drive a mule to
death. If he has reached a certain point of fatigue, he will lie
down and take any amount of beating, but he will not go on.
On the other hand, a horse, an animal of far greater
intelligence and development than the mule, can be
overdriven. At the insistence of his rider he may go on until
he drops in his tracks, perhaps even to die in harness. This
we feel to be evidence of a higher development in the
horse; but we must also recognize that the stubborn
obedience of the mule to nature’s warning has its value. The
mule clings to life with true devotion, and like the man who
fights and runs away, he lives to fight another day.
Among human beings it is not only in illness that inertia
plays a protective role. In pregnancy, too, it is strikingly
evident. The pregnant woman usually sinks into an
overwhelming and placid inertia. Her psychological state
resembles that of a cow or other ruminant animal. This
attitude is usually felt to be not immoral or unwholesome,
but rather peaceful and beneficent, a mood almost of
beatitude. Meanwhile the unseen process of creation goes
on within, totally cut off from any active or conscious
cooperation or control. On the psychological plane a similar
inertia frequently precedes creative activity; this state of
mind is also called ruminating, as though
the process maturing below the threshold of consciousness
were indeed like that in the cow chewing her cud twice over.
The sloth or inertia experienced in conditions like these
protects the vital activities from the intervention of the
conscious ego at times when they are concerned with the
allimportant function of recuperation and the creation of
physiological and psychological “children.” While the hidden
life forces are performing their mysterious work of
transformation, the rational and willed attitude of the
conscious ego can only interfere. It can neither assist nor
guide. The libido 3 is withdrawn from it, and it is left high
and dry. When this happens one can do nothing but await
the re-emergence of the psychic energy, alert to profit by
the creative work in which it has been taking part. In his
“Study in the Process of Individuation” (first version), Jung
writes:
What is essential to us can only grow out of ourselves. When
the white man is true to his instincts, he reacts defensively
against any advice that one might give him. . . .
This being so, it is the part of wisdom not to tell the white
man anything or give him any advice. The best cannot be
told, anyhow, and the second best does not strike home.
One must be able to let things happen. I have learned from
the East what it means by the phrase “Wu-wei”: namely,
not-doing, letting be, which is quite different from doing
nothing. Some Occidentals, also, have known what this not-
doing means; for instance, Meister Eckhart, who speaks of
“sich lassen,” to let oneself be. The region of darkness into
which one falls is not empty; it is the “lavishing mother” of
Lao-tse, the “images” and the “seed.” When the surface has
been cleared, things can grow out of the depths. People
always suppose that they have lost their way when they
come up against these depths of experience. But if they do
not know how to go on, the only answer, the only advice,
that makes any sense is “to wait for what the unconscious
has to say about the situation.” A way is only the way when
one finds it and follows it oneself . 4
This is the positive aspect of inertia, nondoing, wu-wei.
3. Following the practice of Jung, I use the term libido for all
forms of psychological energy, manifested as interest or
desire. I do not limit it to specifically sexual interest, as is
more commonly done by the followers of Freud.
4. The Integration of the Personality, chap. 11, p. 31.
however, while giving full weight to this helpful and
constructive aspect of inertia, it is well to be on guard
against its negative, slothful, and regressive aspects. For
man is no longer just a child of nature. He has so well
obeyed the command to increase and multiply that Mother
Nature can no longer supply all of mankind with sustenance
by her own unaided activity. Man’s utmost industry and
initiative are needed, if he is not to perish from the earth.
When an individual is caught by sloth, he loses even the
awareness that he is failing to act in accordance with the
demands of life. The conflict between the opposing
“wants”— the “I want to get on with my task” and the “I
want to laze away the day”—is lost to mind, and he slips
down into the abyss of nothingness. This state is obviously
far more dangerous than the condition of conflict, painful
and paralysing as the latter may be.
In The Secret of the Golden Flower , that text of Chinese
yoga translated by Wilhelm and interpreted with such depth
of understanding by Jung, it is said:
Laziness of which a man is conscious and laziness of which
he is unconscious, are a thousand miles apart. Unconscious
laziness is real laziness; conscious laziness is not complete
laziness, because there is still some clarity in it.®
But when the light of consciousness itself is dimmed, it is as
if there were no one left within the I to maintain a
discriminating insight into the situation. Part of the
individual’s consciousness has fallen into the depths, and he
suffers from the condition the primitives call “loss of soul.”
Part of his soul, or one of his souls, has left him, and what
remains may not be capable of realizing what has occurred,
let alone of dealing effectively with it.
What, then, can be done to meet this problem? The inertia
cannot be overcome simply by action, for sloth and restless
activity are a pair of opposites that frequently alternate,
without producing any improvement in the underlying
situation. They are both expressions of purely unconscious
and undi
5. The Secret of the Golden Flower, p. 47.
rected functioning belonging to the same level of
psychological development. This fact is amusingly
expressed in Kipling’s description of the Bandar-log, the
monkey people, who were always running about in great
activity with intent to do something of great importance that
they entirely forgot as soon as some trivial object distracted
their attention. Nothing was ever accomplished, and things
went on for the tribe exactly as they had gone on since the
creation.
The means developed by primitive peoples to overcome the
natural apathy and laziness of the
,individual, such as
initiations, dancing, and other rituals, all have the effect of
replacing the personal consciousness with a tribal or group
consciousness. Through identification with the group, and
through the concerted effort of all, energy otherwise
inaccessible can be channelled into life. This is a technique
employed almost instinctively even today whenever a
difficult task must be performed. Military marches, the
sailor’s ‘Teave ho” and his characteristic chanties, serve to
weld individuals together into a cohesive whole. Even in
more sophisticated groups it is still recognized that a
concerted effort will produce a result far in excess of the
sum of separate, individual contributions. Why else do we
have drives or campaigns for fostering most social
enterprises, whether it be the selling of war bonds, the
election of a president, or the inculcation of courtesy among
elevator operators?
Identification with the group is a very powerful motive, a key
that can undoubtedly unlock and release imprisoned energy.
The forces released, however, may be as destructive in one
case as they are valuable in another. In the instances just
cited, the identification is brought about for a particular
purpose and is usually self-limited; in other instances,
however, the identification springs from a deeper and more
unconscious level. Then the outcome is quite unpredictable:
a crowd may become a mob, or a group intent on self-
improvement may develop into a world-shaking secret
society.
In each of these cases the effect produced comes not from
the conscious will of any one participant in the movement.
Although one person may be selected as the leader, he, no
less than his followers, is actually the pawn of the
unconscious forces that have been let loose and usually
their first victim. If he then becomes the prophet of the
daemon that has been aroused out of the depths of the
collective psyche, he will have to direct his magic upon
himself before he can work magic upon the crowd. For
example, a spellbinding orator always has to go through a
warming-up process before he can arouse his audience so
that they too will be gripped by those forces to which he has
for the time being voluntarily relinquished himself. This is
true of the leader of a religious revival just as much as of a
Hitler. When people succumb to such a spell, the onlookers
may be aware of this mechanism. If we regard the effect as
beneficial, we say that they were “lifted out of themselves”;
if the outcome is devilish instead of godly, we say that they
were “possessed” or “beside themselves.” In either case,
while the influence of the daemon prevails, the individuals
affected are no longer self-possessed and responsible
persons. They are swayed by strange impulses, and may be
capable of remarkable acts of self-devotion and heroism as
far above their ordinary capacities in one case as they are
beneath these in another. Such unthinkable atrocities as
lynchings, witch burnings, or Jew baitings may actually be
perpetrated by men and women who, when not inflamed by
mob passion, are possessed of average kindliness and
humanity.
Thus, while group action is certainly effective in releasing
the dormant energies of the unconscious, it is always a
matter of doubt whether this release will be beneficial or
destructive. The man caught in such an identification loses
his capacity to make an individual judgment; he relinquishes
his autonomy and vests it for the time being in the group.
Thus he is no longer in any real sense an individual. He is
only a member of a group, identical in all respects with the
other members: what they do he does, what they feel he
feels, what they think he thinks, what they ignore he too
ignores. The group has become the unit, the individual, and
we ascribe to it powers and capacities that rightfully belong
only to human beings. We say for instance that “the group
says,” “the group feels,” “the group thinks.” But these are
all psychological activities that
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
48
actually pertain only to individual human beings. They
cannot be carried on by a group, for the group has no
tongue, no heart, no brain. In such cases it is the
unconscious that speaks, feels, and thinks; for the
unconscious is common to all the members of the group and
affects them each and all.
Where men and women meet and consciously take counsel
together, coming to a decision in all soberness, the
intoxication of group identity is avoided. The situation lacks
the enthusiasm but it also avoids the excesses inevitably
accompanying the regression from individual control to that
type of group identification which Levy-Bruhl called
participation mystique. But capacity to do this implies a
degree of personal discipline that is attained only with
difficulty. Social and religious practices designed to arouse
the collective energies of the unconscious, then to control
them for useful ends, have usually been applied to the
group as a whole. The individuals remain little more than
automatons whose personal acts are governed by the
taboos and sanctions of the community. For identification
with the group has power to release man’s latent energies
and also to discipline them. But it is far more difficult for the
individual man, alone and unsupported, to acquire self-
mastery and freedom from the dominance of his instinctual
impulses.
hindu yogic training is concerned with this problem. The first
skill that must be acquired by the neophyte is the ability to
control his chit—those thoughts which flit hither and yon
and are often compared to the movements of a fly or a
mosquito. His thoughts must be caught and his mind
brought under control, so that it will become, as they say,
one-pointed. This is the first step towards overcoming
avidya. In Chinese yoga, too, distraction is considered the
first great stumbling block in the path of the pupil. For it is
not activity but capacity for concentration that is the cure
both of sloth and of restlessness. An imbecile may be inert
and slothful, or he may be constantly restless, displaying a
purposeless and meaningless activity. And indeed any
individual—whether of the active or of the inert type—in
whom no power of concentration has been developed and
no inner light or self-understanding insight
has been kindled, is under grave suspicion of psychological
inferiority, if not of actual imbecility. For the capacity to
direct and apply psychic energy is one of the most
important achievements of culture, and its absence is the
mark of a low level of psychological development.
Primitives have a very short attention span for anything
requiring mental effort, though their capacity is much
greater in regard to matters directly pertaining to their tribal
culture. Half an hour’s talk with an educated man, even on
everyday matters, exhausts them. The attention span in
civilized man has lengthened very markedly, and much of
his education is directed towards further increasing it. In a
young child it is as short as in the primitive, but it lengthens
as the child develops; in fact, its duration is one of the
criteria by which psychological development is judged.
If after his natural span has been exhausted, further
attention is demanded of an individual, he becomes either
restless or drowsy. A well-disciplined person may be able to
overcome his boredom and fatigue sufficiently to persist in
his task for a considerable time, but eventually he will relax
the tension he has maintained with effort and will relapse
into torpor or give way to restlessness. Or, shaking off the
sense of obligation to continue the uncongenial tasl^, he
may turn with a new access of energy to a different
occupation more to his taste, to find his sleepiness and
fatigue disappearing as if by magic.
An illustration of this almost miraculous change can be seen
on any warm afternoon in an old-fashioned schoolroom,
where
,some of the children may be almost asleep, others
fidgeting or playing with their pencils. Suddenly the bell
rings. The drowsiness and restlessness vanish. All becomes
purposive activity, and at a sign from the teacher the pupils
stream out into the playground, full of energy and
enthusiasm.
These children are not lazy: they are bored. The kind of sloth
they suffer from is only a reaction to the requirement of
performing an uncongenial task. There is another and far
more serious kind of sloth, which persists no matter what
stimulus to activity or what lure to the libido is applied, and
in which no moral conviction is sufficient to arouse the
individual to
purposive activity. This type might well be called
pathological inertia. The ineffectiveness of the stimulus may
be due to its inherent weakness or to a failure of the inner
psychic mechanism, which does not appraise the situation
rightly. If the individual fails to understand, or lacks insight,
he cannot master his forces and attack the situation. His
need is to realize—to make real—the situation that is
challenging him. As Robert Louis Stevenson expressed it in
“The, Celestial Surgeon”:
Books and my food and summer rain Have knocked on my
sullen heart in vain.
The capacity for the enjoyment of beauty and the things of
the spirit has disappeared, and the individual has fallen into
a dark mood of depression from which only the most drastic
experience can rouse him. Stevenson indeed at the end of
the poem prays for such a painful experience, lest his spirit
be permanently lost in the final extinction of death:
Lord, thy most pointed pleasure take,
And stab my spirit broad awake.
Or, Lord, if too obdurate I,
Choose Thou, before that spirit die,
A piercing pain, a killing sin,
And to my dead heart run them in! 6
Particular attention should be paid to the complaint here
that even the desire for food has disappeared, since hunger
is perhaps the sharpest goad that nature has for urging man
to overcome his natural inertia.
Possibly Stevenson’s lines describe one who was young and
in love. In that case his indifference to food and spiritual
joys is understandable, since sex is the second most potent
stimulus knocking at the door of inertia. If the young man
had been disappointed in love, if his eager outgoing libido
had met with an overwhelming frustration, it would have
been not unnatural that he should fall into depression. But
there are other individuals, in whom the outgoing libido has
not met with any rebuff, who nevertheless show a constant
state of lethargy and depression. In these cases the life urge
itself seems to be de
6. R. L. Stevenson, Poems, p. 115.
5 *
ficient, or apparently it is frustrated within the psyche and
turned back on itself. These individuals cannot take any
adequate part in life. There are others in whom the libido
seems to be dragged down into the unconscious, swallowed
by the “sucking mouth of emptiness,” or lured away from
the light of the upper world to pine, like Persephone, in the
dark realms of Tartarus. But for majiy who have been thus
enchanted, the outcome has been less favourable than in
the case of the goddess of spring.
For these persons all suffer from varying degrees of
psychological illness. In some, the spark of consciousness
has never been kindled. In others, the libido has withdrawn
from life only temporarily, as a result of physical illness or
emotional frustration. Between these two extremes will be
found many degrees of mental illness, conditions of
abaissement du niveau mental, and moods of withdrawal or
of depression. Sometimes these moods are fleeting,
sometimes prolonged or recurrent. Most if not all individuals
have suffered in this way from time to time. Surely everyone
has experienced the dimming of the light that follows
frustration, or suffered the depression that accompanies
physical illness or emotional loss. Who has not struggled
with, or succumbed to, the sloth that creeps upon one with
its cold and heavy breath when one is faced with an
uncongenial task? But in many individuals a comparable or
even greater depression may arise spontaneously, without
awareness on their part of any frustration or unhappiness
that might account for it. In such cases the libido has fallen
out of
D
consciousness through a cleft leading directly down to the
unplumbed depths of the unconscious.
For the individual psyche, as we have already seen, has
emerged from darkness and still floats, as it were, on those
vast waters of the unknown that Jung has called the
collective unconscious. And if there is a defect in the
psychic mechanism that should safeguard the conscious
individual from complete immersion in the collective
unconscious, and relate him to it in a meaningful way, the
libido can very readily leak away and be lost. Throughout
the ages, this problem of the relation of the individual to the
collective unconscious has been the
province of religion, for the psychic realm is the spirit realm.
But since the rise of the exclusively rational and intellectual
approach to life, this whole field of human experience has
been almost completely excluded from conscious attention.
It has not been considered a valid field for research or
education. Consequently all problems connected with this
side of life have been left almost completely to the
unconscious. Until the advent of depth psychology, we
trusted that a sane and reasonable relation to the outer
world would suffice for mental health and that, for the rest,
nature would take care of any difficulties that might arise. It
is therefore not surprising that the psychological function
guarding and regulating the individual’s relation to the
strange world of the collective unconscious should all too
frequently prove inadequate for its task, and allow gaps
through which the libido can fall into unfathomable psychic
depths. >
Because psychological energy has disappeared from view it
has not therefore ceased to be; it is still existent, even
though for the time being it is inaccessible to ego
consciousness. For psychological energy is apparently
subject to a law similar to the principle of the conservation
of energy in physics . 7 A deficiency of available conscious
energy is usually due to one of two conditions: either the
quantum formerly at the disposal of consciousness has
dropped away again into the unconscious, or energy has
never been released from its source in adequate amount but
has remained bound by an attractive power of the
unconscious stronger than any that consciousness can set
against it.
But as energy is indestructible, some other manifestation
will necessarily arise to take the place of the lapsed activity.
One of the most important contributions that modem depth
psychology has made towards the understanding of life is
this principle of equivalence, which postulates that when
energy disappears from one psychological manifestation it
will reappear in another of equivalent value. In many cases,
as Jung
7. Jung has discussed the whole subject of the dynamics of
psychological energy very fully in “On Psychic Energy,” in
The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (C.W. 8), pp. 3 ff.
points out, the equivalent value is not far to seek; in regard
to others, he says:
There are frequent cases where a sum of libido disappears
apparently without forming a substitute. In that case the
substitute is unconscious, or, as usually happens, the
patient is unaware that some new psychic fact is the
corresponding substitute formation. But it may also happen
that a considerable sum of libido disappears as though
completely swallowed up by the unconscious, with no new
value appearing in its stead. In such cases it is advisable to
cling firmly to the principle of equivalence, for careful
observation of the patient will soon reveal signs of
unconscious activity, for instance an intensification of
certain symptoms, or a new symptom,
,or peculiar dreams,
or strange, fleeting fragments of fantasy, etc . 8
Jung goes on to show how these phantasy or dream pictures
gradually form themselves into a symbolic image that
contains the energy lost from consciousness, together with
an additional amount of energy whose attracting power was
responsible for the original loss. If the previous condition of
inertia has been due to inability to face an uncongenial but
necessary task, or perhaps to failure to solve a problem
presented by life, the symbol created in the unconscious by
the regressive libido will prove t© be the means for
overcoming the obstacle. Such a symbol cannot be formed
by conscious effort and purpose; on the other hand, the
formation of a creative or redeeming symbol cannot
take place until the mind has dwelt long enough on the
elementary facts, that is to say until the inner or outer
necessities of the lifeprocess have brought about a
transformation of energy. If man lived altogether
instinctively and automatically, the transformation could
come about in accordance with purely biological laws. We
can still see something of the sort in the psychic life of
primitives, which is entirely concretistic and entirely
symbolical at once. In civilized man the rationalism of
consciousness, otherwise so useful to him, proves to be a
most formidable obstacle to the frictionless transformation
of energy. Reason, always seeking to avoid what to it is an
unbearable antinomy, takes its stand exclusively on one
8. Ibid., pp. 19-20.
side or the other, and convulsively seeks to hold fast to the
values it has once chosen . 9
In the absence of conscious work and willed concentration
of attention on the images arising from the depths, the
unconscious activity will remain on the level of phantasy
weaving or daydreaming, and the individual will be
prevented by his slothful preoccupation with his phantasy
from taking an adequate part in his own life. This
observation gives us a clue to the way in which sloth,
inertia, and depression must be attacked. In the ordinary,
everyday situation, so long as the loss of libido is not very
serious, a determined summoning of all available energy
may be sufficient to make a beginning on the distasteful
task, and it may turn out that, as the French proverb so
aptly puts it, ce n'est que le premier pas qui coute. Once
begun, the enterprise may go on smoothly and efficiently,
bringing interest and satisfaction in its train. These are
situations in which the remedy ordinarily prescribed is to
ignore the problem and to “snap out of it,” or if this is not
possible, to seek distraction or keep oneself occupied. These
measures may succeed, though at the best they evade the
real issue.
But in more serious cases a prescription of this sort simply
does not work. Many a patient whose life spark has
seemingly gone out has been sent by his physician to roam
the world like a ghost, seeking he knows not what. Had he
realized that the treasure he had lost was his own soul, now
dropped into the depths within, he could have made his
pilgrimage in that inner universe: there, following in the
steps of the legendary heroes of the past, he could have
undertaken the “night journey” in quest of the “rising sun,”
symbol of the renewal of libido.
When the light of life dims and one is left in the darkness of
depression, it is much more effective to turn for the moment
from the objective task and to concentrate attention on
what is going forward within, instead of forcing oneself to
continue by a compulsive effort of the will. For when the
libido disappears from consciousness, will power can be
used effectively only to overcome the natural reluctance to
follow the lost
9. Ibid., p. 25.
Inertia yy
energy into the hidden places of the psyche by means of
creative introversion. The phantasy or dream images found
there will surely give the clue to the difficulty, provided one
has the technical ability necessary for understanding them.
For this the layman usually needs the help of an analyst
trained in the interpretation of symbols.
The unconscious images will bring to light the cause of the
impasse. Perhaps the inertia will prove to be an effect of
regressive longing, the secret desire for death and oblivion
that is latent in every human being. At times this longing
may gain so much energy that it outweighs the portion
available for life and its tasks. Certain people are
particularly liable to the inroads of this backward-looking
factor. The life problem with which they must cope has been
extensively dealt with by Baynes in his brilliant study,
Mythology of the Soul , 10 in which he calls this regressive
element the “renegade.” It is this component of the psyche
that always refuses to co-operate in the human effort to
domesticate nature, within and without, and to create a
more civilized life for mankind. The renegade tendency
represents the eternal outlaw, the being who wants what he
wants and refuses to pay the price, always seeking to
exploit the industry of others. It incorporates greed in all its
many forms—greed for food, lust for sexual satisfaction or
power, the demand for ease and pleasure, regardless of the
cost to someone else. It is the negative aspect of the
instinctual urges that keep the world moving.
The renegade is the destructive aspect of the regressive
libido. It bespeaks the attitude of the child, who expects to
be cared for and nourished regardless of his own
unwillingness to co-operate, and who uses his powers only
to demand satisfaction, never to help in creating the means
for that satisfaction —as though life were an indulgent
mother whose only preoccupation is her concern for the
well-being of this particular child. Such an attitude may be
condoned in an actual child, but in an adult it is an infantility
no longer to be indulged. In his case the “mother” is not a
human being who can be
io. See pp. 4, 97 ff.
5 *
coaxed or coerced, but rather Mother Nature herself, whose
ways are impartial, who has no heart susceptible to appeal.
Such an adult will become increasingly asocial and
tyrannically demanding, until he realizes the fallacy on
which his attitude has unconsciously been based.
But the backward longing of the soul for the source of its
being, for its beginnings, for the mother depths, may have a
different significance and so a different outcome. When it is
taken in a positive way, this longing may lead the soul to
renewal and rebirth. Thus the image that arises from the
unconscious in a time of depression may be that of the
mother in either her beneficent or her destructive form. The
form of the image will be directly conditioned by the
conscious attitude and will of the dreamer. If he is childish,
the mother image of his dream will be threatening, it will
smother him with a suffocating kindness, or it will seem to
lure him to destruction. If, however, he is sincerely seeking
for a renewal that will enable him to overcome the
obstruction confronting him, the image presented by the
unconscious will be of that Great Mother who is the source
of all, and from whose womb he may be reborn.
In other cases, the symbol produced by the dream or
phantasy may take one of the many forms of the father
image. The father is the one who has gone before us. He
tackled life and its problems before we came to conscious
awareness. Throughout childhood we have experienced over
and over again that “father knows how.” If care is not taken
to foster the child’s initiative and natural creativeness, his
spirit may well be crushed by being constantly forestalled.
This is one of the most serious effects of the impact of
civilization on primitives. When the Western man arrives,
with all his mechanical devices and technical skill, it seems
to the primitive no longer worth while to labour at the tasks
that have been performed through the ages with the
inadequate tools he has been using. His civilization
,simply
falls to pieces, destroyed by the mere presence of a culture
so far beyond anything he has ever dreamed of.
Consequently he falls into sloth and depression.
Inertia j7
The same reaction may underlie the depression of a modem
adult man or woman. For when we are faced with the
necessity of doing something, or of creating something for
ourselves without the aid of parents, we may well be
hampered by the feeling that “father could do this much
better.” This attitude may seem fantastic to one who has
long been separated from his childhood home and his
childish attitudes; but even for him the problem may not be
so remote as he thinks. For quite apart from the effect of the
actual parents, there remains in the psyche the image of the
father as the one who can do what I, the son, cannot do.
Thus when there is need for a new creation that I feel
inadequate to produce, it is as if the unconscious said, “Now
if only there were a father, he could meet this situation.”
This image of the father is therefore twofaced. On the one
hand it seems to say, “Only the father can do it, therefore it
is of no use for you to try,” and on the other it says, “Hidden
within your own psyche there speaks the voice of that
creative ‘old man’ who has fathered every invention man
has ever made. You can find him within and learn what he
has to teach.”
When life presents us with a new problem, a new chapter of
experience for which the old adaptation is inadequate, it is
usual to experience a withdrawal of the libido. For one
phase of life has come to an end, and that which is needed
for the new is not immediately at hand. This withdrawal will
be experienced in consciousness as a feeling of emptiness,
often of depression, and certainly of inertia, with an
overtone of selfrebuke because of what seems like laziness
or sloth. For if we do not realize that new forces must be
mobilized to meet new situations, we superstitiously expect
a new attitude to be available as though by magic. This new
attitude, however, must arise from the unconscious before it
can be made available for the life situation, and this
requires a creative act that takes time.
The symbol that is produced in the unconscious will
represent the new attitude needed for the next chapter of
this individual life history. The acceptance of the symbol,
and its gradual unfolding through such conscious work as
the individual is willing to expend on it, may take years. Yet
the form
of the fate that results will have been foreshadowed in the
dream image encountered during the period of depression.
Under these circumstances it is obviously necessary to
accept without self-reproach the withdrawal of the libido
from consciousness, and to concentrate one’s attention on
the inner scene. This is the only way in which the lost
energy can eventually be restored, and in which the
capacity to take up the creative task of living can be
renewed.
WANT AND GREED
4
I ife first appeared on earth, so far as we know, in the form
of single living cells. From these simple origins all other life
forms developed. Today the earth is covered with living
organisms, constituting the whole of the vegetable and
animal kingdoms. They are all descendants of those small,
pregnant original cells that lived and died millions of years
ago. The same physical and chemical laws that controlled
the life processes of those ancestral forms still govern the
physiology of the complex animals of the present day. In the
psychological sphere too, far removed as this is from those
simple beginnings, many reminders of the ancient life
patterns still survive to affect the attitudes and habits of
modern man, although he usually remains quite unaware of
their influence.
Of all the characteristics that distinguish the vegetable
kingdom from the animal, the most striking is the fact that
the plant is stationary, subsisting on elements brought to it
by the air or water in which it grows, or on the salts of the
soil in which it is rooted. The plant is thus wholly dependent
on its environment: if this is favourable it flourishes; if not, it
languishes and dies. There is nothing it can do to change
these circumstances, however unfortunate its situation may
be; it cannot move to another spot, even though ideal
conditions may prevail a few feet away.
Some of the most primitive animal organisms likewise are
59
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
6o
sessile. By degrees, however, free-moving forms of life were
developed, an adaptation marking a most important step in
evolution. From then on, the capacity to move about in
search of food and other biological necessities became
characteristic of animal life.
At first the free organisms merely floated about as the
currents in their environment determined; gradually,
however, the ability to move of their own activity was
developed. Af uch later, the power of purposive movement
was acquired. But there remained in them a pattern of
passivity, of inactivity, which was interrupted only when the
need to search for food, the presence of danger, or the urge
to reproduce made itself felt. These needs acted as stimuli
to an activity that was at first little more than a mechanical
or chemical reaction and only much later became
sufficiently differentiated to form an organized reflex. At this
stage passivity^ was the normal state, activity the unusual
one.
When man found himself living under conditions not
naturally adapted to his needs, and constraining him to
undertake difficult enterprises in order to secure himself
against starvation, the innate tendency to quiescence that
he shared with all organisms took on a different aspect.
From being the “natural way” it became in his case the
greatest handicap to survival. Perhaps the hardest battle
man has had to wage has been his struggle against his own
inertia.
But Afother Nature has implanted in all her children,
whether animal or vegetable, a great tenacity of life, which
we call the instinct of self-preservation. This instinct is
concerned with fulfilling the needs of the body so that it
may be kept alive and in health. These needs are of two
kinds: first, the need for food and drink; second, the need
for protection from harmful external conditions, including
heat and cold, injury and disease, as well as danger from
hostile animals and human beings. If man was to meet
these fundamental requirements, it was essential for him to
overcome his primitive inertia.
The needs relating to food and drink, and to shelter and
protection from enemies, are so fundamental that nature
rewards their satisfaction, as it were, with bliss. To be
hungry
and cold brings discomfort long before life itself is
threatened. To be well fed, warm, and sheltered from the
elements brings pleasure. If this were not so, it is doubtful
whether man and the other animals would make the effort
necessary to secure conditions favourable to life, since the
stimulus necessary to arouse them from lethargy would be
lacking. The ' impulse to activity , 1 which is manifested
even in very lowly animal forms, would in all probability not
lead to purposive effort towards securing food and shelter
were it not directed by actual discomfort or fear of
discomfort resulting from their absence. These
considerations obviously condition the activity of primitives,
and without such a stimulus even a modern man may lack
the initiative needed to overcome his lethargy and perform
a necessary task, though his reason tells him that it is
advisable for him to do so.
It is well known among doctors how difficult it is to induce a
patient to continue treatment for a disease that no longer
causes him pain or discomfort, even when he is repeatedly
warned that such care is necessary and urgent. If this is true
of civilized and educated people, it is hardly to be wondered
at that among primitives the individual rarely makes any
effort to care for his health until he
,strange to those who do not understand why he has
chosen to spend so much time and energy in studying this
obscure and confusing material. It was only when Dr. Jung
found in his patients’ dreams symbols and themes
resembling alchemical fantasies and ideas that he came to
realize that the alchemists in their curious and often bizarre
experiments were actually investigating their own
unconscious contents and processes which they found
projected into matter, that unknown and strange realm that
fascinated them so profoundly. Their deep concern with
experiments and curious chemical reactions and the
fantasies they built about them really reflected the
happenings within their own psyches. For the most part this
was a secret the alchemists did not fathom, but some of
them, especially the so-called philosophical alchemists, did
realize that what went on in their retorts occurred
simultaneously within themselves, for they repeatedly
insisted that “tarn physice quam ethice “as is the physical
so is the ethical.” This fact is further evidenced by the strict
injunctions that occur in the literature, adjuring the
alchemist to be of good moral character, and also by the
urgent prayer cited by an alchemist in the Aurora
consurgens: “Purge the horrible darknesses of our mind.” 8
However, as the alchemists did not understand that what
they were concerned with was really a psychological
transformation, but instead projected the opus into the
problem of transforming matter from a base condition to a
noble one, their fantasies about the reactions they observed
in their retorts were reported without conscious criticism or
interference. Conse
3. Aurora consurgens , 9, 4th Parable; also Psychology and
Alchemy, p. 259.
vm
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION
quently their texts give quite a naive account of the
workings of the unconscious and the unfolding of the
archetypal drama in symbolic form. Their search was for the
treasure beyond all treasures, the quintessentia, which they
called by various names: philosophers’ stone, gold,
diamond, and so forth. When translated into psychological
terms, this treasure would correspond to the unknown
central value of the psyche that Jung has called the Self.
This is really the quest with which my book also is
concerned. Had I had access to Jung’s later writings when I
wrote it I could have given a much more inclusive account of
the process. But it stands as an evidence that the road Jung
follows is a genuine and true one, for it will be found that
what I have to say, while far less profound than Jung’s
treatment of the subject, is yet in harmony with his ideas.
He taught his pupils the method for studying the
unconscious, and this book demonstrates that when the
method is used the results tally with those of other seekers.
Once again I must express my deep admiration and respect
as well as my lasting affection for my teacher.
#
The news of Dr. Jung’s death reached me just as I was
completing work on this edition. The world has lost a great
and creative personality, whose lifework has enriched our
understanding of the psyche immeasurably, especially in
the light he has thrown on the religious function in man; but
those who knew him personally have lost as well a dearly
loved friend, who will be greatly missed.
New York, 1961
M. E. H.
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
this book was conceived during the war years, amid the din
of a world cataclysm. Yet day by day I sat at my desk in
utter solitude and peace, with nothing to disturb my quiet
but the call of the gulls and the sound of the Atlantic
breaking eternally on the rocks below my window. It seemed
all but incredible that these two aspects of life could exist
side by side— the surface so beautiful, the under side so
terrible. But is not this a picture of life itself and, more
especially, of man? The surface, the fagade of civilization,
looks so smooth and fair; yet beneath the cultured mask of
consciousness what savage impulses, what ruthless
monsters of the deep await a chance to seize the mastery
and despoil the world!
These were the thoughts that gave rise to this book. Is it not
possible that the primitive and unconscious side of man’s
nature might be more effectively tamed, even radically
transformed? If not, civilization is doomed.
In the following pages this question is examined in the light
that analytical psychology has thrown on the contents and
processes of the unconscious. Until the first appearance of
the works of Dr. C. G. Jung, the unconscious was regarded as
merely the repository of forgotten or repressed experiences.
In this there could be no answer to the problem of a world in
the grip of a barbaric regression. But Dr. Jung discovered
and opened to all explorers another aspect of the
unconscious. For he penetrated to far greater depths than
had ever before been reached, and found there the sources
of psychological life that
ix
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION
X
produce not only atavistic forms but also the potentialities
for new development.
I am profoundly indebted to Dr. Jung for his work and for the
teaching he has given me personally, and I take this
opportunity to thank him in my own name, and also in the
name of all those who have found life by following the road
he has opened.
I wish also to thank him for the permission he has given me
to quote from his published writings and to use the Tibetan
mandala reproduced in this book.
Many thanks are due as well to Mr. Paul Mellon for much
helpful criticism and for the time and interest he has
devoted to the book, to Miss Renee Darmstadter for her able
assistance in preparing the manuscript for the press, to Miss
Hildegard Nagel for her translation of the foreword, and to
my publishers for their courtesy and consideration v in
taking much detail work off my hands.
M. Esther Harding
New York, 1941
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I want to express my appreciation to the following firms for
their permission generously granted me to quote extracts
from copyrighted material of their publications: Balliere,
Tindall and Cox, London; G. Bell and Sons, London; J. M.
Dent and Sons, London; Dodd, Mead and Company, New
York; E. P. Dutton and Company, New York; Harcourt, Brace
and Company, New York; Harvard University Press,
Cambridge, Mass.; John M. Watkins, London; Routledge and
Kegan Paul Ltd., London; Macmillan and Company, London;
Macmillan Company, New York; Oxford University Press,
London; Rinehart and Company, New York. For quotations
from the Collected Works of C. G. Jung I make grateful
acknowledgment to Bollingen Foundation and Routledge
and Kegan Paul Ltd.
In the preparation of chapter 6, I have availed myself of
material previously published in a paper of mine, “The
Mother Archetype and Its Functioning in Life,” Zentralblatt
fur Psychotherapie, VIII (1935), no. 2.
The acknowledgments for the illustrations, many of which
are new in the second edition, are given in the List of
Illustrations. I am most grateful to the various museums for
their help, and particularly to Mrs. Jessie Fraser for valuable
advice.
M. E. H.
' .
\
I
*
.
CONTENTS
#
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION V
PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS xi
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XV
foreword, by C. G. Jung xix
part /. The Source of Psychic Energy
1. Introduction 3
2. The Transformation of the Instinctive Drives 16
3. Inertia: sloth and restlessness 37
4 . Hunger: want and greed 59
5. Self-Defence: enmity and friendship 86
6. Reproduction: 1. sexuality 117
7. Reproduction: 11. maternity 160
8. The Ego and the Power Problem:
SELF-RESPECT AND THE WILL TO DOMINATE 1 96
CONTENTS
XIV
part //. The Transformation of Psychic Energy
9. The Inner Conflict: the dragon and the hero 241
10. The Psyche as a Whole: drawing the circle 303
11. The Reconciliation of the Opposites:
THE MANDALA 359
12. The Transformation of the Libido:
THE HERMETIC VESSEL 41 8
BIBLIOGRAPHY
,is too ill to move, and
delays the search for food until he is ^veak from hunger.
And indeed quite recently some communities ostensibly not
primitive could not bring themselves to make preparations
for their own defence until they were actually attacked,
even though their friends were already being decimated by
an aggressive and warlike neighbour. These reactions show
that the instinct of self-preservation has not been
sufficiently modified by the impact of consciousness 2 to
make it adequate to serve the complicated needs of modern
life. The communities in question-comprising practically all
the nations of the world—are actually far from being
conscious, self-regulating organisms, but are still dependent
on a crudely acting instinct for the preservation of life.
1. C. G. Jung, “Psychological Factors Determining Human
Behaviour,” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
(C.W. 8), pp. 117 ff.
2. This is the process Jung calls “psychization” (cf. above,
pp. 20-23).
In primitive communities, in which the spark of
consciousness burns dimly and men have as yet acquired
little capacity to initiate spontaneous activities to improve
their condition, it is hunger primarily that forces people to
throw off their innate sloth. In our own situation, in days of
plenty and prosperity, it is usual to think that sexuality is
the prime mover within; but this is only because the
immediacy of hunger’s pressure has been mitigated as a
result of regulated work and ample distribution of supplies—
conditions quite unknown to primitives. Thus hunger is the
stern schoolmaster who has taught man to cultivate the
fields and undertake many laborious tasks, quite foreign to
his nature, that yield no immediate satisfactions but only
supply the food he will need at a much later time.
For the Buddhists, as for ourselves, hunger or greed is
represented by the pig, which devours its food with such
gusto. In times of famine, however, man’s need no longer
presents itself to his consciousness as his own hunger;
under circumstances of dire want, his inner feelings, his
suffering, could not possibly be represented by the picture
of a pig gorging itself on good food. A starving man feels
himself to be pursued and eaten up by a demon that gnaws
at his vitals and will not let him rest. Under such
circumstances we find the hunger instinct represented in
folk tale and myth by a wolf: hunger stalks through the land
like a ravening beast and threatens to devour all living
creatures. But primitive man does not realize that this wolf
whom he must at all cost “keep from the door” is really his
own unsatisfied instinct, seen in reversed or projected form.
For when his hunger is no longer merely the friendly
reminder that it is time to eat, and, because of scarcity,
grows fiercely importunate, the instinct shows itself in all
the strength and ferocity of a nonpersonal force. It either
devours him, so that his strength fails and he dies, or it
enters into him, so that the demon takes possession of him,
and he is turned into a beast of prey, capable of the utmost
cruelty in his search for food.
this dual aspect of hunger is strikingly brought out in
legends and folk customs of very wide geographical range.
Some
of these customs relate to practices used, like the bear
dance of the American Indians, 8 to summon up the
energies of the tribe and focus them on the hunt. In other
instances the dance is intended to conjure up magic power
to hypnotize the deer so that it will allow itself to be
captured, or the magic may be used to induce the herds to
remain on near-by feeding grounds and not wander away to
distant regions. Or, if the animal to be captured is a
dangerous one, the magic ritual is designed to soothe it and
convince it that man kills his “brother” only from necessity,
for then it will not turn upon the hunter and destroy him.
Other rites have to do with propitiating the spirit of the slain
animal, so that it will not haunt its murderers nor warn its
brother animals to flee the neighbourhood. Customs of this
type belong to peoples who depend largely or entirely on
hunting for their food supply.
Communities that have learned to till the land, to sow and
reap a harvest, and to breed domestic animals for their
meat, have different customs. The earliest religious
practices of peoples who engage in agriculture are rituals
and magic rites connected with sowing and reaping. Frazer
4 has traced many of these from the eastern Mediterranean
regions through Greece, central Europe, France, and the
British Isles, among the Indians of both Americas, in Africa,
the Pacific Islands, and India. Among all of these peoples,
corn, that is, grainwheat, barley, or oats in Europe, maize in
America, and rice in India and other Oriental countries—is
almost universally regarded as a deity. In many places it is
personified as the Mother, a very natural idea; for just as
the human mother is the source of the infant’s first food, so
corn is the source of man’s bread.
An ear of wheat was in some cases itself considered to be
the Mother, or a sheaf of corn was dressed in woman’s
clothing and venerated. In Peru, an ear of corn (maize) was
dressed in rich vestments and called 2 ara-Mama; Frazer
says that as Mother it had the power of producing and
giving birth to maize. 5 In plate I we see an ear of maize
mounted on a stake
3. J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp. 522 ff.
4. Ibid., pp. 393 ff.
5. Ibid., p. 412.
and adorned with a feather. It is called “The Corn Mother
and is honoured as such by the Pawnees in their Hako
ceremony.
In ancient Greece, Demeter was corn goddess as well as
Earth Mother. Her daughter, Persephone, who each year
spent three months in the underworld, during which time
the fields
Demeter, as harvest queen, gives ears of grain to her
nursling, Triptolemos (characterized by a crooked plough),
who, according to legend, first planted wheat in Greece.
Behind him Kore (Persephone) holds torches as queen of the
underworld.
were bare, and nine months on earth—a stay corresponding
with the growing season—also personified the corn. In
statues of the mother and daughter they may both be seen
crowned with wheat, each bearing a sheaf or sometimes a
single ear of wheat in her hands, as in figure r.
In the Eleusinian mysteries, which took place in September
during the time of harvest, the story of Demeter’s search for
the lost Persephone was re-enacted. The last and most
solemn day of the festival was given to celebration of a
ritual marriage between the hierophant and a priestess
impersonating the goddess. They retired to a dark cave,
where the sacred marriage
was consummated in symbol, for, as Hippolytus, the author
of the Philosophumena , relates, the hierophant is “rendered
a eunuch by hemlock and cut off from all fleshly
generation.” Immediately after, the priest came forth and
silently displayed to the reverent gaze of the initiates a
liknon 6 containing a single ear of wheat. Then he cried
aloud, “August Brimo has brought forth a holy son, Brimos,”
that is, “the strong [has given birth] to the strong.” 7 Thus
the ear of wheat was the “child” of the corn goddess. It was
called “the Strong” because bread is the source of man’s
strength. 8 This was the epopteia or epiphany, the showing
forth—the supreme revelation of the goddess to her
worshippers.
It is somewhat unexpected, perhaps, to find that the animal
sacred to Demeter was the pig. In statues the goddess is
frequently shown accompanied by a pig, which was also the
animal customarily sacrificed at her festivals. 9 In all
probability, the corn goddess in her earliest phase was
herself a pig. First the god literally is the animal, then he is
companioned by the animal, and the same animal is given
to him in sacrifice. Still later, the animal is believed to
represent or embody the spirit of the god. Yet it is not at first
obvious why the pig, an animal notorious
,for its greed and
destructiveness, should represent the mother goddess,
giver of corn and all nourishment. Some light is thrown on
the question by a strange detail in the myth of Persephone,
10 which relates that when she was lured away by Pluto,
lord of the underworld and god of wealth and plenty, she fell
into Hades through a chasm, and when this chasm closed
again a certain swineherd named Eubuleus was also
engulfed, with all his pigs. When Demeter wandered
throughout the region searching desperately for her lost
daughter, the footprints of Persephone were found to be
obliterated by those of a pig. This story probably represents
a
6. The liknon was the winnowing basket used as a cradle for
the infant Dionysos, the son of Demeter.
7. Hippolytus, Philosophumena, trans. Legge, I, 138.
8. For a further account of these rituals cf. J. Harrison,
Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, p. 549, and
Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp. 142 f.
9. Harrison, Prolegomena to-the Study of Greek Religion, pp.
126, 547, illus.
10. Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp. 469 f.
late attempt to conceal the unpalatable fact that
Persephone, the beautiful goddess of spring and of the
growing corn, was originally herself a pig.
In the Thesmophoria, the autumn festival sacred to Demeter
and Persephone, when the harvest and the September
wheat sowing were celebrated together, the women
worshippers not only imitated Demeter’s sorrowing search
for her daughter
Fig. 2. The Sacrifice of the Pig
The three torches indicate an offering to underworld deities.
but also partook of a solemn ritual meal consisting of the
flesh of pigs. In this rite, as in many another sacramental
meal, the flesh of the animal representing the god was
eaten by the worshipper in order that he might become one
with his god. Aristophanes makes a satirical allusion to this
custom in The Frogs. The mystae are chanting an
impassioned hymn calling the initiates to the festival, when
Xanthias, in an aside to his companion, Dionysus, remarks:
O Virgin of Demeter, highly blest,
What an entrancing smell of roasted pig!
And Dionysus replies:
Hush! Hold your tongue! Perhaps they’ll give you some. 11
n. Cf. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,
p. 540.
At this same festival, pigs and other offerings were thrown
into rock clefts called “chasms of Demeter and Persephone”
(fig. 2). Before it could be an acceptable gift to the goddess
the pig had to be purified, and in the accompanying figure
(fig. 3) we see such a rite of purification taking place. The
remains of the animals were retrieved in the following
spring and buried in the fields when the seed was sown. In
this way,
Fig. 5. The Purification of the “ Mystic” Pig
it was believed, the corn spirit, persisting in the flesh of the
pig, would fertilize the seed, causing it to grow and to
produce an adequate harvest.
It was not only in ancient Greece that corn, or perhaps it is
more accurate to say the spirit of corn, was conceived of as
a pig. Frazer reports that in Thuringia, when the wind blows
over the fields, it is customary to say, “The boar is rushing
through the corn.” In Esthonia there is an analogous allusion
to the “rye boar.” In some regions, the man who brings in
the last sheaf of corn, or who strikes the last blow of the flail
in threshing, is chased by the other reapers, bound with a
straw rope, and dubbed “the sow.” He has to carry this
unenviable sobriquet for the whole year, enduring as best
as he can the coarse jokes of his neighbours, who pretend
that he smells
of the pigsty. If he tries to shift the burden of personifying
the pig spirit to a comrade, which can be done by giving the
latter the straw rope that figured in the rite, he risks being
shut up in the pigsty “with the other pigs,” and may be
beaten or otherwise maltreated into the bargain.
In other places the connection between pig and harvest is
preserved in less boisterous customs. In Sweden, for
instance, a Yule boar is made of pastry and kept throughout
the season. It represents the harvest plenty. In many
localities in Europe, the Christmas boar, which is usually an
actual animal roasted whole and kept on the sideboard as a
cold dish for all visitors to taste, probably had a similar
origin.
In these customs we see that man’s hunger, indeed his
greed, as personified by the pig, is closely associated with
the idea of corn, which represents the mother, the provider.
It is as though pig and com together personify greed and its
satisfaction. This personification has a dual implication, for
while the pig eats greedily and even roots up and destroys
more than it eats, it is also the most fecund and most
maternal of animals. Possibly the “sow” man, whose act
completes the harvest, is nevertheless maltreated and
driven away because he represents not only plenty but also
ravenous greed, and therefore the threat of famine.
In more remote times, human beings selected to
impersonate the corn spirit were actually sacrificed at
harvest, probably in an attempt to kill the negative aspect
of the idea of food, which is want. Such human sacrifices 12
took place regularly each year among the Incas, the
Mexican Indians, the Pawnees, and other tribes in America;
they were also common in western Africa, in the Philippines,
and in India, especially among the Dravidian tribes of
Bengal. In each of these localities the victim was chosen
some weeks in advance and was treated kindly, fed lavishly,
and even venerated until he was sacrificed as the corn spirit
in the harvest ritual.
In all these instances, need and greed are more or less
confused in a composite idea of the corn spirit, but on the
whole the emphasis is on the positive aspect, the idea of
plenty. In
12. Frazer, The Golden Bough, pp. 431 ff.
Hunger 69
some parts of Germany and in the Slavic countries,
however, the corn spirit represents not satisfied appetite
and plenty but rather their opposites, hunger and famine.
For the people in these districts, when the spring winds blow
over the fields, it is not a pig that rustles the corn, but a
wolf. They warn their children not to go to the fields to
gather flowers, “lest the wolf should eat you.” ,
In these localities great care is taken by the reapers to
“catch the wolf,” for it is said that if he escapes, famine will
be let loose in the land. Sometimes this wolf is represented
by a handful of especially long-stalked grain, sometimes by
a man who is singled out on account of some particular
gesture or action. This man is then clad in a wolfskin and led
into the village by a rope. In other places it is said that the
wolf is killed when the com is threshed. In olden times the
man representing the corn wolf was killed in actual fact;
later the killing was enacted in a ritual drama, or the man
was replaced by an effigy, such as a manikin, or a loaf made
in the shape of a man. In many folk customs the earlier, real
killing is still represented by a symbolic game, often rude
and boisterous, in which a good deal of rough handling of
the victim may take place. But the origin and significance of
the game have long ago been forgotten.
Sometimes, instead of an animal or a man, the last sheaf
bound at harvest plays the role of the com spirit, under the
name of “the wolf.” This sheaf is not threshed; it is tied up—
sometimes it is wrapped in the skin of an animal—and kept
intact in the barn all winter. Its “health,” as they say, is
carefully tended, so that its full power will be preserved.
Then in the spring its kernels are mixed with the seed corn
and used in the sowing. If this special store of corn should
be eaten, owing to dire need or forgetfulness, the wolf will
avenge himself on the farmer. He will not bring the spirit of
corn—the power to grow—to the next sowing; the crops will
fail and there will be famine.
These customs and beliefs apparently reflect the great
difficulty man experienced in learning
,to reserve enough
grain for seed. This was especially difficult when the harvest
was too
scanty to take care of the farmer’s hunger during the long
winter months in northern climates. Obviously the last sheaf
— the wolf—must remain in the bam all winter if there is to
be seed corn in the spring. This must have been one of the
hardest lessons man had to learn during the transition from
a foodgathering to a food-producing culture, for his instinct
naturally prompted him to appease his hunger by eating all
the food there was. The belief that the last sheaf contained
or even actually was the corn wolf was all that restrained
him. For if he ate his seed corn, then indeed the wolf of
famine would be freed in the land.
The Trobriand Islanders of the Pacific have some curious
ideas and customs that bear on this problem. They do not
think of corn as having a life or existence of its own,
inherent in the seed itself, and capable of continuation
regardless of who handles it. Rather, they consider it £s
belonging to or appertaining to definite persons, whose life
or mana it shares and without which it is powerless to grow.
Each family possesses its ancestral corn, which will grow
only if a member of that particular family plants it. It will not
grow for anyone else. The corn is handed down from
generation to generation, ownership being vested in the
women of the family. If a man should allow all the corn of his
family to be consumed, he could not get fresh seed, for
there are strict taboos against giving seed to anyone
outside the family. He would be faced with ruin, as he would
be unable to plant his fields in the spring, unless he could
induce a woman who had inherited seed to marry him. This
belief imposes an exceedingly strict discipline on appetite,
and like the custom of keeping the wolf —the last sheaf—in
the barn all winter, it has a very practical significance.
When the spirit of corn was represented by the com mother
instead of the wolf, the emphasis was on the positive rather
than on the negative aspect of this spirit. Yet even here the
negative connotation was still present. Perhaps the
difference in attitude represented by the contrast between
the two symbols is related to the factor of whether it was
easy or difficult in a given locale to raise an adequate crop.
In fertile
regions man seemed to regard the corn spirit as the mother,
while in northern and barren districts, where harvests are
uncertain, the wolf was the more appropriate symbol.
Where the positive aspect of the corn spirit was invoked, the
sheaf personifying the corn mother was guarded during
growth and venerated at harvest. It was garbed as a woman
and kept in the barn alj winter; there the corn mother was
ceremoniously visited at intervals and asked whether she
felt well and strong. If it appeared that she felt weak, she
was burned, and a new corn mother was installed in her
place; for unless she kept her strength she could not give
birth to strong babies.
Here we see the transition from the positive to the negative
aspect of the corn spirit. If she weakened, the corn mother
herself had to be burned, lest she bring famine instead of
plenty. Thus under certain circumstances the spirit of com
seemed to become harmful to man. Then it had to be
destroyed or driven away, that is, the threat of famine had
to be banished. And so the man who bound the last sheaf
was made to personify this potential danger and was
hounded from the village like a scapegoat. In some
instances he was actually killed. Among the ancient
Mexicans the corn man was regularly killed at harvest, not
as a scapegoat but as a sacrifice, his body being eaten in a
sacramental meal, much as the pig was eaten in the
Eleusinian mysteries.
Frazer traces the gradual growth and refinement of this
barbarous custom. At first it demanded actual killing and
eating of the human being who was believed in very fact to
embody the spirit of corn. Later the corn animal was
sacrificed and eaten; Demeter’s pig and the harvest boar
exemplify this stage. This was followed by the eating of a
loaf made of newly reaped corn and fashioned in the form of
a manikin. Finally a true sacramental meal emerged, like
that celebrated at the close of the rice harvest in the island
of Buru, where every member of the clan was bound to
contribute a little of his new rice for a meal called the
“eating of the soul of the rice.” 13 This name clearly
indicates the ritual character of the repast.
13. Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 482.
7 2
In this harvest supper we see the early beginnings of a
communion meal, in which the body of the divinity is eaten
in symbolic form by the worshippers, who are believed by
this act to assimilate his nature and power.
these legends and customs surrounding the corn spirit
present two aspects of man’s striving to deal with the
problem of his need for food. On the one hand, he attempts
to control nature and so to enlarge the source of supply. On
the other, he copes with the task of controlling his own
nature. In addition to his innate sloth and inertia, which are
born, as the Buddhists would say, of avidya, not-knowing,
there is also his compulsion to satisfy his hunger of the
moment, without regard to the consequences. This too is an
effect of avidya; for if he were really conscious of the result
of eating everything at once, he obviously would not do it.
But because the pangs of today’s hunger are immediate and
inescapable, and the consciousness of tomorrow’s hunger is
remote and he can conceive it only as a faint replica of
present suffering, primitive man—and the primitive in
modem man likewise—does not want to become aware of
the law of cause and effect, that the Buddhists say is the
lesson that must be learned by those of “little intellect.” 14
He prefers rather to act on the adage, “Let us eat and drink;
for tomorrow we die.”
Gontran de Poncins 15 reports that when he was living
among the Eskimos of northern Canada, he found that they
wanted to eat on the first night of a journey all the food
prepared for the entire trip. He was regarded with great
suspicion because he ate only a part of his store and kept
the remainder in reserve. He was finally obliged to give his
comrades all of his provisions at once, for fear that they
would otherwise become hostile. This was particularly hard
on him because at that time he had not learned to eat
Eskimo food and was relying on his small store of “white
man’s” provisions to see him through the trip. The very
presence of a store of food larger than was needed for a day
at a time became a danger. For not
14. See above, p. 35.
15. Cf. Kabloona, pp. 90-91.
only did his companions eat his entire supply, but after their
gargantuan feast they lay sleeping all the next day and
refused to move, despite the fact that they had a long and
hazardous journey ahead.
Among nomadic and hunting peoples like the Eskimos, the
task of finding food has to be undertaken at regular
intervals, and this discipline alone prevents them from
sleeping away their entire time.' But when a tribe settles
down and begins to develop an agricultural life, it is freed in
large measure from the dangers and the precarious features
of a hunting economy. It can produce its food supply on its
own cultivated lands, and thus is no longer dependent on
the presence of game. However, a new danger to life
appears in the very existence of a store of food.
Whereas the ferocity and the unaccountable comings and
goings of the animals constituted the chief dangers of his
former life as a hunter, man’s own sloth and greed now
become his principal enemies. For when a group of people
for the first time reaps a harvest and possesses food in bulk,
the obvious reaction is to wish to feast immediately. Indeed,
in our presentday harvest festival we ourselves follow the
same pattern. For while it is a thanksgiving to the Giver of
the harvest, it
,is also an occasion for feasting, when the
customary curbs on sensual indulgence are laid aside. BuC
primitive man not only feasts at such times; he also scatters
and destroys what he cannot eat. Then, when all is
squandered, want inevitably follows, for in a purely
agricultural community there is no possibility of replenishing
the store until the next harvest.
This phase of the problem, with its consequent demand for
psychological development, is represented in a legend of
the com spirit that comes from ancient Phrygia . 16 There it
is related that Lityerses, son of King Midas (who, like Pluto in
the Persephone myth, was lord of untold wealth), was the
reaper of the corn. He had an enormous appetite, for as a
bastard son he represented the shadow side or opposite,
unconscious aspect of his father. For the father, Midas,
represented wealth, plenty, and the bastard son, that is, the
son who is not
16. Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 425.
the heir, who is indeed the outsider in the family,
necessarily carries all the negative aspects that the “son
and heir” escapes. So Lityerses was the very personification
of insatiable greed, who dissipated and devoured the wealth
that his father had accumulated.
This legend is particularly instructive, for it gives a clue to
the modern problem of the son who feels himself to be
rejected by his father. He may not be illegitimate, as
Lityerses was, but if for any reason he feels himself to be
not fully accepted by one or both of his parents (if a boy
especially by the father, if a girl by the mother), he is all too
likely to react unconsciously, in a way corresponding to the
Lityerses of the legend. Such a son will turn to his mother,
he will be soft and self-indulgent. He may be and often is
over-fat, lazy, demanding, and terribly jealous of any rival
whose industry and selfdiscipline gain him the rewards of
independence and the approval of the father and possibly
alsp of the world. For if a boy’s relation to his father is
negative or disturbed, he is inevitably hampered in his
development of the masculine values and is liable to remain
a “mother’s boy.” If a girl feels herself to be unaccepted by
the mother she will turn to the father and will develop those
masculine qualities that characterize the animus. She may
make a career for herself in the world or, in more serious
cases where the damage has been greater, she may
become an opinionated and embittered woman, one who is
seemingly self-sufficient and domineering, but who
underneath suffers from a sense of inferiority and insecurity
on the feminine side. She cannot imagine that she might
ever be attractive to men, and indeed probably men
actually fight shy of her, scared away by her sharp and
bitter tongue.
In the legend Lityerses was proud of his strength, and yet
had to prove it to himself and to the world by repeated
victories. He was accustomed to lure some passing stranger
into the cornfield when he was reaping, challenging him to a
contest to see which of them could reap the most. Contests
of this sort are still held at harvest festivals in many
localities. But while today they are merely games, in ancient
times and in legend they were far more serious matters, for
there might well be a
Hunger
sinister ending. Lityerses, the man with the limitless
appetite, always won. He then bound his rival inside a sheaf
of corn and beheaded him.
This legend must date from the beginning of the agricultural
phase of civilization, when man had learned how to produce
a crop but not how to govern his appetite. His instinct was
compulsive and by no means subject to control or
modification by reason. When aroused, it dominated the
whole field of consciousness. No other consideration
existed; for in men at this stage of psychological
development, when instinct prompts to action all else is
forgotten. Lityerses represents this instinctive quality in
man. He is the natural man, strong and lusty and proud. The
legend relates that up to the time of his encounter with
Hercules no one had been able to overcome him.
The stranger who is invited to help with the reaping
represents a new attitude, a developing aspect in the men
of that day—the beginning of self-discipline. This new man is
still, however, a stranger to the problems that cultivation of
the fields and the production of harvests have let loose in
the world. He has a head, it is true; he has begun to think,
to recognize the law of cause and effect, as the Buddhists
say , 17 but his head is not very firmly set on his shoulders,
for the contest is always won by Lityerses (the instinctive
man within), and the stranger (the new realization in man)
loses his head. Appetite prevails, and presumably the
harvest is consumed in feasting. Before sowing time comes
again, the village will go hungry.
This recurrent struggle evidently went on for a very long
time without much change. Then Hercules arrived on the
scene, and perceiving what dire straits the village was in,
undertook to reap with Lityerses. He went to the field and
offered himself for the contest. The two reaped side by side,
and, a thing that had never happened before, Lityerses was
outstripped and Hercules won the contest. He then bound
Lityerses in a sheaf, as the latter had so often done with
others, killed him, and threw his body in the river. That is,
the instinct
17. See above, p. 35.
7 6
factor was returned to the depths of the unconscious, just as
today greed is more often repressed than transformed.
Thereafter, a ritual based on this fortunate outcome of the
struggle was practised yearly in Phrygia at harvest-time. A
stranger chancing to pass the harvest fields was regarded
by the reapers as the embodiment of the corn spirit, and as
such was seized, wrapped in sheaves, and beheaded.
Obviously Lityerses is not only the spirit of corn but also the
spirit of greed. He personifies insatiable appetite, which no
ordinary restraint can hold in check. Yet this is an aspect of
the corn spirit that must be driven out if man is to enjoy
abundance the year round. At first, consciousness is too dim
to enlighten the blind instinct that prompts man to go on
eating as long as any food remains: in comparison to the
power of his stomach’s demand, the influence of his head is
very feeble. But finally Hercules, the sun hero, appears and
is able to overthrow the tyrant of appetite. Tor he represents
the divine or semidivine spark of consciousness, the sun in
man that enables him to make the heroic effort necessary to
overcome the age-old domination of the biological urge. In
this way a further step in the transformation of the instinct
is taken.
This struggle against the negative aspect of the spirit of
corn is also seen in the customs of driving out the “old man”
or the “old woman” before the first sowing of the grain.
These rites were formerly prevalent in Germany, Norway,
Lorraine, the Tyrol, and in parts of England. The idea is that
the spirit of corn grows weak and old during the winter; it
could produce only a sickly growth in the new corn—or
possibly, through the long fast during the winter, it has
actually become the spirit of hunger instead of food. In the
Slavic countries, this old man is called Death, and a rite
practised before the first sowing is called “carrying out
Death.” This reminds us of the customary representation of
death as a skeleton carrying a scythe. It was perhaps
originally a picture of a reaper who, like Lityerses, devoured
the entire harvest and so brought death by hunger and
starvation. Later, this picture came to represent death from
whatever cause. The allegorical interpretation of the figure
of death as the reaper of man, who falls
before his scythe like the grass of the field, is obviously a
late conception.
This old man who must be expelled is equivalent to the wolf
of the beliefs discussed above. He is often counterbalanced
by a “young man,” who,
,like Persephone, is the young corn.
For instance, in ancient times in Rome it was customary on
March 14—the night before the full moon that marked the
beginning of sowing—to expel the old Mars, Mamurius
Veturius. For Mars was a vegetation spirit as well as a god of
war. In this ceremony the old Mars was treated as a
scapegoat and driven out into enemy territory. It is
interesting to note this dual aspect of Mars. On his positive
side he is a vegetation spirit, giving his name to the spring
month of March. His zodiacal house is Taurus, which is
associated with the month of plenty. But in his negative
aspect he is the god of war. Most wars are fought, in the
final analysis, for food or food lands or their modern
equivalents: fundamentally it is lack of food that makes
wars. Furthermore, the anger of Mars —the blind fury that
takes possession of a man, so that he loses all reason—is
due as a rule to frustration of one of the basic instincts; it
represents the second phase of the instinct of
selfpreservation, namely, the impulse to defend oneself
from one’s enemies.
two factors played a part in fostering the gradual evolution
of the hunger instinct—the impact of man on man, or the
social factor, and man’s conviction that whatever he did not
understand in nature was of supernatural origin. At first this
supernatural element was explained as being the mana of
the creature or object or phenomenon; but gradually the
mana effect was thought of as emanating from supernatural
beings, gods or daemons, who controlled the world and
whose good will must be cultivated if man was to survive.
We do not know the origins of the social and religious
factors that have moulded man’s psychological and cultural
development. They were already ancient by the time man
began to till the ground, and directed the evolution of
instinct simultaneously along two lines that had somewhat
different
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
I s
goals. On the one hand, man’s relation to his fellow man
curbed his instinctive selfishness; on the other, he
recognized that although his conscious will could do much
to secure his safety in the world, it was still helpless in face
of the uncontrollable powers of nature. He was thus
compelled to develop a relation to these powers by adopting
an attitude that throughout the ages has been known as
religious.
When agriculture took the place of hunting and food
gathering, men began to live in larger groups, and
permanent villages were established, in order that the fields
and the domestic animals might be more easily protected.
As a result, human relationship came to play a much greater
part in each man’s life. In addition, the work of tilling the
fields and reaping the harvest was accomplished more
satisfactorily as a community enterprise, and so again the
problems of relationship increased. This led to the
development of customs that had as their purpose the
restraint of man’s instinctive gfeed. His growing ego, with its
desire to possess and control, had to be held in check by
various social sanctions and taboos. To this day, most of our
rules of politeness are based on the need to curb individual
selfishness and egotism: under the code of polite table
manners, for instance, one must, before beginning to eat,
see that others are served with the best pieces of food, etc.
The many centuries of conformity to such regulations have
established a discipline and control over the instincts of
hunger and of self-preservation that have become second
nature to all civilized people. For the most part these
controls are valid and lasting, unless a particular strain is
suddenly placed upon the conscious adaptation of a given
individual or group. Then the primitive instinct may break
forth and overthrow in a moment all that civilization has
built up through the centuries at so great a cost.
It would seem that if there were no other means for the
restraint of instinct, recurrent regressions to barbarism
would be inevitable. But the second factor, namely, man’s
intimation that his food came from the gods, and that its
supply was only in small measure under his own control,
was at work from the beginning. Thus it held out at least a
hope that through his
Hunger 7 ^
relation to the gods, a real change in man’s nature might be
brought about. For it was through religious practices that he
first learned to overcome his inertia, and it was on account
of reverence for the spirit of the corn, and later for the god
or goddess of the harvest, that he was able to release
energy from preoccupation with the immediate satisfaction
of instinct. Having accomplished this release, he began to
play creatively with the deity in whom the freed libido was
vested. The religious rites became more elaborate and more
meaningful, while the statues and shrines of the gods grew
ever more beautiful. Under the influence of this religious
attitude, the libido manifested in the instincts underwent a
change: it was gradually transformed for the service of the
psyche instead of remaining bound to the body.
From the beginning, man was most painfully aware of his
helplessness in the face of nature, and recognized that to
procure a good harvest he must please the gods. The tasks
that he felt compelled to undertake to propitiate them were
not dictated by reason, nor were they consciously thought
out, or based on observations of the actual conditions that
furthered the growth of crops. They were taught him by his
own intuition, or by seers and priests who had particular
insight in such matters.
Sometimes these rites were fantastic and, from our point of
view, utterly useless. But surprisingly often they led to
activities that increased the bounds of human knowledge as
well as the productivity of the fields. We need only recall the
invention of the calendar on the basis of knowledge gained
through the worship of the moon as harvest god. Osiris, for
example, was not only the moon god but also the teacher of
agriculture. While some of the rituals had a practical
agricultural value, others certainly had none. But all had a
further, most important effect: they increased the discipline
and control of man’s instinct and gave him a certain
freedom of action, a disidentification from the compulsion of
the blind life force within him.
The religious rites and folk customs connected with the
satisfaction of hunger came into being spontaneously. They
8 o
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
were not deliberately invented but arose of themselves, as
naive expressions of man’s instinctive feeling about “the
way things are.” This means that in his practices concerned
with magic, man was only following his intuitive perception
of the ancient, archetypal images or pictures that originate
in the unconscious. 18 Actually therefore these customs had
to do not with a deity or daemon residing in the corn, nor
even with a living spirit of corn, as their initiators believed,
but with an unknown factor dwelling within man’s own
psyche. But since this fact was completely unsuspected by
man himself, the unconscious contents that had been
activated by the necessity of doing something about his
need for food were projected into the external situation,
where they were perceived as if they had originated in the
outer world. If man was to learn how to overcome his own
regressive tendencies and inertia, to progress not only in
agricultural knowledge but also in psychological
development, he had to find a means of coming to terms
with this unknown, daemonic factor.
the religious rites and magic practices devised to increase
the yield of the soil were thought of as producing an effect
on the gods, beings external to man: their anger was turned
aside, their indifference was overcome, their interest and
benevolence were attracted. It did not dawn on man’s
consciousness until many centuries had passed that while
his magic had no actual effect on the order of the
,external
world, it did exert an influence on the daemonic force
emanating from the depths of his own psyche. Prayers to
the gods affect the inner atti
18. The source of these images we do not know, but Jung
has pointed out that the similarity of the customs and ideas
that have been developed over the centuries in all parts of
the world, and appear today in the dreams and phantasies
of modern people as well, point to a common substrate in
the psyche, a universal pattern of psychic experience and
behaviour corresponding to the instinct patterns that
condition the physical reactions of everyone. The elements
of the psychic pattern he calls the archetypes; and just as
the instincts manifest themselves in typical physical
reactions, so do the archetypes manifest themselves in
typical psychic forms, the archetypal images. Considerable
confirmation of Jung’s theory has been furnished in recent
years by the observations of workers in related fields.
Brain’s work on the functioning of the brain, for instance,
and the observations of animal psychologists and biologists,
Allee, Portmann, and Lorenz among others, all point in the
same direction.
tude of the petitioner, and the resulting change of attitude
in him can in turn change the appearance of the world and
alter the course of events. But this “belief,” as well as the
atheism that is its necessary precursor, are both products of
a psychological insight achieved only at a much later stage
in history.
The two trends, the one towards scientific exploration of the
world and the other towards the psychic evolution of man
himself, advanced sid£ by side. Gradually, however, they
diverged. The first gave birth to modern science; the second
has been the particular province of religion. Modern
psychology, with its clarification of psychological
happenings, has provided a bridge between these two
opposing views. Numinous experiences, the basis of
metaphysical dogma, are now recognized to be due to the
projection of psychic events. When this is realized, they can
be accepted as valid in their own sphere, with the result that
the external phenomena are released from their
contamination and can be investigated objectively.
Thus there has come about a gradual change in point of
view. The daemonic factor, now seen to be an expression of
man’s own instinctual drive, was projected into the object
because he was insufficiently aware of its existence within
himself. And it is hardly necessary to state that the process
of man’s disidentification from his inner compulsions is still
only in its initial stages. It varies greatly in different
individuals. Some barely realize the subjective factor in their
passionate loves and hates, while others, although they are
the few, are more conscious and therefore freer from such
compulsive entanglements.
When the driving force within him was simply biological
instinct, man’s concern was the immediate satisfaction of
his appetite. But as the hunger instinct was modified
through increasing consciousness, two things resulted: first,
man was enabled to control his food supply with ever
greater certainty through self-discipline and hard work;
second, he became aware of a longing not allayed by the
satisfaction of his physical hunger. The corn had become
merely a plant subject to natural laws: it no longer
contained the life spirit, the daemon,
the god. But the urgent need to. be united to the unseen
potency that had formerly resided in the corn still remained.
Adan’s own spirit longed to be made one with that life spirit
which animates all nature. Thus he became aware that the
ritual acts to which his ancestors had felt impelled were not
nonsense, but represented subjective impulses of great
significance. He began to understand that the true meaning
of the myths and rites could be grasped only when they
were understood symbolically.
This is not the same as to say that they were taken
metaphorically. A metaphor is the substitution of one known
fact for another. The substitution of a manikin made of paste
for a human sacrifice may well have occurred because the
human sacrifice had become abhorrent to a more civilized
age. If so, this would be a metaphorical use of an inanimate
object in place of the animate one. Such a substitution is not
a symbol in the true meaning of the word.
But when the sense of mystery, of unseen power, of numen,
formerly inherent in the ritual eating of the corn man,
remains—though now expressed in a strange and unknown
intuition of spiritual union with God, effected under the
guise of an actual meal in which, by the eating of a cake of
corn, man is made one with his God—the experience is a
symbolic one. For when it is clearly realized that the grain
itself is not God, that the spirit, the growth, latent in the
grain is not God either, and also that God is something
beyond either of these things, which yet in some way
represent or picture him, and when the bodily act of eating
is recognized as only an analogy to the spiritual act of
assimilation, an act that cannot be envisaged or
represented to man’s consciousness in any better way, then
we are obliged to say that these objects and this act are
symbols, “the best possible description, or formula, for a
relatively unknown fact.” 19
These realizations produced a gradual change in man’s
relation to the daemonic or numinous power of the instincts.
Mean
19. Cf. Jung, Psychological Types, p. 601, where this
distinction is discussed at length.
while, a corresponding change became apparent in his
customs. The rituals connected with preserving the positive
aspect of the corn spirit, or with overcoming its negative
aspect, were followed by a custom of dedicating the first
and best of the crop to the spirit of the corn. This spirit or
daemon was now thought of in a more general form, as the
god of harvest. The idea of a god of harvest is both more
abstract and more personal. The container of the mana is no
longer an actual ear of corn; it has been replaced by the
harvest as a whole. Simultaneously the spirit becomes more
personalized, and an actual deity begins to take shape. To
him, or to her, offerings were made of the corn that his or
her bounty had provided. Usually the first fruits, replacing
the sacrificial corn man of a former time, were not eaten but
were consecrated to the god of harvest.
Out of this ritual there arose another, even more meaningful
one. Man began to partake of the food that was offered to
the gods, not to satisfy his hunger but so that he might by
this means hold communion with his god. As the corn or
other food was believed to be the actual body of the god
whose spirit caused the corn to grow, the communion meal
was really a partaking of the actual body of the deity; thus,
it was thought, man’s nature was enriched by an admixture
with the divine substance.
Where the corn spirit was believed to inhabit a human
being, the potentiality of this transition was already latent.
For when the man who carried the significance of corn spirit
was killed and his flesh eaten (as happened in ancient
Mexico), it was believed that his spirit—the spirit or life of
corn that he personified—could be assimilated by the
participants in the meal. This food was felt to have
extraordinary life-giving powers; it could give health to the
sick or even bring the dead to life, and those who ate it
would not know hunger throughout the years.
Customs of this kind are numerous and very widespread.
They vary from folkways hardly understood to practices of
very similar content that have become the most important
and meaningful rituals of highly developed religions, in
which the
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
*4
implications of communion with God and of a mystical
regeneration through the sacramental meal have replaced
the old expectations of magic effect.
The Catholic mass in many ways resembles these early
harvest meals, in that the
,wafer is believed to be
transformed, through the ritual act of the priest, into the
very body of Christ. This mystery happening of the mass,
based as it is on customs and beliefs of an unreckoned
antiquity, awakes an echo within the human being, for it
speaks to the unconscious directly and produces its effect in
a region beyond man’s conscious control. One for whom this
symbol still lives feels himself actually transformed by
participating in the ritual. For where this central mystery has
power to touch the very depths of a man’s soul, it still can
exert its transforming influence on his unconscious. But that
power has been weakened through the development of
rational thought. The psychological attitudes of mediaeval
man no longer prevail, and the majority of intellectual men
in consequence find themselves totally unable to accept the
irrational character of the symbolic happening.
Modem man has sought to compass the whole of life with
his conscious intellect, only to find that the power of the
irrational life force has not been overcome, but has
retreated to the unconscious and from that hidden
stronghold exerts a powerful and often baneful influence on
his life. The power of his primitive greed bursts forth in wars
of aggression and manifests itself in asocial business
practices, while the exclusive concern with outer
satisfactions leaves his soul hungry and starving. For man
cannot live satisfactorily, he cannot be whole, unless he is
living in harmony with the unconscious roots of his being.
Yet how can he be at one with himself while the barbaric
impulses of unredeemed instinct continue to hold sway in
the unconscious? It is just because the ideals we hold up
before us do not represent the truth about mankind that the
hopes of peace and progress they embody so constantly
elude us. Yet we fear to admit this obvious fact and to relax
our efforts at self-improvement, lest we fall again into chaos
and barbarism.
Perhaps we need not be so afraid. For when all is said, the
Hunger 8$
original impulse towards psychological development and the
evolution of consciousness arose not from the conscious ego
(which was a result, not the cause of the development), but
from the unconscious springs of life within man. It is not
surprising, therefore, that its renewal should also be found
in the unconscious, where the life processes manifest
themselves, now as throughout human experience, in
symbolic form. Through the study of this little-known part of
the human psyche, it is possible to contact and in some
measure to understand the symbols that arise
spontaneously in dream or phantasy from the innermost
depths of the individual’s being. By this means he may
become reconciled with his other side, because the symbols
of his dream carry for him personally the value that the
organized symbols of religious ritual held for his ancestors.
The primitive impulses within him are profoundly affected
by the concentrated work and attention he bestows upon
his dreams. For the symbols themselves re-enact the
ancient, ever renewed drama of spiritual regeneration or
transformation. Through the experience of this inner drama,
if it is rightly understood and acted upon, psychic health and
inner maturity can be achieved by the modem man, just as
they were found by his predecessors through participating
emotionally in the symbolic drama of religious ritual.
s
Self-Defence
ENMITY AND FRIENDSHIP
T here is a popular illusion, rather common in the present
century, that life owes us something. We feel that we “ought
to be able to expect” certain things from life—as if life were
a sort of supermother. We hear it said, for example, that
everyone has a right to a minimum living wage, to a good
education, or even to good health, while nations declare
that they deserve Lebensraum —“a place in the sun,” as it
was termed in 1914. We consider such conditions in some
strange way to be our due, forgetting that the majority of
them must be created by man’s own effort. Surely a
moment’s consideration will show us that this attitude of
mind is based on an illusion. We have only to look back to
the primordial conditions of life to realize its absurdity.
There was no mother and there was no powerful state to
regulate the conditions of life for the first animal organisms,
which found themselves in a world already filled with
vegetable life. The older generation was as helpless as the
younger in face of the inexorable conditions it faced. The
predecessors of animal life, the plants, had evolved in
adaptation to the various conditions of climate and soil as
they actually occurred in the different regions of the world,
and we cannot believe that a plant mother could arrange for
her offspring to get a chance to survive. A seed that
happens to fall in an unfavourable spot cannot assume that
it has been denied its rights, or claim that
86
life owes it a better chance of survival and growth. Why
then should man make such an irrational assumption? Those
animal forms which could adapt to the conditions in which
they found themselves, survived; those which could not,
perished. If a locality was unfavourable, a plant could do
nothing about it; its growth was stunted, and finally, if
conditions did not improve, it died. But the animals learned
to move away from inauspicious sites in order to seek
places better suited to their needs.
This transition required thousands of years. Meanwhile the
animals were learning new ways of coping with changing
conditions. This they accomplished entirely by developing
new powers within themselves, not by directly altering their
environment. The capacity for independent movement led
to many revolutionary changes in the structure of their
bodies. They developed lungs, so that they could breathe air
and live on land instead of being confined to the water. They
developed teeth, limbs, new kinds of digestive and
reproductive organs—to mention but a few of the radical
changes that increased the capacity of living forms to
spread over the earth.
For many thousands of years all the new powers won by the
animal kingdom were gained through physical adaptation of
the organism itself. They had been attained long before the
revolutionary idea of attempting to alter the conditions of
life first dawned in minds that must be considered as by
that time human. Up to this point the survival of the
organism had depended entirely on the instinct of self-
preservation, which gradually evolved to greater complexity
as the organisms themselves developed. But when an
attempt was to be made to change the environment,
concerted effort on the part of the evolving units came to
play an increasing role. Man’s natural gregariousness
favoured this advance, which increased his power
enormously, but at the same time threatened the
independent development of the individual. For the group
had power that the individual had not. Consequently the
individual tended to look more and more to the group as the
all-powerful provider and protector, the body that “ought” to
care for its members. The group or tribe became an entity in
which the
individuality of the separate persons was completely
merged.
The survival of the living organism is threatened not only by
lack of food but in many other ways as well. The dangers fall
roughly into three groups—danger from the elements,
danger from disease or injury, and danger from enemies. A
detailed consideration of all these fields would require a
history of human culture that is far beyond the scope of this
book. As the main theme here is the psychological problem
that man has encountered in his struggle to relate the
conscious ego to his compulsive drives, our chief concern is
with the danger from enemies that derives from the
aggressive tendencies of man.
The instinct of self-preservation has had a very important
positive effect on human society, for it has fostered the
growth
,of relations between men. The individual life is
obviously best protected when groups of men band
themselves together for mutual aid. In such groups
friendships readily develop. It is therefore in the sphere of
man’s relation to his fellow man that the most valuable as
well as the most destructive aspects of this instinct can be
traced; here the effort of man to tame and domesticate his
compulsive instinctive reactions can be seen in its
vicissitudes through the centuries. For the movement
towards civilization is by no means one of steady progress.
The efforts of years, even of centuries devoted to the
taming and psychic modification of the instincts, have been
swept away, over and over again, in a collective frenzy, a
furor or madness still sweeping over mankind with a
regularity that might well make one despair that the
daemonic force will ever be tamed and domesticated.
Paradoxically, the instinct of self-preservation, which, like
the hunger instinct, is endowed with specific energy and
compulsive drive, has been responsible for some of the
most uncontrollable and destructive outbursts that history
records. Large regions of the earth have at times been
devastated by famine or flood; plagues too have taken their
toll of life, sometimes in appalling measure. In such
situations men instinctively combine against the foe. But
when man turns against man, there seems to be no end to
the devilish ingenuity with which
he devises destruction not only for his brother but for
mankind as a whole. War remains the greatest evil of
mankind. King David’s plea that he be punished for his sin
by being made to suffer plague or famine rather than defeat
in war, reflected a wise choice. “Let us fall now into the
hand of the Lord,” he cried, “and let me not fall into the
hand of man.”
the mechanisms of .self-defence as they operate in man,
guarding his life from a thousand dangers, are still largely
unconscious; only to a relatively small extent are his
measures for self-preservation under his own direction or
control. The purely physical reflexes that maintain his well-
being rarely pass the threshold of consciousness, but their
ceaseless vigil goes on even during sleep. A man’s stomach
rejects a poison that he does not know he has eaten; his eye
blinks to avoid a particle of dust so small that he has not
consciously seen it. The number of the unconscious
mechanisms and reflexes that daily protect him from bodily
harm is almost infinite.
Other self-protective reactions are less unconscious and
therefore less automatic. They are subjected to a certain
amount of psychic modification through the control of the
conscious ego. However, a reaction that has been brought
under conscious control may fall again under the sole
direction of primitive instinct if the threshold of
consciousness is lowered. A pet dog who is ordinarily quite
gentle may growl and snap if touched when he is sleeping.
For in sleep his primitive instinct takes possession of him
once more and he acts reflexly. Many human beings exhibit
a similar regression to a more primitive condition when
conscious control is weakened from fatigue, illness, or some
drug (the outstanding example of this being the effect of
alcohol). The same thing may occur when an individual is
temporarily overcome by emotion or by an uprush of
unconscious material flooding into the psyche and
overwhelming the field of consciousness. Under such
circumstances the individual may likewise respond to
danger, real or imagined, with an automatic or compulsive
reaction that takes no real account of the situation and is
almost purely reflex in character.
However, when an automatic reaction passes the threshold
of consciousness, it comes in ‘some measure under the
control of the individual and so partly loses its automatic
character. The instinctive mechanism that has previously
determined its release then becomes subject to the
modifying influence of moral, social, and religious factors,
and the process of transformation of the instinct is set on
foot. This process has been greatly influenced by the
tendency of the human species to congregate into groups
for mutual protection and in order to facilitate the search for
food. But these values were offset by their opposites, for the
opportunities for theft were many, and constant quarrels
resulted. Thus the development of the instinct of self-
preservation has played a very large part in the problem of
human relationships. Indeed it is as a result of motivations
arising from this instinct that man classifies all living beings
as either enemies or friends.
In man the natural weapons, teet^i, claws, and fleetness, by
means of which the solitary animal can generally capture its
prey and protect itself against whatever threatens or hurts
it, were sacrificed in the interest of specifically human
qualities. Consequently man’s enemies were often too
powerful to be met by one individual alone, especially when
there were children to be protected and fed. 1 Alliances
between individuals or families, and between groups of
people, assured mutual aid for offence and defence. In this
movement towards social life, the modification of the
instinct is already strikingly manifest; for if it had not
undergone some transformation, primitive groups would
have been destroyed by internecine quarrels. Men who lived
in defensive bands had to learn to tolerate one another and
to curb their instinctive reactions. They had to learn further
how to co-operate, and to treat one man’s injury as the
affair of the whole community. Cain’s question—“Am I my
brother’s keeper?”—had somehow to be answered in the
affirmative.
In the course of ages man did acquire sufficient freedom
from his own apathy to be able to take part voluntarily in
1. This problem was more crucial in the case of man on
account of the prolonged period of immaturity and
helplessness in the human young.
group action. An injury could become real to him even
though he had not suffered it in his own person. Next, he
learned to remember from one occasion to another; hence
he could act on his own initiative and volition instead of
being dependent on the stimulus of actual injury or
immediate danger. Yet even today this capacity is only
rudimentary in many primitive tribes. Often pantomimic
dances and dramas must be undertaken to arouse the group
sufficiently to go on the warpath, even though the
depredations of its enemies are recent and serious. For the
primitive, with his twilight consciousness, it is easier to
forget a wife carried off by a neighbouring tribe, or a loved
child killed by a wolf, than to overcome his own inertia. He
simply cannot realize—that is, “make real” to himself—the
nefariousness of the enemy who has injured him. After the
pantomime has made it real, he can no more help rushing
out to be avenged than he could formerly help being
shackled by indifference and lethargy.
In situations like these, the majority of the tribe, the
average members, are entirely dependent on the
autonomous functioning of the instinct of self-preservation.
There may be one man, however, who has overcome his
inertia and unconsciousness. The medicine man or chief
who calls for the dance, and who by his own dancing
arouses the others to action, has acquired a spark of
consciousness. In him the psychic modification of the
instinct has progressed a stage farther, and through his
development the average men are led to act in a way that
cements their group alliance. In his greater psychological
development and greater consciousness, this man proves
himself to be a leader.
Concerted action to avenge wrong, especially in a situation
that is not the immediate concern of all, implies the
beginning of friendship and group loyalty. In this way enmity
becomes the stimulus to friendship. The kind of friendship
that develops in a community threatened by a common
enemy, whether that enemy
,is hunger or a hostile
neighbour, is based on the identification of the group
members with the group as a whole. The group reacts as a
unit: the individual member is no longer a separate entity
but is fused with the others, and
the values of the group become his values. One sheep in a
flock is very much like all the other sheep, both in its
appearance and in its reactions. In the same way, a
primitive tribe, a civic club, a religious sect, a political party,
are all composed of numbers of persons whose significance
derives from the group and not from their individual and
unique qualities.
Where the solidarity of the tribe is an essential for survival,
special techniques are used to foster the identification of
the individual with the group. First and most important are
the puberty initiations in which the boys and young men are
instructed in the tribal secrets, after which they are received
into full membership in the tribe. The ordeals through which
they must pass have also the aim of breaking up their
childish dependence on their families, substituting the group
affiliation as their major relationship. The rites performed in
times of stress, when the village is threatened, renew this
tie of membership and the sense of tribal solidarity.
Identification with the group has Very obvious values, but it
carries also certain disadvantages. For the unique qualities
of the individual must necessarily be disregarded and
sternly suppressed, with the inevitable result that he does
not develop his innate capacity for initiative but depends on
the group for support and defence and still more for moral
guidance.
Naturally the identification of the individual with his fellow
members and with the group is rarely, if ever, complete.
Even among sheep in a flock there are individual
differences; some few stand out from their fellows, and such
differences usually make for conflict. We even speak of a
rebel as a “black sheep.” Those who want conformity try to
impose it on the individualists; they in turn struggle for their
independence. Through this struggle (perhaps not among
sheep, but certainly among men) a further separation of the
individual from the group takes place. If one such rebel joins
with others who are like-minded, a secondary group will be
formed. This process is likely to be repeated, until some,
finding themselves out of sympathy with the rest, venture
forth alone.
Through such a process the differences between individuals
are brought more clearly into view. One person finds himself
becoming differentiated from all others, even from those
who in many respects are like him. To become separate can
even become an aim in itself, albeit often an unconscious
one. This is usually the motive behind the rebelliousness of
adolescence and the argumentativeness of adults, many of
whom enter into a discussion simply to clarify and
differentiate their own points of view, rather than to
convince their opponents or to learn from them. A similar
need for clarification may motivate an individual who
quarrels not about ideas but over some action or attitude
that affects him emotionally, though he may be quite
unaware of the nature of the unconscious motive he is
obeying—namely, the urge to separate himself from
someone who is too close to him or who exerts too strong
an influence over him. The goal is to find himself, his own
uniqueness.
In modern times the emphasis on the ego and its
separateness has led to an individualism that has been
erroneously regarded as individuality and that has resulted
in a considerable weakening of the ties between man and
his fellows. This false separateness is always challenged
when the group or the nation goes to war: then it must be
waived, and the individuals must be merged again into a
collective entity, re-created for a common purpose. Each
man is united with others through a common experience of
suffering and sacrifice. A deep and satisfying sense of
oneness results. For even an insignificant man is able to lay
aside his concern for his own safety and comfort in loyalty
to a group and to a cause beyond personal ambition; in this
way unselfishness, courage, and heroism take the place of
selfishness and egocentricity.
Thus the primitive instinct of self-defence, leading to
hostility and conflict, can also become the motive power
enabling an individual to overcome the childish bonds to his
family and the traditional alliances to the group in which he
was born. It may help him even to transcend his
dependence on a group of his own choosing with which he
feels himself to be in deepest sympathy, so that he can gain
strength to separate himself from it. Having done this, he
must face the world alone—a task so hard that it would not
be much wonder if he ran back precipitately to the safety of
the group at the first difficulty
he encountered. Were it not that the door has been closed
through the conflict that set him free, his triumph might
prove to be but a Pyrrhic victory. But having separated
himself from the group by conflict, he cannot return without
renouncing the claim to his individual point of view and
submitting to the rule of the majority. He has to go on.
Having left all his opponents behind him, he might expect to
be at peace. For the family and the group are no longer at
hand to oppose him. Little, however, does he realize the real
nature of the problem. It is true that he has won the right to
go his own way; but no sooner has he put a suitable
distance between himself and those whose control he has
rejected, than he discovers that he is not really alone. For he
is of two minds. The group attitude he has opposed so
strenuously is now voiced by something within himself. The
whole conflict has to be taken up again—this time no longer
as an external fight with an opponent outside himself, but
as an inner conflict. For the group spirit is in him no less
thafl in the other members of the community, and if he is to
find his uniqueness he will have to struggle with that
collective impulse within himself.
In Flight to Arras, Antoine de Saint-Exupery records the
inner experience of a young French pilot during the last
terrible days of the Battle of France. He was a rather solitary
young man who felt himself superior to the ordinary person,
being isolated by the disillusioned and somewhat blase
attitude of the university student of the nineteen-thirties.
When his squadron was left behind to carry out useless
reconnaissance flights after the rest of the army had
retreated, all the values of life, as he had known it,
vanished. The emotional horizon was narrowed down to the
existence of these few comrades, who were as completely
separated from the rest of the world as if they had been on
a lost planet; and he found himself at last emotionally one
of a group.
The self-conscious egotism of the young intellectual was
redeemed through this identification. For the first time in his
life he was an integral part of a whole, something bigger
and more significant than himself. His cynicism melted
away. He found himself loving these people; and to his own
great sur
prise he realized that he was accepted as he never had
been before, not only by his comrades but also by the
simple farmer’s family with whom he was billeted. On his
last flight, he moved a step farther in his spiritual evolution,
for in those memorable hours alone above the clouds he
saw that the values of humanity are merely exemplified in
the group spirit. They are really to be found not in the group
but in the very essence of each man: it is this that makes
him human. This quality is a suprapersonal value that
resides in each one and yet is not his personality, his ego.
Rather, it is the spark of life within him—a divine something,
yet most human too. In his solitary meditation, his
experience of utter aloneness, which SaintExupery recounts
in simple and convincing language, the young
,flier touched
the experience of what Jung calls the Self, the centre of
consciousness that transcends the ego.
Opposition and the motive of self-defence can thus furnish
the impulse necessary to bring about a separation from the
group and lead to the discovery of the uniqueness of the
individual. Thereby the instinct of self-defence, which
contains the seeds of war and potentialities for destruction
of the whole human species, shows itself to be capable of
functioning in a new realm, and now its power is transferred
to the quest for the supreme value within the human
psyche. Through this search the primitive and barbaric
forces that still slumber uneasily behind the civilized mask
of modem man may be redeemed.
the historical evolution of this instinct proceeded in a series
of fairly well-defined steps. Here and there a few individuals,
as well as small groups of men, became capable of self-
control and reasoned action, and thereby raised themselves
above the general level of almost reflex reaction to the
threat of injury. Similarly, larger groups gradually learned
how to govern their mass reactions, until even nations
consented to accept some discipline and control.
The aggressive instinct seems to be peculiarly difficult to
transform, perhaps because, unlike the hunger instinct, it
necessarily employs primitive means for its fulfillment. One
indi
vidual in eating does not necessarily violate another’s
rights, but fighting, even in self-defence, involves the use of
aggressive as well as protective mechanisms. Yet in spite of
this the instinct has undergone considerable modification.
The same factors that played such an important part in the
disciplining of man’s instinctive greed, namely, social
necessity and religious influences, were instrumental in
modifying the instinct of self-defence. As the pressure of
these two forces produced their characteristic effect,
initiating and fostering psychic modification, the instinct
came to a larger degree under control of the conscious ego.
It became or seemed to become less arbitrary and
compulsive. The forward steps were faltering and were often
retarded by the eruption of compulsive primitive reactions
whose regressive trends threatened over and over again to
destroy all that civilization had wrested from the untamed
reaches of the unconscious psyche.
Wherever human beings live together in groups, the
primitive irascibility and belligerence of the individual will
always be a threat to the life of the group. If a community is
not to be decimated through internecine violence, some
means of restraint must be found. The social restrictions
and taboos that gradually evolved had this primary object.
Through the centuries they were progressively strengthened
and adapted, and as the group increased in numbers and
organization, these instruments gained in power and
prestige. Although aggressiveness was by these means
actually tamed in some measure, the instinct of self-defence
proved to be extraordinarily intransigeant. The development
of mutual tolerance within the group produced a semblance
of culture and reasonableness that was often exceedingly
misleading. For the members of the group, restrained by
fear of punishment and of disapproval from their fellows,
might in public obey established laws and conventions; yet
in the secrecy of their own hearts, and even in their private
actions, the old primitive instinct might still have its way. For
most members of a group are psychologically below the
level of development represented by the group ideal and
law, even though some may be above the collective
standard. Thus there is often a great discrepancy between
the apparent
level of civilization in a community and the degree to which
the primitive instinct has actually been transformed.
1 his discrepancy between the conventional behaviour and
the reality that lurks beneath the surface of civilization is
further obscured because of the great difference in
accepted codes of behaviour affecting the individual in his
relation to his own community on the one hand, and
regulating the relations between different groups on the
other. Restraint of the individual within his community
usually developed more rapidly, and the rules governing his
behaviour became more exacting than did the
complementary rules governing the behaviour of one group
in its relations with another. Man learned to respect his
brother’s rights long before he conceded that the foreigner
had any rights at all.
The Crow Indians, for instance, formerly considered that
stealing horses from a neighbouring tribe was merely a
sport, to be indulged in at every opportunity, even though in
their dealings with one another they had learned to be
scrupulously honest. In many a community a warlike spirit is
considered to have a high moral value for the group long
after it has been superseded as the ideal for the individual.
In times of stress even civilized individuals, as already
instanced, frequently regress to an earlier mode of
behaviour. There are numerous accounts illustrating
reversion to violence and murder in persons cut off from
civilization and thus placed beyond the restraints of the law
and public opinion. We need only recall the well-known story
of the ship’s crew marooned on Pitcairn Island, where the
community almost totally destroyed itself in quarrels, in
spite of the fact that it must have been obvious to all that
the chances of survival were greater, the larger the size of
the group. In contrast, there is the equally forceful
illustration of the real inner development that must have
been present in Adams, the man by whom the remnant of
the unfortunate group was finally rallied and educated. For
even today the inhabitants of Pitcairn are famed for a high
level of social culture and conduct, enforced solely by their
own integrity and not by a police force. That the one book
which Adams possessed, and on which the education of chil
dren and adults alike was grounded, happened to be the
Bible, is a fact of no small psychological importance, in view
of the part the religious factor has played in the discipline
and modification of the instinct of self-defence.
in the infancy of the human species, as well as in the
individual infant of today, the reaction to injury is reflex and
purely instinctive; it is a reaction of body, not of mind or
conscious intent. And, if we can judge from our observations
of animals and infants, it is not at first accompanied by the
psychological experience we call feeling. But when the
instinct begins to be modified, the reflex reaction is changed
into an emotional one; that is, it is now a bodily reaction
with a feeling overtone.
The feeling is recognized as belonging in some measure to
oneself. The bodily reaction happens in one and does not
have a similar quality of “my-ness.” Indeed, bodily reactions
that are obviously emotional may occur in us without any
accompanying conscious feeling. When one feels his “gorge
rising,” or when one is “getting hot under the collar” or has
“that sinking feeling in the pit of the stomach” which
indicates disgust, anger, or fear, it is sometimes almost as
though one were looking on at all this, as though it were
happening to some other person. Then, if the reactions
reach a certain intensity, the conscious citadel is overcome
and one is invaded by the emotion and compelled to submit
oneself to it, whether one wants to or not.
In some people this invasion can occur without any
awareness on their part of what is happening to them. One
minute the individual is apparently calm and self-possessed,
and the next he is no longer in control of himself: an
emotion that he may hardly recognize as his own speaks
and acts through him. Others, however, are aware of the
rising tide of emotion within, and although they cannot
entirely control it, they can prevent themselves from
committing some irrevocable act
,469
1
INDEX
479
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
PLATES
FOLLOWING P. 234
Frontispiece. “The Sea is the Body, the two Fishes are the
Spirit and the Soul.” Watercolor from a manuscript of The
Book of Lambspring (Italian, xvii century). Private collection.
I. The Corn Mother of the Pawnee Indians. Drawing from
Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology
(Smithsonian Institution), XXII (1904).
II. The Slaying of the Bull. Modern drawing.
in. The Mistress of Animals. Etruscan bronze plate, vi
century. Museum Antiker Kleinkunst, Munich, p: G.
Wehrheim, Antikensammlungen Miinchen.
iv. The King of the Centaurs Seizes the Bride. Fragment from
West Pediment of the Temple of Zeus. Archaeological
Museum, Olympia, p: Deutsches Archaologisches Institut,
Athens (copyright).
v. The Anima Opens the Eyes of a Child. Modern drawing.
vi. Human Sacrifice. Detail from interior panel of a silver
cauldron, believed to have been made by Danube Celts, c. 1
century b.c.; found at Gundestrup, Denmark, in 1891.
National Museum, Copenhagen, p: N. Elswing.
vii. Mask Representing the Animal Nature of the God.
Granite statue of Sekhmet, Thebes, 19th Dynasty. Staatliche
Museum, Berlin, p: Eranos Archives.
viii. Isis Suckling Pharaoh. Limestone relief, Temple of Seti I,
Abydos, 19th Dynasty, p: Eranos Archives.
ix. Two Women with a Child. Ivory, Mycenae, Bronze Age.
National Archaeological Museum, Athens, p: TAP Service.
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XVI
x. Quentin Matsys (i466?-i53o): St. John with Chalice and
Dragon. Detail of altarpiece, Flemish. Wallraf-Richartz
Museum, Cologne, p: Rheinisches Bildarchiv, Cologne.
xi. Piero di Cosimo (1462-1521): St. John with Chalice and
Serpent. Oil on wood, Italian. Honolulu Academy of Arts, p:
Courtesy of the Academy.
xii. Jonah Cast Up by the Whale. Miniature gouache painting
from a Persian manuscript: Rashid ad-Din, Jami at-Tawarikh,
c. 1400. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, p: Courtesy
of the Museum.
xiii. The Rescue of the Black Man from the Sea. Painting
from a manuscript: Solomon Trismosin, Splendor soils
(1582). British Museum, London, p: Courtesy of the
Museum.
xiv. The Circle of the Psyche. Modern drawing.
xv. Vajra Mandala. Tibet, Lamaist sacred painting. Private
collection.
xvi. The Impregnation of the Centre through the Bite of a
Serpent. Modern drawing.
xvii. The Fertilization of the Centre by the Great Serpent.
Modern drawing.
xvm. The Dragon Guarding the Centre. Modern drawing.
xix. The Transformation: the hermetic vase, sealed and
crowned, containing the triple dragon. Painting from a
manuscript: Solomon Trismosin, Splendor soils (1582).
British Museum, London. p: Courtesy of the Museum.
xx. The Consummation of the “Great Work”—the coniunctio.
From the Mutus liber, in J. J. Mangetus, ed., Bibliotheca
chemica curiosa (1702). Private collection.
TEXT FIGURES
1. Demeter and Persephone. From an early red-figured
skyphos found at Eleusis. After Harrison, Prolegomena to the
Study
of Greek Religion. 64
2. The Sacrifice of the Pig. From a painted vase in the
National
Museum, Athens. After Harrison, Prolegomena. 66
3. The Purification of the “Mystic” Pig. From a cinerary urn
found on the Esquiline Hill. After Harrison, Prolegomena. 6j
4. A Cretan Bull Sacrifice. From a gold bead seal,
Mycenaean, from Thisbe, Boeotia. After Evans, The Ring of
Nestor, no
5. Odysseus Bound to the Mast and Assailed by Three
Winged Sirens. From a red-figured stamnos in the British
Museum.
After Harrison, Prolegomena. I2Q
List of Illustrations xvii
6. A Siren. From a Latin Bestiary, copied in the twelfth cen
tury (Cambridge University Library, n. 4.26). Reproduced
from T. H. White, The Bestiary: A Book of Beasts. 130
7. The Goddess Nut as a Tree Numen Bringing Water. After
Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians. 176
8. Vishnu in His Lion Avatar Slaying Golden Garment. After
Moor, The Hindu Fantheon. 214
9. Snake as the Soul 0/ the Dead Hero. From a black-figured
lekythos in the Naples Museum. After Harrison,
Prolegomena. 264
to. The Serpent on the Cross. After a drawing by Nicolas
Flamel, c. 1400, reproduced in Read, Prelude to Chemistry.
266
11. The Serpent on the Cross. Modern drawing. 267
12. Schematic Representation of a Psychic Involvement. 350
73. Spontaneous Drawing Made by an Individual Attempting
to
Find the Cause of Her Depression. 356
14. The Gemini or Double Pelican of the Alchemists. After an
engraving in the Buck zu distillieren (Brunswick, 15x9),
reproduced in Read, Prelude to Chemistry. 434
* •
,
FOREWORD
this book presents a comprehensive survey of the
experiences of analytical practice, a survey such as anyone
who has spent many years in the conscientious pursuit of
professional duties may well feel the need of making. In the
course of time, insights and recognitions, disappointments
and satisfactions, recollections and conclusions mount to
such a proportion that one would gladly rid oneself of the
burden of them in the hope not merely of throwing out
worthless ballast but also of presenting a summation which
will be useful to the world of today and of the future.
The pioneer in a new field rarely has the good fortune to be
able to draw valid conclusions from his total experience. The
efforts and exertions, the doubts and uncertainties of his
voyage of discovery have penetrated his marrow too deeply
to allow him the perspective and clarity which are necessary
for a comprehensive presentation. Those of the second
generation, who base their work on the groping attempts,
the chance hits, the circuitous approaches, the half truths
and mistakes of the pioneer, are less burdened and can take
more direct roads, envisage farther goals. They are able to
cast off many doubts and hesitations, concentrate on
essentials, and, in this way, map out a simpler and clearer
picture of the newly discovered territory. This simplification
and clarification redound to the benefit of those of the third
generation, who are thus equipped from the outset with an
over-all chart. With this chart they are enabled to formulate
new problems and mark out the boundary lines more
sharply than ever before.
xix
FOREWORD
XX
We can congratulate the author on the success of her
attempt to present a general orientation on the
problematical questions of medical psychotherapy in its
most modern aspects. Her many years of experience in
practice have stood her in good stead; for that matter,
without them her undertaking would not have been possible
at all. For it is not a question, as many believe, of a
“philosophy,” but rather of facts and the formulation of
these, which latter in turn must be tested in practice.
Concepts like “shadow” and “anima” are by no means
intellectual inventions. They are designations given to
actualities of a complex nature which are empirically
verifiable. These facts can be observed by anyone who
takes the trouble to do so and who is also able to lay aside
his preconceived ideas. Experience, however, shows that
this is difficult to do. For instance, how many people still
labour under the assumption that the term archetype
denotes inherited ideas! Such completely unwarranted
presuppositions naturally make any understanding
impossible.
One may hope that Dr. Harding’s book, with its simple and
lucid discussion, will be especially adapted to dispel such
absurd misunderstandings. In this respect it can be of the
greatest service, not only to the doctor, but also to the
patient. I should like to emphasize this point particularly. It is
obviously necessary for the physician to have an adequate
understanding of the material laid before him; but if he is
the only one who understands, it is of no great help to the
patient, since the latter is actually suffering from lack of
consciousness and therefore should become more
conscious. To this end, he needs knowledge; and the more
of it he acquires, the greater is his chance of overcoming his
difficulties.
,by a hasty retreat from the
situation. Children especially, in whom the restraints of
civilization are not as yet very firmly established, may rush
from the room when they feel themselves
Self-Defence pp
being overwhelmed, to “have it out” by themselves. In
these cases the ego, the conscious I, struggles to retain its
control over that other which is not itself, that psychic force
which threatens to take possession of consciousness.
Primitive man explained this other as being a god or
daemon who entered into him, and we for our part use
similar expressions to explain the phenomenon. We say, “He
acted as if possessed,” or “I don’t know what got into him.”
We are inclined to look indulgently on invasions of this kind,
as if they were natural phenomena, unfortunate perhaps,
but unavoidable. Certainly when one is oneself the victim of
such an uprush of primitive libido, one tends not to hold
oneself entirely responsible. The loss of self-control seems in
itself an adequate excuse for the outbreak. With the
explanation, “I was not quite myself,” or “When he spoke to
me like that I saw red,” or “When I struck him I hardly knew
what I was doing,” the violent action seems justified.
But as the conscious ego gains ability to control or repress
these instinctive reactions, it begins to dominate the
psyche, and man is compelled to take increasing
responsibility for his own emotions: the individual is obliged
to admit that it was his own anger or fear that caused the
outbreak. If in spite of all his struggles to overcome his
emotions, he still remains subject to attacks that override
^the control of his ego, he confesses that under certain
circumstances he may experience anger or fear or hate
beyond human measure—compulsions of daemonic energy.
It is characteristic of a certain stage of psychological
development that these emotions arising from the
nonpersonal part of the psyche are projected into a being
outside oneself. Instead of saying that he has been
possessed by a daemon, a man at this level will say that it
was God who was angry. In this way he ignores his own
responsibility for the anger, for he becomes merely the tool
chosen by God to express divine wrath.
“Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord”: these
words were spoken by the prophet of the God of wars, in
whose name the Israelites had fought many a campaign.
Now
100
they were being taught that the anger belonged to God, and
that when they revenged themselves they were really
avenging his injuries.
Put yourselves in array against Babylon round about: all ye
that bend the bow, shoot at her, spare no arrows; for she
hath sinned against the Lord. Shout against her round
about: she hath given her hand: her foundations are fallen,
her walls are thrown down: for it is the vengeance of the
Lord: take vengeance upon her; as she hath done, do unto
her . 2
This battle cry purported to be a summons to avenge the
injuries that God had suffered, but surely the injuries that
God’s people had suffered gave edge to their anger. Their
ascription of anger to God was little more than a
rationalization, or an assumption that God also suffered the
emotions they felt so hot within themselves; that is to say,
they projected the daemonic emotions that took possession
of them into a divine figure envisaged as outside
themselves.y. They created God in their own image.
But when we come to the Christian era, another step has
been taken. Paul writes to his converts in Rome:
Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give
place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will
repay, saith the Lord. Therefore if thine enemy hunger, feed
him; if he thirst, give him drink; for in so doing thou shalt
heap coals of fire on his head. Be not overcome of evil, but
overcome evil with good . 3
God is still thought of as outside the psyche; moreover, the
personification has gone a step farther. It is here thought
that God alone, without the co-operation of man, will bring a
suitable retribution on those who have disobeyed the divine
laws. This change in attitude went hand in hand with the
emergence of the idea of an impersonal justice or law. It was
no longer necessary for each man to be a law unto himself:
the law now stood above his private feeling and judgment.
To be able to submit in any real way, in his own being, to the
arbitration of the law, implied a discipline of instinctive and
spontaneous
2. Jer. 50:14, 15.
3. Rom. 12:19-21.
101
Self-Defence
reactions that it must have taken hundreds of years to
acquire. And indeed the ascendancy of the civilized man
over the primitive, in any one of us, is still so precarious that
we must all at times have experienced actual physical
reactions indicating anger, violent anger at that, the while
our conscious thoughts, words, and feelings remained
perfectly balanced and under control. Who has not felt
himself physically “burning” at an insult he would not dream
of resenting openly, or clenching his fists during what tvas
on the surface a perfectly friendly argument?
In times of physical danger even the most heroic may be
aware that their bodies are acting as though under the
influence of abject terror; the effects may be so marked that
the individual may be compelled to give way to them
momentarily. At the same time his mind may remain clear,
and as soon as the physical reaction subsides he is able to
do whatever is necessary to meet the crisis, quite
regardless of personal risk. These persons could not for a
moment be accused of cowardice, yet their bodily reactions
are those of primitive and uncontrollable terror. Our
judgment may even tell us that their courage is of a higher
order than that of less sensitive persons who do not
experience the impact of fear as acutely.
Conventional training insists that these violent emotions be
dealt with by repression or by conscious control. In civilized
countries all children are taught to control both their actions
and their emotions. This lesson is learned with varying
degrees of success, but all learn it in some measure. In fact,
many persons become so adept at hiding their instinctive
reactions, not only from others but also from themselves,
that their very self-control makes them liable to another
danger. For should the inner barriers be let down even
slightly, through a lowering of the threshold of
consciousness (as a result of fatigue or the use of alcohol or
some other depressant), or should the external restraints be
removed by changes in the outer conditions, the repressed
reactions may burst forth unrestrainedly and prove
themselves doubly destructive, just because the person in
whom they occur has been so completely unaware of their
presence.
102
If this occurs in modern persons, how much more serious
must the danger have been in the beginnings of civilization.
In truth, a large part of the energy of man throughout the
centuries has been devoted to combating and controlling his
compulsive emotions. In some civilizations, this demand for
selfcontrol has been so implacable that to show any emotion
at all has meant loss of face. In others, the whole culture
has been based on the disciplines of war: the national hero
was the warrior, and the virtues of the warlike spirit
represented the social ideal. Ancient Sparta was such a
warrior state, and its name is still a synonym for an attitude
of utmost fortitude and self-control. The Roman Empire
likewise was founded very largely on a military ideal. Some
of the American Indian tribes, such as the Iroquois, based
their whole morality on war and its discipline, which
accounts for the degradation that befell them when the
white man would no longer allow their braves to go on the
warpath. In both Germany and Japan in recent years, the
prestige of an elite caste was conferred on military
personnel; the qualities most esteemed were obedience,
discipline, hardness, and disregard
,of all other values, even
life itself, for the sake of military objectives.
It has even been asserted that periodic wars are necessary
for the spiritual health of a nation, doubtless on account of
the beneficial effect that military discipline has on the
individual man. For not only can military training change a
primitive man possessed by a bloodthirsty daemon into a
warrior or a knight, but it can also transform an indolent and
selfindulgent boy into an alert and self-reliant citizen.
Furthermore, when men face a common danger together
and are dependent on each other for their safety, they
develop a particular kind of comradeship that has a high
moral value; for it relegates personal safety and advantage
to a secondary place and binds them together as perhaps
no other human experience can. Also, common danger and
the devotion that is engendered by war no less than by dire
necessity, seem to stimulate the national life to fresh
efforts. Fong overdue social reforms are undertaken with
enthusiasm, while scientific research takes on new life. Even
the birth rate usually increases markedly. It
seems as though the life of the nation were rejuvenated
through the psychic forces released by war.
yet from the beginning of civilization it must have been
obvious that the primitive resentments and murderous
angers of the individual would have to be checked by
something more than the discipline of the warrior band if
men were to live together in villages or tribes and co-
operate for purposes of selfpreservation. For when the
instinct to kill is aroused, it may go on working
autonomously, seeking ever new victims in friend and foe
alike. Therefore elaborate customs regulating war as well as
quarrels between individuals are met with all over the world.
For example, certain tribes practise rites de sortie after
battle, in addition to the rites cTentree 4 designed to arouse
the warlike spirit of the braves; for once the spear has
tasted blood, as they say, it thirsts to taste it again, and will
not care whom it kills. Thus when the young men return
from the warpath they are not feted as heroes, nor are they
allowed to strut about the village displaying their
bloodstained weapons. Instead, they are disarmed,
segregated in huts outside the village, given purgatives or
sweat baths, and fed on bread and water until the spirit of
war has left them and they are themselves again. They then
return to the village in a chastened mood, and there is no
danger of furfher bloodshed.
These and similar restraints upon man’s aggressive instincts
laid the foundation for the most important cultural
development of the period extending from the tenth century
over more than five hundred years, which was
predominantly concerned with gaining control of the warlike
spirit and the aggressive instinct. This epoch was actually
named “the days of
4. The terms rite cPentree and rite de sortie denote certain
rituals designed respectively to induct an individual into an
unusual or taboo condition and to release him from it at the
expiration of the given time or function. He is thus set apart
to perform certain duties that are otherwise taboo. He is
believed to become imbued with the daemon or spirit whose
special realm he has entered, and to remain so possessed
until he is “disinfected” and released by the rite de sortie.
The martial state in men, and the period of childbirth in
women, are examples of taboo conditions requiring rites de
sortie, while rites d'entree are practised in connection not
only with war but also with hunting and other activities.
chivalry” on account of the cultural achievements resulting
from the disciplining of men in regard to combat. It was felt
at that time that the emotions from which quarrels between
individuals and wars between groups arose were valuable,
and an elaborate discipline was devised to control without
repressing them. For they were the true source of that
courage and mettle which were so highly prized and so
necessary for group survival in the unsettled state of Europe
in that era.
From about the time of puberty, boys of upper-class families
were trained in the school of chivalry. If they became
proficient not only in the use of arms but also in the ability
to handle themselves and control their emotions, they were
initiated, at the end of adolescence, into the ranks of the
knights, who formed an elite caste. To achieve knighthood
was, indeed, the supreme accomplishment; it had a spiritual
meaning in addition to the significance of graduation into
manhood.
The psychological movement of which mediaeval chivalry
was a part was accompanied by a profound change in the
relation between the sexes. Men began to seek for an
entirely new kind of association with women. From being
primarily a biological object for man—the source of sexual
satisfaction, the mother of his children, and the keeper of
his householdwoman became the focus of new and strange
emotions. Romantic love began to play a prominent part in
men’s thoughts. The birth of this new devotion to the “fair
lady” went hand in hand with the development of manly and
chivalric virtues. The connection between the two ideals is
clearly seen in the literature of the period—in the
Mabinogion of the Celts and the related Arthurian cycle, or
in early French romances such as Aucassin et Nicolette. It is
interesting to observe that the somewhat earlier Chanson
de Roland is an epic of chivalry devoted entirely to feats of
war and the friendships of comradesin-arms, while the
theme of the fair lady is practically absent.
The association between discipline and control of the
warlike instinct and the beginnings of romantic love is no
accident. From the psychological point of view, man, instead
of being merely the puppet of the unconscious, had become
in some measure his own master. There had come into
being a psychic
function that related his conscious personality in a
meaningful way with those dark sources of psychic energy
which had formerly held him in their grip. This psychic
function was maintained by his unknown, other side, his
feminine counterpart or soul, which Jung has called the
anima. 5 To become acquainted with this “fair lady,” to
rescue her from the power of dragon and tyrant—
personifications of the untamed instinctive drives —and to
serve her, became his chief spiritual necessity. Naturally he
could not see this process directly. It sprang from a cultural
movement, a process taking place in the unconscious of
hundreds of persons and moulding the very spirit of the
times. The individual always perceives these unconscious
soul happenings in projected form, that is to say, his
attention is caught by and riveted on an outer happening
that derives its fascination from the unconscious energy it
symbolizes and reflects. The soul of man, his anima, came
into being when he succeeded in separating himself from
complete identity with the unconscious drives; being
feminine, it was projected into an actual or ideal woman,
and so was personified.
When the individual man was in danger of being sucked
back into a more primitive condition, his anima appeared as
threatening. Then he envisaged woman as bestial or
devilish. But as he gradually succeeded in dissolving the
identification with his compulsive instincts, his anima
likewise changed and began to appear in desirable guise.
The projection then fell on a woman who was also seen as
desirable. In her aloof bearing, in the subtle attraction of her
otherness, her difference from man, woman carried some of
the mana, the glamour, the mysterious potency that had
functioned in uncivilized man as concomitants of blind
passion. The spell that woman’s allure put upon man now
aided him in his struggle with the barbaric elements in his
nature. For the fair lady’s sake he would undergo any
discipline, no matter how rigorous; or he would undertake a
quest in the name of the
,“destressed damsel,” whom, in the
legends at least, he unfailingly rescued. We, with
5. See C. G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (C.W.
7); M. E. Harding, The Way of All Women; E. Bertine, Human
Relationships: in the Family, in Friendship, in Love.
our greater psychological insight, recognize this quest as
the journey into the inner world in search of his soul,
perpetually awaiting his arrival.
The interest of the whole community was focused on the
exploits of the elite caste of chivalry. They lived their lives
ritually, as it were, not only for themselves but for the group
as well. They were set apart in order that they might fulfill
this imperative of life. Private acts of vengeance were
replaced by tournaments and duels, fought and won before
an audience of the entire community. A,knight was not
permitted to redress a wrong by an immediate retaliation: to
do so was considered barbarous and unworthy. He had to
wait until a time could be set for a formal meeting with his
enemy. Even when they did meet they could not plunge into
a murderous brawl but had to restrain themselves and act
according to prescribed forms, under the direction of
umpires. Gradually the skill of the combatants came to have
a greater importance than the amount of bodily injury they
could inflict on each other by brute strength. Friends would
challenge each other at a tournament to see which was the
better man, and the observance of the rules came to be
spoken of as “fair play.” The deadly fight had now become
play!
In the days of chivalry, when the tournament held such an
important place in the education and civilizing of men and in
the tempering of their instinct of self-defence, obedience to
the rules and the carrying out of the ritual became an aim in
itself. This aim interposed itself between the combatants
and their immediate goal of killing each other.
Consequently, the primitive urge of the instinct was
deflected from its primary objective and found at least
partial satisfaction in another realm. This modification was
fostered by the regulations governing knightly combat. In
the first place, time was allowed to intervene between the
injury and the retribution, so that passions cooled in the
interim; further, as the emphasis came to be placed on skill,
the combatant who was more successful than his rival in
keeping cool had a definite advantage. When brute force
counts most, emotion is helpful, for it lends strength to the
blow; but when prowess depends on dexterity,
the balance is otherwise. The man who has himself in hand,
who is not the helpless servant of his own passion, has the
advantage over a less disciplined opponent.
When the encounter took place in open tournament, a
secondary objective came into the picture. For part of the
combatant’s concern was diverted from the effort to injure
his opponent to the desire to please the onlookers by
playing, in its every detail, the role of the ideal warrior. In
this way, satisfaction of his anger and of his desire for
revenge was gained on a different plane. A knight who had
been insulted or dishonoured felt himself to be reinstated as
much through the approval of the community as by the
shedding of his opponent’s blood. Later it was considered a
sufficient satisfaction to gain this public approval, even
though the opponent suffered a defeat that inflicted only a
token injury or merely hurt his prestige while leaving his
person uninjured.
The tales of the Mabinogion and of the entire Arthurian
literature show the transformation thus wrought upon the
instinct of self-defence. Instead of fighting only to avenge
bodily or material injury, a man might fight to defend his
honour or to reinstate himself in the eyes of his lady, who
represented ideal womanhood. These goals reflect the more
refined aspects of ego striving. Or perhaps his courage was
dedicated to a more impersonal image, such as the Holy
Sepulchre, or the Holy Grail, for* which many a knight of the
Middle Ages risked his life. For to him these were symbols of
inestimable worth, surpassing even the claims of his
personal safety and honour.
To what extent this change was really effective in mediaeval
man we have no means of knowing. The stories of the
Round Table are undoubtedly idealized accounts, or perhaps
wholly fictitious. Yet because they show a change in the
ideal of the times, they are valid evidence that a real
psychological transformation was taking place. Individual
men may never have attained the heroic level attributed to
the knights of Arthur’s court; but that generations of people
preserved or even invented such tales indicates that man
was capable of conceiving of such a modification of the
instinct and of ad
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
108
miring it. Indeed, from that time on the very name of knight
came to have new significance. It no longer meant merely
warrior or soldier: “knightly virtue,” “a chivalrous act,” are
concepts that to this day carry the hallmark of devotion to a
suprapersonal motive.
the first lesson a candidate for knighthood had to learn was
to overcome himself. The ideal of self-mastery, and the
obligation to overcome the animal instinct in one’s nature, is
also represented in the ritual of the Spanish bullfight. Brutal
and disgusting as this survival from a barbarous age is in
the opinion of most Western people, it is nevertheless very
instructive. It demonstrates that a symbol containing in
potentia all the factors necessary for the redemption of
primitive energy may yet produce no change in the
psychology of either the participants or the onlookers,
because it remains merely an outer spectacle. If it were
realized to be a symbolic act, the drama of the bull ring
might perhaps serve to set on foot an inner conquest of
brute instinct and a change in the unconscious of the
Spanish people.
The bull, being the largest, most powerful, and most
dangerous of the domesticated or semidomesticated
animals, represents the bull-like, only partially tamed
instincts and passions of man. The ritual begins with a
procession in which the bull, garlanded with flowers, has the
place of honour. Just as in an older day the bull was deified,
so here too homage is paid to his indomitable power and
energy, which are recognized as suprahuman, even divine.
When the fight begins, the bull is attacked first by men on
foot, then by men on horseback, who fail to overcome him.
This shows his superiority to the average human, to
collective man; that is, instinct is recognized as being
stronger than ego. At last the matador, the hero, makes his
appearance, alone and on foot. It is his task, as the
embodiment of the heroic quality in man, to face the
enraged bull and overcome him. But this is not an ordinary
killing, the slaughter of a dangerous beast. It is a ritual act,
and the matador must carry out the rite in every detail,
even at the risk of his own life. The bull must be
Self-Defence 109
killed in a particular manner; any matador who dispatched
his antagonist in a slovenly and unskillful fashion would be
hissed from the ring. His task is not to butcher the animal
but to demonstrate a certain attitude towards it: for the bull
is the carrier or representative of a suprapersonal value—an
essence that is both blind emotion and a god—and through
its death man is redeemed from subjection to his own
passion.
The majority of people who attend bullfights are quite
unaware of what is happening before their eyes, though the
action holds them and moves them, indeed transports them
completely beyond themselves. It obviously touches a root
deep in the unconscious and full of vitality and power. Were
the symbolic drama understood, it surely would have a
profound psychological influence. When such a drama is
enacted and not understood, it has a brutalizing effect on
actors and spectators alike, serving merely to sanction
indulgence of a crude and brutal blood
,lust.
If, however, the bullfight were to be perceived as a symbolic
portrayal of the age-old need to overcome the animal
instinct in man himself, the actual combat would be
replaced by a ritual drama. It might then become an
experience by which man could learn that he must control
his blind and compulsive instinct and release himself from
its dominance. Such a transformation would be in line with
the evolution of the rituals of redemption in many religions;
these rites usually have their roots in ancient and brutal
sacrifices analogous to the bullfight. For the matador is the
symbol of the fact that it is only by a heroic act, indeed a
heroic attitude, that man can quell his passions. If he is able
to remain cool and to maintain his self-possession in face of
the onrush of his own angers and brute instincts, he will
perhaps be a match for them, in spite of the fact that they
dispose over far more energy than is available to his new-
found ego consciousness. Skill, self-discipline, and a ritual or
religious attitude, are the factors that turn the scales in his
favour.
This aspect of the ritual combat with the animal was
practised in ancient Crete, where captured youths, men and
maidens, were trained to “play” with the bulls, and finally
110
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
to kill them, in order to demonstrate the power of discipline
over blind instinct represented by the bull. In figure 4 such a
ritual sacrifice is depicted. It comes from a gold bead seal,
found in a Mycenean rock tomb, near Thisbe.
When in the course of psychological analysis an individual is
confronted with the problem of having to deal with power
ful instincts newly aroused through the confrontation with
his shadow 6 the problem may be represented in dreams as
a fight with a wild and powerful animal. A modern woman,
who was faced with a problem of this nature, dreamed that
a primitive man was attacked by a fierce bull. There ensued
a desperate struggle but finally the man killed the bull by a
stab behind the shoulder, which strangely corresponds to
the wound inflicted ritually, so long ago, in Crete. (See plate
II.)
There are many legends and stories as well as actual
historical events that exemplify the emergence of such a
heroic attitude. A highly instructive instance is the
legendary encounter between David and Goliath. The
armies of the Israel
6. See below, note, p. 295.
Ill
Self-Defence
ites and the Philistines were encamped over against each
other, and day after day Goliath, a giant of enormous size
and strength, came out before the army of the Philistines
and challenged the Israelites to send over a champion to
meet him in single combat. The outcome of the encounter
was to decide the battle, though the custom of the time was
to fight to the last man, with the victor annihilating the
vanquished foe and despoiling his country. To the children of
Israel this was a sacred duty imposed by the voice of
Jehovah, for he was a warlike God and embodied the
unconscious drives of a people who had only recently fought
their way to a land in which to live. Then came the battle
with the Philistines, who were more firmly established and
held superiority in power. Their champion, Goliath,
represented their reliance on brute strength. David, who
volunteered to meet him as champion of the Israelites, was,
in marked contrast, a youth—hardly more than a boy. Yet he
overcame his huge opponent by skillful use of a weapon of
no intrinsic strength, his shepherd’s sling, devised to drive
off the wild animals that threatened the flock at night. This
victory signified that force was no longer the most powerful
factor in the world. The Lord of Hosts was changing his
character. As David said: “The Lord saveth not with sword
and spear.” A time Was approaching when these predatory
tribes would be obliged to settle down, when skill would
have to replace might.
in this story, whether it is legend or historical fact, David
and Goliath engage in actual combat, but their duel
foreshadows a change in attitude that led by degrees to the
substitution of a ritual encounter for the actual one. Thus
the very nature and meaning of the combat underwent a
change. Man’s struggle against his foe became a drama
representing his conquest of brute instinct itself, perhaps
even of the spirit of passion—anger or hostility—personified
in the enemy. In the episodes of the Arthurian cycle, the
opponent—whether legendary knight, magician, or dragon—
was, to the hero of the Round Table, the very personification
of evil: to destroy him was to rid the world of an accursed
thing. At that stage in
112
psychological development, the evil lurking in the
unconscious was projected into the “enemy” and hated and
attacked as if it had no connection with the protagonist
other than that he felt himself destined to struggle with and
overcome this menace or die in the attempt. But in a still
later stage, man came to realize that it was the barbaric
spirit within himself that he had to overcome, albeit still in
the person of an outward opponent.
In the tournaments, where the embodiment of the inimical
force was not an actual foe, but might be a friend chosen to
play the role, the realization of the ritual nature of the
encounter hovered just below the threshold of
consciousness. It was only a short step farther to the
recognition that the real enemy was not a person but a
destructive instinct, a psychological force, a spirit—not of
course a daemon or ghost, a spirit in the primitive sense,
but rather a psychological factor of nonpersonal origin,
much in the sense in which we speak of the warlike spirit, or
the spirit of adventure. Yet when such a motive force arises
from the unconscious and acts compulsively and
autonomously in the individual, it is almost as if he were
possessed by a daemon or spirit in the antique sense of the
term. As Paul says, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood,
but against the powers of darkness in high places.”
The idea of the struggle against evil is frequently
represented in the terms of actual warfare—the “soldiers of
Christ” are urged to “fight the good fight,” etc.—and indeed
it is a battle. But only too often this combat is not
recognized as a contest that should be waged in the
subjective realm, within a man’s own heart. Instead, he sees
the forces of evil only outside himself: they are projected
and thus personified in another being as the mortal enemy.
This psychological mechanism of projection has been the
cause of many brutalities throughout the centuries.
Religious persecutions-inquisitions, pogroms, and crusades
—have been carried out by men who believed themselves to
have all of the truth, with the consequence that the enemy
had only its opposite, all the error. Such a one-sided and
fanatical attitude always denotes complete ignorance of
what lies in one’s own
Self-Defence / / ^
unconscious. It seems to the zealot that God himself
demands that the evil in the other man be attacked and
overcome. Campaigns against evil, of the most brutal and
barbarous type, have been undertaken, over and over
again, at the instigation of God—or so their perpetrators
believed—a God who like the God of Hosts of Old Testament
days could brook no opposition. This was but one of the
many gods of battle whom men have worshipped and in
whose name they have indulged their own barbaric
impulses. Ishtar of Babylon was goddess of hosts as well as
Magna Mater, giver of nourishment and embodiment of
vegetation. Mars was god of war and at the same time the
spirit of spring. And many another deity has represented the
negative-positive energies that have their origin in man’s
own instinctive drives.
To realize that the god is indeed only the personification of
that spirit power which rules in man’s unconscious requires
insight that was beyond the psychological range of the man
of antiquity. To him it seemed rather that his god was an
,external being of most arbitrary disposition. He did not
suspect that this angry, jealous, undependable god, who
gave life and plenty at one moment only to blast and
destroy at the next, was really a projection of the powerful
and unaccountable forces within himself.
However, even the character of gods may change; that is to
say, the instinctive drives deep-buried in the unconscious of
man are subject to an evolutionary psychic development or
transformation that is mirrored in the transformation of the
character of God. I have already referred briefly to the
change that took place in the Israelites’ concept of Jehovah.
From being a bloodthirsty God of battles when the Israelites
were predatory tribes who had descended upon the land of
Canaan, he became a far more spiritual God, the Shepherd
of Israel, a God of morality, for whom justice was more than
vengeance. A similar transformation took place in the
character of the Greek gods. Finally a time arrived when
man began to understand that the gods really represented a
law within himself.
In earliest antiquity, Zeus was the Thunderer hurling his
bolts at all who offended him, whether man or beast. He rep
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE, U4
resented the power of brute instinct. But there came a time
when he made a differentiation. His law for the beasts was
still that they must be guided by their instincts. They
remained under the law of Zeus the Thunderer. But man had
now to learn a different law. Conflict for him was to result
not in violence but in justice. “Fishes and beasts and fowls
of the air devour one another,” writes Hesiod, “but to man,
Zeus has given justice. Beside Zeus on his throne, Justice
has her seat.” 7
the negative aspect of enmity is obvious; its positive fruits
are not so readily recognized. Courage, self-sacrifice, and
the other virtues mobilized by war grow in proportion to the
dangers that threaten. For danger can rouse an individual or
a nation to such profound recognition of essential values
that private welfare is forgotten, at least while the peril
lasts.
But beyond these lies another potential value of entirely
different dimension. For the dynamic forces that the instinct
of self-defence has power to arouse are of an intensity that
overrides the boundaries of the conscious part of the
psyche. We could hardly have believed at the beginning of
this century that passions and qualities we thought long ago
outgrown were only slumbering beneath the surface of our
complacency and laisser aller attitude. Little pleasures, little
comforts, wellbounded ambitions and ideals, expressed our
philosophy of life. Then came in rapid succession two world
wars, let loose by men who despised small virtues and little
pleasures and threw open the doors to unlimited,
unbounded desirousness and brutality. The day of the small
things was past.
Just over twenty years ago, 8 in a lecture before a small
group of people, Jung remarked that when the forces of the
unconscious slumber, man lives a petty life concerned
merely with little things. He lives on the personal level only.
But if a big idea awakens in such a man, be it an idea of
good or of evil, it arouses energies belonging to the
nonpersonal level, and he begins to live beyond himself. He
becomes the tool, the mouthpiece of a force greater than
his ego. He becomes in
7. Works and Days, 11 . 276-81. Cf. Evelyn-White trans., pp.
23-25.
8. This was written in 1947.
Self-Defence u$
fact the soldier of an idea, and as such he can change the
face of the world. Here is another value of war, which can be
positive, but may on the other hand precipitate the greatest
of tragedies.
It is perhaps not possible for the group, for collective man,
to advance beyond the stage that Hesiod depicts. If the
nations can reinstate Justice beside Zeus upon his throne,
much will have been accomplished. If any further
transformation of the aggressive instincts is to take place,
we shall have to look to the individual, in whom alone
psychological understanding and development can be
achieved. I have already spoken of the part that conflict
plays in separating the individual from the dominance of the
group and from his own dependence on its support, and of
the fact that when he finds himself alone and unsupported
by the group approval and morality, he is likely to fall into
conflict again as soon as he is confronted with any situation
that arouses an instinctive emotional response. At such a
moment he will find himself flooded with involuntary
reactions threatening to drag him back to an old behaviour
pattern. If this regression is to be avoided, a further step
must be taken to enable him to understand his own psyche
and to adapt or modify the instinct itself.
The psychological insight that Hindu religious thought brings
to this problem is most illuminating. The BhagavadGita tells
the story of a hero, Arjuna, who was about to engage in a
battle of vengeance against a kinsman. His every instinct
was against the inevitable slaughter of his relatives, but his
duty, according to the law of the day, was to do battle. In
the greatest conflict and depression, he went a little apart to
struggle with himself and try to see his situation more
clearly. As he sat in his chariot, the god Krishna came to him
in the guise of the charioteer and taught him the meaning of
the battle. The god pointed out to him that as he was of the
warrior caste his role was to fight and carry out the
obligations of a warrior. Thus and thus only could he fulfill
his own karma, or fate. Then the teaching touched a more
profound level. Krishna explained that the evil kinsman
whom Arjuna must defeat really represented his own
shadow, the powers of ag
gression and egotism within himself. In fighting the actual
battle he was fighting a symbolic one as well, for the enemy
was also himself. By overcoming his kinsman he himself
would be released from the karma of a warrior.
The cycle is thus completed. The individual first projects the
evil of which he is unconscious. Then in his anger and
resentment towards that evil he separates himself from
unconscious identification with the group and at long last
comes to recognize that it is his own evil that he has been
fighting. Through this recognition a little more of the
nonpersonal energy of the instinct becomes available for
redemption from the depths, and the individual is released
to move a step forward in his psychological development.
Reproduction
I. SEXUALITY: Lust and Love
4
T he instinct of self-preservation safeguards the life and
well-being of the individual: the well-being of the race is
served in a similar way by an instinct for race preservation.
This instinct, however, operates not in the race as a whole
but in the individuals comprising it. At the same time, since
the life of the race precedes the life of the current
generation, and will continue long after the latter has
perished, it is, as an entity, something greater than the sum
of the lives of its living members. Consequently, the impulse
that ensures the continuance of the race will function
regardless of the selfinterest of the individual. It may be
detrimental to his personal interests, may even destroy him.
Thus at times an opposition can arise between the two great
impulses that guard life.
In a purely natural existence, in which the instincts have
complete control, this conflict can readily be observed.
Whenever it arises, the instinct for race preservation seems
to take precedence over the instinct for individual
preservation. For example, it is said that a fruit tree affected
by disease or injury may produce a bumper crop. When its
life is threatened, the tree produces more fruit than before,
regardless of the fact that it thereby squanders the vital
energies needed for its recuperation. By a similar reaction,
the number of bees in a hive will increase when the colony
is threatened by shortage
,of food. It is as though nature
were making a last desperate at
" 7
tempt to carry on the life of the community by sheer weight
of numbers, regardless of how many perish of starvation.
The bees carry out this suicidal policy themselves, though
they will also on occasion ruthlessly kill off large numbers of
their fellows, if the welfare of the hive seems to require the
sacrifice. It would seem that nature is greatly concerned
with the survival of the race and relatively less concerned
about the welfare of the individual.
When, however, the original condition is modified by the
active intervention of individuals who have come to realize
themselves consciously, the natural course of events is
disturbed. These humans seek to conserve their individual
lives, often in preference to serving the collective life of the
race. For when ego consciousness comes on the scene and
the instincts lose some of their compulsory character
through psychic transformation, the balance between the
instinctual forces changes.
Nature gives precedence to the race; from the point of view
of the ego, the well-being of the individual is obviously the
essential value. The ego would say, “What would happen to
the life of the race if the individuals that make it should
perish?” Or, as the Negro spiritual puts it, “It’s me, it’s me,
it’s me, O Lord.” In the struggle between the two instincts,
the scales can occasionally be turned, by conscious
intervention, in favour of personal survival; yet man’s power
to change the natural order for his own benefit is not as
great as he thinks. For the law of instinct functions within
him; it is not a rule imposed from without. And nature’s
ancient way usually prevails.
It is possible for a woman afflicted with a grave disease,
such as cancer, to go through a normal pregnancy. The child
may be born healthy and well-nourished, even though the
mother’s illness progresses more rapidly. In the case of such
an unfortunate pregnancy, the child is formed and develops
at the cost of the mother’s life, regardless of her own wishes
in the matter. Here nature makes the choice. On the other
hand, a mother may consciously choose to save her child,
even though the decision costs her own life. Or a woman
may deliberately
allow herself to become pregnant even though her
conscious judgment warns her that it is folly, perhaps even
fatal folly, to do so.
The force of the instinctive mechanism that works to
preserve the race even at the expense of the individual is
particularly demonstrated in wartime. The marked rise in
the birth rate that generally occurs in such periods indicates
that the impulse to reproduce grows stronger when the life
of the race is threatened, even though from the point of
view of the individual the advisability of assenting to it is
open to serious question.
The reproductive instinct manifests itself in two aspects,
sexuality and parenthood. Discussion of the parental instinct
has been reserved for the following chapter; the analysis
here will centre upon the sexual instinct.
The fundamental importance of sexuality in the
psychological make-up of modern men and women has
been brought into the open through the researches of Freud
and his followers. The demonstration that creative activities
of many kinds, cultural, artistic, and scientific, depend for
their energy au fond on the sexual instinct, no longer shocks
us as it did our immediate forebears. The instinctive roots of
erotic and romantic love have been made abundantly clear
to us by Freud. It remained for Jung to demonstrate the
developmental trend inherent in this fundamental instinct. 1
The tendency to psychic modification of the biological
instincts, which is innate in the human being, has produced
a wealth of cultural achievements whose origin can be
traced back, by a process of reductive analysis, to instincts
hardly more differentiated than the rudimentary reflexes
from which they arose: yet we cannot conclude from such
an analysis that the final cultural product is nothing but a
displaced sexual gesture. For creative work has been
expended upon the crude impulse, with the result that a
cultural value has been produced, and in addition that the
instinct itself has been transformed for the use of society.
It is with this aspect of the process that Jung has been i. See
C. G. Jung, Symbols of Transformation (C.W. 5).
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
120
especially concerned. He was impressed with the fact that
the tendency to evolution is inherent in the living organism.
It is not something imposed from without, nor is it an
invention of consciousness. Living forms have evolved quite
apart from any conscious aim. The aim, if aim there was,
came from a source of which the organism was completely
unaware—that is, the motivation was unconscious.
Furthermore, this “aim” was apparently passed on from one
generation to another; for most of the adaptations that have
actually been achieved have required many generations for
their evolution. In his researches in regard to the
unconscious background of the human psyche, Jung
observed contents that could not be satisfactorily explained
on the basis of the Freudian theory of repression; their
meaning became apparent only when they were
teleologically interpreted. The evidence supporting this
point of view is not rare nor inaccessible. It is available to
anyone who has the means of understanding the
happenings that go on in the background of his own psyche.
In the depths of the unconscious, the old, long-established
life patterns are eternally repeated; at the same time,
nature is also continually producing new forms, undertaking
new experiments. This we recognize to be so in the
biological sphere; a study of the unconscious demonstrates
that it is true in regard to the psychological realm as well.
It is comparatively easy to trace the steps of an
evolutionary process upon which we look back. It is much
harder to credit the idea that there are still embryonic,
unfinished structures to be found within the living individual
of the present day, and that these, far from being
meaningless, actually bear the germs of significant new
forms whose nature we cannot even guess. Yet, unless we
assume that the evolutionary process has come to an end
with our own era, and that man today stands at the apex of
his development for all time, we must admit that unfinished
structures now in process of evolution do actually exist both
in the body and in the psyche. If we do not accept this, we
are tacitly assuming that twentiethcentury man is less, far
less than his predecessors; for has he not lost their greatest
potentiality, namely, the power to initiate new forms? If so,
modern man is not at the peak of evolu
tion; he is a long way down on the other side of the
mountain, and must shortly be replaced by a more virile
organism retaining the power to evolve. It is with the
evidence of this power to evolve, as it is manifested in the
psychological sphere, that Jung and his followers are so
particularly concerned.
The original impulse expressing the sexual instinct is bound
up with gratification of the organism’s own physical need. At
this level of development, interest in the sexual object is
limited to the consideration of its suitability as stimulus and
adjuvant to the act. On the animal level, there is apparently
no awareness that the sexual partner is moved by impulses
similar to the subject’s own and seeks similar satisfactions;
nor is there any awareness of the consequences of the
sexual act in terms of reproduction. It was not until the
process of psychic transformation of the instinct had
progressed considerably that awareness of these two
factors came into consciousness. Among the most primitive
tribes, even adults do not seem to be aware of them, while
in civilized societies, children may be moved by sexual
impulses long before they have any consciousness of
,the
meaning of such feelings or any realization of their goal.
Moreover, the compulsory effect of the instinct is such that
too often mere knowledge has little connection with
behaviour.
Ancient tribal rituals and taboos pertaining to the sexual
function had as their aim the release of the individual from
the dominance of his sexual impulses. Participation in these
rites initiated the process called psychization 2 —a change
marked by development of the power to control to some
extent the automatic response to sexual stimulation. With
the increase of this power came the ability to choose a mate
instead of being at the mercy of an uncontrollable physical
reaction to any chance stimulus.
When man came to realize the connection between
sexuality and reproduction, a new phase in the psychic
modification of the instinct was inaugurated. The idea arose
that there was a connection between his own reproductive
power and the fertility of his fields and herds: to him both
were the work
2. See above, pp. 20-23.
122
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
of a “spirit of fertility.” 3 Through the use and discipline of
his own impulses he hoped to influence the fertility of the
land. The magic ceremonies and religious rituals that grew
out of this idea had an enormous influence on man’s
relation to his sexual instinct. Not only did these ritual
practices help him to disidentify himself in some measure
from the insistent demand of the instinct; they also made
him realize that although the sex desire arose in his body
and seemed to be an expression of his most intimate self, it
was in a sense also something separate from himself—a
daemonic force or spirit that used him or operated in him.
There are thus in the sexual instinct, as in the instinct of
self-preservation, two trends, one having a social and the
other a religious goal. The social component of the libido
sexualis moves towards the goal of human relationship.
Love of mate and offspring, and the urge to form a family
unit and a home within the community, are the products of
this trend. The religious component leads towards the goal
of unification within the individual himself, through a union
or marriage of the male and female elements within the
psyche. For the religious mystic, throughout the ages, this
inner marriage has been a symbol of the union of the soul
with God. For the psychologist, it signifies the union of the
conscious personality with the unconscious part of the
psyche, whereby the individual is made whole.
this gradual development or transformation of the sexual
instinct can be traced in the history of the race and must be
recapitulated in the experience of each individual, if he is to
attain psychological maturity. At first, the sexual instinct is
merely a bodily urge unrelated to any knowledge of its
possible results in reproduction or to love of a partner. It is
merely an urge akin to other biological impulses, such as
hunger, the desire to eliminate, and the inclination to sleep.
So far as we know, there are no tribes on earth so primitive
and unconscious that they know nothing of the meaning
3. See M. E. Harding, Woman's Mysteries, for Spirit of
Fertility and associated sexual rites.
of this bodily urge; there are still some, however, like the
Aruntas of Australia, who profess not to know the
connection between intercourse and pregnancy . 4 It is
probable, however, that they do really know it, while their
formal belief, based on tradition, does not take cognizance
of it. They will state that a woman became pregnant
because she slept under a particular tree or drew water
from a certain spring, or because the light of the moon fell
upon her: these are the accepted explanations of pregnancy.
If one can get the informant to be more frank, he will admit
that she probably also had relations with a man. This is an
example of the way in which traditional teaching takes the
place of thinking among primitive peoples.
In many myths and traditional stories of primitives we can
find the traces of early attitudes towards the sexual
function. There is for instance the story of Trickster, a
mythical hero of the Winnebago tribe of American Indians.®
Trickster is a strange fellow, a newcomer among the tribal
heroes, who never quite understands what is going on. He
blunders along, breaking taboos and flouting the sacred
ways. He is like Sung the monkey in Chinese mythology,
who surely represents the earliest beginnings of human
consciousness. Sung typifies man, the clever fool, who is
never content, like the other animals, to obey the ancient
law of mature, but must be always investigating,
improvising, and devising new ways.
The legend goes that Trickster was burdened with a huge
and ponderous phallus, which he was compelled to carry on
his back. He did not know what it was, or what it was for,
nor why he should be so burdened. The other animals
laughed at him, saying that he was at the mercy of this
thing and could not put it down. But Trickster retorted that
he could put it down as soon as he wanted to; he just did
not want to, for by carrying it he could show how strong he
was. In turn he derided the other animals, saying that none
of them was strong enough to carry so large a burden. This
went on for
4. See B. Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Northern Tribes of
Central Australia, p. 265. Cf. also R. Briffault, The Mothers, II,
46.
5. This account was given in a lecture by Paul Radin. Cf. P.
Radin, The Trickster, with commentaries by C. J. Jung and K.
Kerenyi, passim, for other versions of Trickster’s attitude to
portions of his body.
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
124
a long time, until Trickster began privately to be a little
worried. He realized that he had carried this bundle as long
as he could remember and had never laid it down. So he
went to a quiet place in the woods where he could be alone,
and tried to remove his load. But he found to his great anger
that he could not do so. Then he struggled to wrench off the
phallus, but each effort hurt him horribly and threatened to
tear him in half. His burden was part of himself.
This story is obviously an account of man’s gradual
awakening to consciousness of his own sexuality. In the
beginning, its demands are considered an asset, a strength,
a source of pride. But as consciousness grows, the biological
urge is recognized as a burden, a daemon whose service
demands time and effort and energy that might be used for
more valuable tasks. Then man begins to struggle with his
daemon. His conscious self and the nonpersonal daemon
are no longer in harmony, and in trying to rid himself of the
compulsion within him man finds that he is being torn apart.
The burden of sexual instinct that woman carries manifests
itself in a different form. Male sexuality is essentially
outgoing, a pursuit of the object in order to obtain relief
from tension and discomfort through physical contact. It
produces an urge to activity, a restlessness and drive that
can be stilled only by detumescence. In contrast to this,
woman’s sexuality manifests itself in a yearning passivity, a
desire to have something carried out upon her; it produces a
burden of inertia that is the exact counterpart of man’s
instinctive drive.
Woman is therefore burdened with two measures of inertia,
the primal sloth of unconsciousness that is the common lot
of man and woman, and an additional quota that is the
effect of unconscious and unrealized sexuality. Just as
Trickster had to struggle with his phallic bundle, so woman
has to struggle with her inertia if she is to be freed from
identification with her daemon of biological instinct. It is this
aspect of feminine psychology that is responsible for the
heavy sensuousness of the cowlike woman. It is personified
in dreams not infrequently as the ‘white slug” woman. It
signifies not merely sloth but unrecognized sexuality. When
Trickster knew what
his burden was, he could
,begin to free himself. In the same
way, the modern woman who recognizes that her inertia
may be due to sexuality rather than to sloth is in a position
to begin to detach herself from it.
A human being who is still identified with the daemon of
sexuality is able to live his sexuality only on an auto-erotic
level. This is true whether the impulse finds its outlet in
masturbation or whether it leads him to sexual relations
with another person of either his own or the opposite sex.
For as the interest and desires of the individual in this stage
of development are concerned solely with his own
sensations and bodily needs, his sexual instinct still lacks
that degree of psychic modification which necessarily
precedes any real concern with the object. Therefore almost
any partner will serve for satisfaction on this level, provided
the necessary stimulus is present to set off the physical
mechanism of detumescence.
Consequently, persons in this stage of development are
usually promiscuous and fickle, and at times may be driven
by a veritable daemon of desirousness, seemingly without
regard for either the requirements of relationship or the
fundamental decencies. To a man on this level, a woman is
nothing but a sexual object, and one woman can be
substituted for another with the greatest ease. A woman in
a similar stage of psychological development may long
simply for a man, any man, provided he wants her sexually,
for to her the man is merely a phallus bearer. The appeal of
many lewd jokes and of pornographic literature in general is
based on the persistence of this aspect of sexuality.
A predominantly auto-erotic aspect of sexuality is
manifested in the type of woman who wants a man not
primarily to satisfy her sexual hunger but rather to give her
children. The woman herself may consider her instinctive
longing for babies a valid excuse for seeking sexual contact
with a man, even though there is no real relationship
between them. She may even think that her impulse is
“quite nice”—that it is a commendable evidence of love for
children—for the maternal instinct in our society is heavily
tinged with sentimentality. Such a woman does not seem to
realize that she proposes to
126
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
exploit the man’s feelings in using him to fulfill her desire
for offspring. Her desire is an instinctive drive no more
commendable and no more reprehensible than an urge to
gratification of any other primary instinct; but where the
fulfillment requires the co-operation of another human
being, the demand should be recognized for what it is. The
self-love on which it is based should not masquerade under
the guise of love for the object.
Among primitive peoples, the auto-erotic aspect of sexuality
may be the only one operative in the community. Among the
polygamous tribes of the west coast of Africa, for instance,
the men marry as many wives as possible and live among
them as lords. In reality, the men are the sexual prisoners of
their harems, though they would be the last to recognize
this fact. They are obliged to divide their favours among
their many wives under rules the women themselves make,
imposing very severe penalties for infringements. It is true
that the wives do all the work and support the husband in
idleness, if not in luxury; but if he does not satisfy his wives,
they can leave him, taking their children with them. Thus his
dominance is more seeming than real. Such a man is the
slave not only of his own sexual urge but also of the women
who give him the satisfaction he craves.
At this stage, the psychic counterpart or image of the sexual
instinct, which Jung calls the archetype, is represented in art
forms by the phallus and the yoni or the uterus. In such
figures as the Greek herm or the Sheela-na-Gig, the strange
Celtic sculptures of female creatures displaying their
genitals, the sexual organ is used to represent the entire
human being, the remainder of the body being either
depreciated or entirely suppressed. In plate III a similar
figure, known as the “Mistress of Animals,” is shown
clutching two beasts by the throat. This example is of
Etruscan origin, but figures of a corresponding character
have been found in Greece and Crete, in Central Asia, and
also in China, representing the relation of a deity to her
animal nature. In these cases the sexual organs of the
human figure are usually greatly emphasized, as in the
present example. Similar distortions are a commonplace in
pornographic art.
They also figure largely in the obscene scribblings of
adolescents, whose concern with the biological aspect of
sex is natural enough, since they have not yet become
aware of the emotional potentialities of the instinctive drive.
In the next stage of development, sexuality is definitely
linked with emotion. The mutual attraction felt by the man
and woman is no longer limited to the physical sphere: it is
accompanied by an emotional element that becomes
increasingly important as the development of the instinct
progresses. This emotion must be called love, though its
nature varies enormously according to the degree of
psychological development that the individual has reached.
Indeed, it is possible to form a fairly accurate picture of an
individual’s psychological development from a study of the
kind of emotional involvement of which he is capable.
In the more primitive stages, the partner’s qualities of either
body or mind are immaterial, provided he or she is able to
arouse and satisfy the physical need. But when the sexual
involvement is accompanied by an emotional factor, the
object of attraction is no longer merely the bearer of a
sexual organ but is seen to possess the characteristics of a
human being. In art, for instance, the sexual object is no
longer represented by the yoni or the phallus but by the
figure of a beautiful maiden or of a virile young man. The
cult of the nude in art relates to this phase . 6 Even so, the
attracting object still lacks any individual differentiation: it is
still only a beautiful maiden, an attractive man. To the lover,
it is not the one particular person, and none other, who is
desirable; there is still no real love of the object as a
personality. This attitude is betrayed by men in such
comments as, “I love girls,” or “The sex is very attractive to
me,” and by women in such expressions as, “I want a man
to go out with,” or “Aden are dear things.” The exact
similarity of the masculine and feminine versions of this
condition is illustrated to perfection in the “cock” scene in
The Beggar’s Opera , in which the hero struts possessively
amongst
6 . In a more advanced stage of psychological development,
nakedness is often used with a symbolic significance. The
implications noted above do not apply in such
circumstances.
12 %
his many ladies, singing, “I’ve sipped ev’ry flower”; and in
the chorus in Patience , “There’s more fish in the sea, no
doubt of it, than ever, than ever, came out of it,” in which
the rejected girls assert their readiness to accept another
man, any other man, if the one they have been professing
to love should depart.
Legends and myths dealing with this psychological attitude
in the male represent him as surrounded by a multiplicity of
alluring feminine forms, like the Flower Maidens in the scene
of Parsifal’s temptation. The beautiful damsels represent his
own vagrant erotic impulses. They are quite
indistinguishable one from another, and he has no possible
means of knowing what they are really like. They are not
women but only personified longings. They are “part
souls”—his souls. The classical example is found in the
episode of the sirens besetting Ulysses on his homeward
journey, tempting him and his men to delay their return and
luring them down into the ocean depths in search of an
undreamed-of bliss. These temptresses try to deflect the
wanderers from resuming their responsibilities to wife
,and
child and to hold them dallying with sensual satisfactions.
Psychologically this means that if they responded to the
temptation they would be engulfed once more in the
unconscious, for it would represent a regression to a stage
of identification with the sexual instinct from which they had
been at least partially released. Ulysses very wisely
commanded his sailors to stop up their ears, so that they
would not hear the enchanting music and follow the sirens
to death.
In another version of the legend Ulysses (or Odysseus, as he
was earlier called) had his sailors bind him to the mast, as
he did not trust his resolution to resist the tempters. The
scene is portrayed in figure 5, where we see him assailed by
the apparently not very welcome attentions of three winged
sirens. The siren represented in figure 6, from a
twelfthcentury Bestiary, is also shown as winged and having
bird’s feet, but her fish’s tail seems to suggest that she has
some relation to a mermaid, a being who is also reputed to
lure sailors to their doom.
To these legendary voyagers the enchantment of such
phantom beings as the sirens and mermaids represented a
very real danger. For they embody the anima image, in a
collective and undifferentiated form, and represent the wish-
dream of a man whose eros development has not
progressed beyond the auto-erotic stage. For the dream of
such a person is of a situa
Fig. 5 . Odysseus Hound, to the Mast and Assailed by Three
Winged Sirens
tion of paradisal delight, like the harem of an oriental ruler,
where he will be attracted and stirred by sensuous female
dancing and ravished by the partly hidden and partly
revealed beauty of maidens whose only thought is to please
him. It is another phase of auto-erotism, of self-love, even
though it is a more developed phase than the purely
somatic one that it replaces.
The corresponding condition in woman is represented in
myth by scenes of rape and abduction, by satyrs, centaurs,
and primitive half-men. The rape of the Sabine women is a
good example. The phantasies of a woman in a
corresponding stage of development may be concerned with
a “cave-man,” whose so-called love-making seems in the
phantasy to be so
desirable. Such a woman may indulge in phantasies of a
man of power and muscle who is completely absorbed in
the desire to capture her. His attraction lies in his brute
strength contrasting with her helplessness and in his
exclusive concern with
her. Her longing is to be carried away by this cave man and
to be overcome, so that while seeming to be indifferent or
even to resist, she can yield herself in an orgy of conflicting
emotions. In the frieze from the Temple of Zeus at Olympia,
representing the fight between the centaurs and the Lapiths
at
the wedding feast, two women are being seized and carried
off by centaurs. (See detail reproduced in plate IV.) In many
parts of the world “marriage by capture,” such as we see
here, was formerly the custom. A young man, who sought a
wife, crept into the village of a clan different from his own,
and seized and carried off a maiden for his bride. It is
possible that sometimes the youth and the girl were already
well acquainted, or they might be complete strangers, but in
either case it is quite likely that she did not resist, though
her brothers and uncles pursued the fleeing couple in
outrage at losing one of their women.
Even to this day, at a modern wedding, this long discarded
“marriage by capture” is often mimed in the custom of
chasing the bridal pair as though the groom were abducting
the bride. The couple flee as if guilty and the friends who
pursue them enact the part of the bride’s outraged relatives
hastening to rescue her and punish him.
At this level, the feminine instinct expresses itself in a
wellnigh insatiable desire to be used by another being. Such
a woman feels herself to be nothing, to be empty; she longs
not to do or to act but to be acted upon—not to create but
to be filled. This is not unselfishness or self-abnegation, as it
may seem to a superficial observer; for it may be that her
actions and attitudes are dictated by a very active
selfishness and egotism, even though these motivations
remain hidden from herself. This condition usually
represents an unconscious rather than a conscious auto-
erotism and frequently deceives the sexual partner. Or he
may actually desire such a woman, for her instinctive
attitude is really the counterpart of his own physical urge.
This aspect of feminine sexuality is today usually concealed
under a conventional mask, and the modern woman rarely
recognizes it as what it is. It can often be glimpsed,
however, when the woman is unaware of what she is doing.
The most marked examples of such unconscious behaviour
occur during hysterical attacks, when a woman’s attitudes
and gestures may be grossly sexual, even though she may
be quite unaware of a sexual motive in her illness. A similar
attitude of complete self
abnegation, of an abandonment that cries aloud for a strong
man to fill the emptiness, is obvious in the state of mind
portrayed in the following poem by Laurence Hope:
Less than the dust beneath thy Chariot wheel,
Less than the rust that never stained thy Sword,
Less than the trust thou hast in me, O Lord,
Even less than these!
See here thy Sword, I make it keen and bright,
Love’s last reward, Death, comes to me to-night,
Farewell, Zahir-u-din . 7
The attitude is also pictured in novels of a type most
popular with adolescents, in the recurrent theme of the
young girl who suffers some minor accident under
circumstances that leave her helpless in the hands of a
stalwart hero, preferably just as night is falling.
The longing for assuagement of the yearning emptiness that
is the expression of feminine receptivity on this level, is
often the theme of dreams and other products of the
unconscious. Phantasies and free drawings, as well as
dreams, may depict it with an astounding frankness, making
it clearly recognizable to those who have eyes to see. Yet it
may be completely hidden from the understanding of the
woman who produces such a revealing image.
In speaking of the physical side of the sexual urge, I do not
mean to suggest that there is something wrong or even
undesirable in the physical aspect as such. Not only is it the
essential factor in reproduction, but it is also a most
important, perhaps even the most important, foundation of
the love relationship between partners. However, it cannot
alone carry the value of psychological relationship, and
under certain circumstances the physical relation cannot be
achieved satisfactorily unless the psychological relation
between the partners is right, so that love can flow freely
between them. 8 Then and then only can the sexual union
be really satisfying. Or, to put it the
7. India's Love Lyrics, including The Garden of Kama, p. 1.
8. See Jung, “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship,” in
The Development of Personality (C.W. 17).
other way round, unless a psychological structure is reared
on the foundation of the physical sexuality, there will be no
permanent abode for the relationship. Bodily desire and
bodily satisfaction play an essential part in all psychic
activities based on instinct. Just as eating plays a part in
friendship and even in religious rituals, so the sexual
embrace can be the vehicle of an emotional or psychic
experience transcending the physical one.
When the purely physical aspects of sexuality no longer
serve to satisfy the needs of an individual whose being
comprises not only animal functions but also psychological,
that is, spiritual and emotional longings, a change takes
place in regard to the nature of the sexual object that
attracts him. This change can be readily observed in the
attitudes of adolescents as they emerge from their exclusive
concern with physical sexuality and discover romance. Their
development parallels the
,cultural change of the Afiddle
Ages through which romantic love first appeared in Western
man and then rose to great importance, at the very time
when man was emerging from the developmental stage
characterized by emphasis on physical prowess and brute
force.
In this new stage of the psychic transformation of sexuality,
the object of desire is differentiated from all others as the
loved one; however, the individual’s love is here concerned
not with the object itself but rather with the values
projected upon the object from his own unconscious. 9 This
is clearly demonstrated in the frequency with which
romantic love arises fully formed—“at first sight,” as we say
—and may likewise terminate just as suddenly and
inexplicably. Obviously, the love object—the woman, for
instance, who so fascinates and attracts—is not loved for
herself, for the lover can have no knowledge of her real
qualities; rather, the sexual and romantic love of the
beholder is attracted by values reflected in or symbolized by
her. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the love
object causes certain vibrations deep within the un
9. This subject is discussed at length in Harding, The Way of
All Women, chaps, i and n. Cf. also Jung, “Anirna and
Animus,” in Two Essays on Analytical Psychology (C.W. 7),
and “Mind and Earth,” in Contributions to Analytical
Psychology, pp. 128-32.
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
*34
conscious of the lover, and that these produce an illusion of
definite attributes in the object, much as certain stimuli can
produce an illusion of visual phenomena. For example, a
blow on the head makes one “see stars,” and certain
poisons produce hallucinations that seem to the sufferer to
have objective reality: in both instances the seeming visual
percept is obviously an allusion originating within the
subject.
When a man falls in love with a woman at first sight, she
seems to possess all the qualities that are most desirable in
his eyes. In addition he feels that he has a curious, almost
miraculous power of perception in regard to her. He will
declare that he knows what she is like, what she thinks, and
how she feels, even though he may never have heard her
utter a word and obviously does not know her at all. The
same can occur in the case of a woman. It is amazing how
much blindness and real insensitivity a woman may show
ins regard to the feelings of a man who has caught her
imagination and her desire. She is as if under a spell, and
she feels convinced that he is in love with her. Nothing that
he can do will avail to disabuse her. For her conviction arises
from her unconscious instinct, not from the objective reality
of the situation. Where the projection is mutual, the man
and woman feel themselves to have an extraordinary
kinship, a mysterious mutual knowledge and harmony. They
naturally find it a marvel, a special blessing, a gift of the
gods, an experience in which they are singled out for the
favour of heaven. And perhaps they are right—if it lasts.
Herein lies the weakness of the situation: for their sense of
oneness is obviously based on an illusion that may
disappear at the first touch of reality.
The phenomenon is comprehensible when we realize that
the attraction proceeds from the fact that it is the other side
of himself that the man sees reflected in the woman, while a
similar mechanism functions in the woman. These qualities
within the individual are unconscious, unknown to himself;
they are not his own qualities. For he has never made them
his own by consciously accepting and working on them; he
has probably even repressed their germinal existence
because they are inimical to those factors out of which he
has chosen
to build his conscious personality. Nonetheless, they
represent the latent potentialities of his own nature. They
are the psychic factors omitted from his conscious
adaptation, and their absence means that he is one-sided
and unwhole. The very fact that he has such a strange
knowledge of what these qualities are when he meets a
woman who can represent them, is evidence that they
"belong to his own psyche.
Every human being is constituted of elements derived from
ancestors of both sexes. In a man the male elements are
dominant and the female elements recessive, while the
reverse holds in the case of a woman. This duality obtains
both in the biological and in the psychological sphere. Thus
a complete man must be both masculine and feminine. The
totality of the elements of opposite sex residing in an
individual (of the feminine in man and of the masculine in
woman) makes up the soul. 10 Jung, following the classical
formulation, has given the name anima to this soul complex
in the man, and the name animus to the complex of
unconscious male elements in the woman’s psyche. He
points out that the recessive aspects of the psyche,
masculine or feminine as the case may be, are directed
towards the unconscious and form an autonomous complex.
Like all such complexes, it tends to become personified and
to function as though it were a separate? personality or a
part soul, as it is called among primitive peoples.
The individual from whom such a personification emanates
does not, as a rule, recognize it to be a factor within his own
psyche. But many a person is at times aware of a voice
other than his own speaking in him, or of another
personality taking possession of him and bringing moods
and affects that he cannot reconcile with the more accepted
and more conscious part of himself. More frequently, this
autonomous soul complex reveals itself by being projected
upon a suitable ob
10. Soul is here used in a psychological, not a theological,
sense. According to Jung, the term soul “is really a
psychological recognition of a semiconscious psychic
complex that has achieved a partial autonomy of function. .
. . The autonomy of the soul-complex naturally supports the
idea of an invisible personal being who apparently lives in a
world very different from ours” (Two Essays on Analytical
Psychology [C.W. 7], pp. 215, 216). See also the definitions
of “soul” and “soul-image” in Psychological Types; and
chaps. 1 and 2 in Harding, The Way of All Women.
ject in the environment. In this case the feminine elements
in a man will find their vehicle in a projection upon a
woman, while the masculine elements in a woman will seek
a man through whom they can be expressed.
The attraction between the sexes always contains an
element of this projection of anima or animus—an element
that increases in proportion to the lack of development in
the individual. For if he has failed to develop a psychic
function to replace the soul complex, then the archetype of
the being of opposite sex—of woman in the case of a man,
of man in the case of a woman—rules supreme, blinding the
individual to the real lineaments and characteristics of the
actual person confronting him. A man, for instance, will find
himself attracted to a woman who more or less accurately
reflects the condition of his own soul, and for the rest he will
labour under the illusion that she completely embodies its
characteristics, and will react to her as though she wielded
over him and his destiny the powers actually possessed by
his own soul. For as his soul is an essential part of his total
psyche, he will be unconditionally bound to the woman who
bears his soul image.
The concept of anima and animus is a complex one. 11 It
has been gradually evolved and elaborated by Jung as
corresponding to the actual manifestations of the human
psyche as these have unfolded themselves to his
observation throughout the years of his professional study.
He defines the anima as a psychic function whose purpose
is to relate the human being in a meaningful way to the
contents of the collective unconscious—the archetypes, the
psychic patterns or aptitudes for
11. I would refer the reader to Jung’s Two Essays on
Analytical Psychology (C.W.
,For those of my patients who have reached the
point at which a greater spiritual independence is
necessary, Dr. Harding’s book is one that I should
unhesitatingly recommend.
C. G .Jung
Kiisnacht / Zurich
July 8, 194 7
And now from the Vast of the Lord will the waters of sleep
Roll in on the souls of men,
But who will reveal to our waking ken The forms that swim
and the shapes that creep Under the waters of sleep?
And I would I could know what swimmeth below when the
tide
comes in
On the length and the breadth of the marvellous marshes of
Glynn.
Sidney Lanier, Hymns of the Marshes, i8yo
Be warned and understand truly That two fishes are
swimming in our sea,
The vastness of which no man can describe.
Moreover the Sages say
That the two fishes are only pne, not two;
They are two, and nevertheless they are one.
Nicholas Barnaud Delphinas, The Book of Lambspring, 1625
*
'
*
*
‘
“
PART I
THE Source
OF PSYCHIC ENERGY
The forms that swim and the shapes that creep Under the
waters of sleep . . .
B eneath the decent fa£ade of consciousness with its
disciplined moral order and its good intentions lurk the
crude instinctive forces of life, like monsters of the deep—
devouring, begetting, warring endlessly. They are for the
most part unseen, yet on their urge and energy life itself
depends: without them living beings would be as inert as
stones. But were they left to function unchecked, life would
lose its meaning, being reduced once more to mere birth
and death, as in the teeming world of the primordial
swamps. In creating civilization man sought, however
unconsciously, to curb these natural forces and to channel
some part at least of their energy into forms that would
serve a different purpose. For with the coming of
consciousness, cultural and psychological values began to
compete with the purely biological aims of unconscious
functioning.
Throughout history two factors have been at work in the
struggle to bring about the control and discipline of these
nonpersonal, instinctive forces of the psyche. Social controls
and the demands of material necessity have exerted a
powerful discipline from without, while an influence of
perhaps even greater potency has been applied from within
the individual himself, in the form of symbols and
experiences of a numinous character—psychological
experiences that have had a powerful influence on certain
individuals in every community. So pow
erful indeed were these experiences that they became the
core of religious dogmas and rituals that in turn have
influenced the large mass of the people . 1 That these
religious forms have had power to curb the violence and
ruthlessness of the primitive instincts to such an extent and
for so long a time is a matter for the greatest wonder and
amazement. It must mean that the symbols of a particular
religion were peculiarly adapted to satisfy the urge of the
conflicting inner forces, even lacking the aid of conscious
understanding, and in many cases without the individual’s
having himself participated in the numinous experience on
which the ritual was originally based.
So long as the religious and social forms are able to contain
and in some measure to satisfy the inner and outer life
needs of the individuals who make up a community, the
instinctive forces lie dormant, and for the most part we
forget their very existence. Yet at times they awaken frpm
their slumber, and then the noise and tumult of their
elemental struggle break in upon our ordered lives and
rouse us rudely from our dreams of peace and contentment.
Nevertheless we try to blind ourselves to the evidence of
their untamed power, and delude ourselves into believing
that man’s rational mind has conquered not only the world
of nature around him but also the world of natural,
instinctive life within.
These childish beliefs have received not a few shocks of
late. The increase in power that science has made available
to man has not been equalled by a corresponding increase
in the development and wisdom of human beings; and the
upsurge of instinctive energies that has occurred in the last
twenty-five years 2 in the political field has not as yet been
adequately controlled, let alone tamed or converted to
useful ends. Yet for the most part we continue to hope that
we will be able to reassert the ascendancy of reasonable,
conscious control without any very radical concomitant
change in man himself. It
1. C. G. Jung, in Mysterium Coniunctionis (C.W. 14), § 604,
says: “‘Religion’ on the primitive level means the psychic
regulatory system that is coordinated with the dynamism of
instinct. On a higher level this original interdependence is
sometimes lost, and then religion can easily become an
antidote to instinct, whereupon the compensatory
relationship degenerates into conflict, religion petrifies into
formalism, and instinct is poisoned.”
2. The above was written in 1946.
is of course obviously easier to assume that the problem lies
outside of one’s own psyche than to undertake responsibility
for that which lurks within oneself. But are we justified in
taking this attitude? Can we be so sure that the instinctive
forces that caused the dynamic upheavals in Europe, and
obliterated in a decade the work of centuries of civilization,
are really limited by geographical or racial boundaries to the
people of other nations? May they not, like the monsters of
the deep, have access to all oceans? In other words, is “our
sea”— the unconscious as we participate in it—exempt from
such upheavals?
The force that lay behind the revolutionary movements in
Europe was not something consciously planned for or
voluntarily built up; it arose spontaneously from the hidden
sources of the Germanic psyche, being evoked perhaps but
not consciously made by will power. It erupted from
unfathomable depths and overthrew the surface culture that
had been in control for so many years. This dynamic force
seemingly had as its aim the destruction of everything that
the work of many centuries had laboriously built up and
made apparently secure, to the end that the aggressors
might enrich themselves in the resulting chaos, at the
expense of all other peoples, meanwhile ensuring that none
would be left with sufficient strength to endanger the
despoilers for centuries to come.
The excuse they offered for their disregard of international
law and the rights of others was that their own fundamental
needs had been denied. They justified their actions on the
ground of instinctual compulsion, the survival urge that
requires living space, defensible frontiers, and access to raw
materials—demands in the national sphere corresponding to
the imperatives of the instinct of self-preservation in the
individual.
The aggressors claimed that the gratification of an instinct
on the lowest biological level is an inalienable right,
regardless of what means are employed for its satisfaction:
“My necessity is of paramount importance; it has divine
sanction. I must satisfy it at all costs. Your necessity, by
comparison, is of no importance at all.” This attitude is
either cynically egotistic or incredibly naive. The Germans
are a Western people and
6
have been under Christian influence for centuries; they
might therefore be expected to be psychologically and
culturally mature. Were this the case, would not the whole
nation have to be judged to be antisocial and criminal? It
was not only the Nazi overlords, with their ruthless ideology,
who disregarded the rights of others so foully; the whole
nation manifested a naive egocentricity akin to that of a
young child or a primitive tribe, and this, rather than a
conscious and deliberate criminality, may perhaps account
for their gullibility and their acquiescence in the Nazi
regime. Deep within the Germanic unconscious, forces that
were not contained or held in check by the archetypal
symbols of the Christian religion, but had flowed
,7), and to Aion (C.W. 9, ii). In the
early chapters of the latter book Jung discusses in
systematic form his ideas about the layers of the psyche.
First we find the ego and persona, which are more or less
conscious factors of the psyche; behind the conscious ego is
the shadow, an unconscious or semi-unconscious figure that
personifies the personal unconscious, and behind that the
anima, in the case of a man, or the animus, in the case of a
woman. This figure relates the personal part of the psyche
to the not-personal part dominated by the archetypes.
Because the shadow and the anima (animus) are
unconscious components of the psyche they are usually
projected into the outer world where they become
personified in some suitable person who acts as carrier for
the values they represent.
functioning that are the psychological counterpart of
physiological instinctual mechanisms.
When the anima or animus has not evolved to the status of
a psychic function, it remains autonomous and manifests
itself in dreams in personified form—as the figure of a
woman in men, and as a male figure in women—and in
actual life in projections to other persons. Because the soul
complex in a man represents the feminine elements in his
psyche, the projection of his anima will fall on a woman,
who will seem to him on account of this projection to
embody all of his own unrecognized potentialities, valuable
or destructive, while in the case of a woman the man who
catches her animus projection will in the same way be
possessed of the fascination and compelling attraction of
her own unrealized masculine capacities.
Thus the quality of an individual’s sexual projection reflects
the condition of his anima, that is, of the unknown part of
his own psyche, his soul complex. If it is primitive and
undifferentiated, it cannot effectively perform its
intrapsychic function as mediator between the conscious
personality and the collective unconscious. The tides of this
vast inner ocean will meet with no effective barrier, but will
impinge directly on the psyche, with the restilt that such a
man will be subject to unaccountable moods and to the
compulsive drives characteristic of instinctual behaviour.
Whenever the projection of anima occurs, such an individual
will act almost automatically, being completely dominated
by the passion arising within him and by the inescapable
urgency through which nature constrains her creatures to
fulfill her purposes. A man under the spell of such a
projection is hardly responsible for his actions. When an
instinctive desire takes possession of him, nothing can
prevent him from obeying its behest. He is like a driven
beast, and only after the instinct has had its way with him
does he come to his senses and become human again. This
type of projection is obviously not concerned with an
individual woman, but only with woman in her biological role
—the least common denominator of femaleness.
The projection of the soul complex is the psychological
event that underlies a sexual attraction. For it is not only on
the physical plane that man and woman complement each
other and are drawn towards each other, seeking physical
union and biological completeness. A similar yearning
towards a similar goal functions—most powerfully—on the
psychological level.
In the long story of the cultural development of mankind,
and correspondingly in the story of the personal
development of the individual in modern times, we observe
a gradual change in the character of the satisfaction
demanded by the sexual instinct. The libido sexualis, no
longer content with one goal, physical detumescence,
begins to demand a further satisfaction on an entirely
different plane. Physical pleasure, although it remains
important, is no longer sufficient. Its primacy is challenged
by the urgent desire for emotional satisfaction. The physical
aspect of the sexual act itself becomes in increasing
measure dependent on the emotional factor. Unless a
satisfactory channel for the emotion can be established, and
unless there is an emotional response from the partner, the
physical contact will fail to satisfy the urgent longing of the
man or woman; indeed, the sexual mechanism itself may
even be inhibited to such an extent that a temporary or
permanent frigidity results in the woman, or functional
impotence in the man. But if in addition to the physical
attraction there is also an emotional rapport between the
lovers, the whole experience is intensified and deepened
not only through its emotional or spiritual significance, but
also because the quality of physical satisfaction in the act
itself is enhanced.
by the time the sexual instinct has reached this stage of
psychic modification, its expression is obviously no longer
directed to the one goal of reproduction of the species. The
intervention of consciousness has caused a split in the
singleness of nature’s primary aim. The creation of a new
generation will always remain the paramount goal towards
which nature lures her unsuspecting children, through the
mutual attraction of the sexes and the pleasures of physical
union. But as the sexual
instinct is gradually modified through its relation to the
psyche and so becomes more closely related to
consciousness, another aim emerges from the unconscious,
namely, an emotional or spiritual one. The psychological
energy or libido inherent in this secondary aim also divides
into an outer and an inner branch, the first having an
objective goal and the second a subjective one. The
outward-going stream of the libido is directed towards
building a permanent relationship with the loved object and
founding a family—that is, it has a social goal. The chief
concern of the inner or subjective branch is the emotional
experience made available through sexual love, and the
inner or psychological realm into which it leads;
consequently it now has a psychological goal.
The social trend of the libido, which led to the formation of
the family unit, the very basis of society, has throughout the
ages of civilization exerted the most profound and
significant influence in curbing and disciplining the auto-
erotism of the sexual urge. In addition, the stable emotional
background provided for the younger generation by a
permanent family life, and the prolongation of the period of
education that this has made possible, have proved to be
cultural factors of the greatest importance.
Thus the reproductive instinct, which originally functioned
solely as a physical urge, led in time to the evolution of love
and human relationship. For when the sexual partner
becomes a permanent mate, the interaction between the
two personalities makes the development of a further
relationship essential. The formation of a home and the
rearing of children lead a part of the sexual libido over into
the parental phase of expression of the reproductive
instinct, where the personal and auto-erotic wishes of the
parents are challenged and disciplined by the needs and
demands of the young.
The family unit in turn is connected with other similar units,
and its members learn to take their place in the community.
Thus, as a result of carrying out what seemed a most
personal physical and emotional urge, men and women are
led to fulfill a social obligation of an impersonal or, as it is
better called, a nonpersonal nature. The discipline of this
path, with
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
I4.O
the gradual change in objective that it presents, will ensure
the further development of the instinct itself, in so far as it
is drawn into life and really involved in the situation; in
addition, the character and personality of the individuals
concerned will develop and mature. They will no longer be
interested solely in their own satisfactions, but will be
released from the exclusive domination of the auto-erotic
principle, and a wider objective will become operative in
consciousness. Thus the
,ego will replace the autos.
The emergence of the ego as director of the conscious
personality opened up a long road of progressive
development. For it alone had sufficient clarity to be able to
make an effective stand vis-a-vis the primitive and
instinctive demands of a purely physical or auto-erotic
character. In a state of nature the individual lives in the
moment, reacting to whatever impulses are set in motion by
the actual situation confronting him, without consciousness
of other situations or interests that may be jeopardized by
this single-aimed reaction. But with the emergence of an
ego—a centre of consciousness—continuity of memory
becomes possible. This leads to conflict between the various
impulses and desires that pass through the individual in an
unending stream, and he must choose between them
according to some scale of values. The choice may be
determined on the basis of selfish and egotistic desires
reflecting a low level of development; or it may be
determined by more important aims that are still, however,
expressions of the ego, though they are no longer grossly
selfish objectives.
In a more advanced stage of development the choice may
fall on a value that is felt to surpass even the higher aims of
the ego. If for example a man and woman really love each
other and respect each other’s personalities, a true
psychological relationship may be established between
them through the years. 12 In such a case, the relationship
itself may be felt to have a value of such importance that it
transcends all the usual satisfactions of the ego—such as
the desire to have one’s own way, or to prove oneself
always in the right. In other cases,
i2. See Jung, “Marriage as a Psychological Relationship,” in
The Development of Personality (C.W. 17); Bertine, Human
Relationships.
activities undertaken as a means of supporting the family,
which therefore indirectly depend on the sexual instinct for
their energy content, come to have a value of their own
quite apart from the ego satisfactions they bring in terms of
monetary return or prestige. Such values may be found for
instance in patriotic service, in,concem for the rights of
man, in devotion to scientific research, in the care for
human beings through education, medicine, and the social
services, or in the almost religious attitude of the artist or
craftsman towards his creative ideal.
In each of these typical situations, in which the personal
objective has been replaced at least in part by a
nonpersonal one, the psychological evolution of the
individual can proceed a step farther. For a new factor has
begun to replace the ego as of central importance in the
psyche.
The establishment of marriage and family life as a social
institution played a part in the psychological and cultural
evolution of man the importance of which cannot be
overestimated. Indeed, modern man owes more perhaps
than he realizes to this particular social form, which has
done so much to control and harness the energy of primitive
sexuality and to permit creative use of it in spheres not
directly sexual. Thus through the discipline of marriage the
sexual instinct has undergone a significant measure of
psychic modification. However, while the taboos and
regulations devised to curb this powerful instinct have
assured an effective control and transformation of a part of
its energy, the full force and potentiality of a primary
instinct could not be so dealt with, and a large portion—how
large it is impossible to ascertain, for the resources of the
instincts are seemingly limitless—was necessarily repressed
and lost in the unconscious.
This repression increased as the centuries passed, finally
becoming so excessive as to foreshadow a danger that
modern man might be cut off almost entirely from this
source of energy. In puritanical countries the repression
became so great, and the individual consequently suffered
from so serious a split within himself, that in the beginning
of the present century his condition resembled the state
that overtook the world,
according to the Babylonian myth, when Ishtar, goddess of
fertility and of sexual love, journeyed to the underworld to
search for her son Tammuz, the god of spring. While she was
absent, everything fell into a condition of stagnation,
depression, and inertia; nothing happened, nothing could be
accomplished, everything languished, until she returned to
the earth.
The fear and resistance that greeted Freud’s discovery of a
way of re-establishing contact between conscious man and
the sexual roots of instinct below the threshold of his
consciousness, as well as the avidity with which it was later
taken up, reveal the extent to which modern man had been
separated from the source of life within himself, and how
important this re-establishment of contact was felt to be.
One of the earliest taboos placed on the sexual instinct, and
one that is still almost universally observed, is the taboo on
incest. Exogamy has been the rule in the majority of human
societies, not because of any natural lack of sexual
inclination towards related persons near at hand, but under
constraint of a cultural form prohibiting sexual relations and
marriage between close relatives. In addition to its
biological results, this regulation had very important
psychological effects. In early societies, as soon as the
young man came to maturity and began to be aware of
sexual urgency, he was compelled to leave the intimacy of
his group to explore the world outside the village limits in
search of a sexual partner. To do this he had to overcome his
childish fears and learn to rely on himself. The girl for her
part had to summon courage to receive a visitor from a
strange clan, who for just this reason might be unwelcome
to her village. Or, as is common in some primitive marriage
ceremonies, she might have to allow herself to be abducted
in face of the ferocious opposition of her brothers and
uncles. By this adventure in search of a sexual partner, the
young people widened their experience of the world and
increased consciousness in themselves. This was a
psychological advance for them individually and thereby for
the culture of the group, as important perhaps as the
physical gain resulting from crossbreeding.
As the family became more stable and children came to
be loved and cared for not solely during the helplessness of
infancy but also in maturing stages as individuals, the life
that could be found within the limits of the family became
more satisfying emotionally, and consequently the impulse
to leave it in search of a mate became less urgent. A child in
such a home tends to remain attached to one of the parents
or to a brother or sister in sudi a way that its further
emotional development is hampered. The more congenial
and cultured the home life, the greater is the danger of
family fixation, whereby the young people are deprived of
the most powerful incentive to break free from the home—
namely, consciousness of unsatisfied sexual longings, which
ordinarily releases the new generation to launch out into the
world on their own.
This once again demonstrates how a cultural achievement,
while it makes some of the energy of a primitive instinct
available for the enrichment of conscious life, may at the
same time cause a splitting of the primitive libido into
positive and negative forms functioning in close
juxtaposition. As the author of The Book of Lambspring puts
it:
The Sages will tell you That two fishes are in our sea
Without any flesh or bones.
Moreover the Sages say
That the two fishes are only one, not two;
They are two, and nevertheless they are one. 13
In the sea—that is, in the unconscious—the positive and
negative aspects are not sharply divided. In the case of the
instinct of self-preservation, for instance, the assurance of
plenty, resulting from industry, and the fear of want,
resulting from greed, were brought
,into conscious focus
through the discipline that enabled man to produce a
harvest. In the case of the sexual instinct an analogous
situation arises: no sooner is a part of the drive
domesticated, so that out of its urges marriage and home
are created, than we find these very values acting in an
opposite way on the succeeding generation. A
13. Nicholas Barnaud Delphinas, The Book of Lambspring, in
Waite (tr.), The Hermetic Museum, vol. I, p. 276. See also
frontispiece.
family life that is too protective and too engrossing can
handicap the children, keeping them immature. The urge
that should launch the young people into the world is not
strong enough to break the ties to home. They do not suffer
from sufficient emotional hunger to be forced to go in quest
of a satisfying love relationship outside the family. Their
affections are satisfied with the response of parents or of
brothers and sisters. Even the daemon of sexuality can
remain quiescent, almost indefinitely, if the nature of the
love between members of a family is not too closely
scrutinized. But if it is investigated more thoroughly—as
Freud showed through the analysis of the unconscious roots
of such situations—an incestuous bond with the family may
well be found to be hidden below the surface.
The idea that such a condition of affairs could exist was
exceedingly shocking to most “respectable” people when
the facts were first made public. A very common
misunderstanding accounts in part for this natural reaction,
for there is a tendency to take Freud’s use of the term incest
too literally. This has led to a rather widespread
misapprehension. For the concept of an unconscious,
psychological incest does not postulate overt sexuality, nor
a conscious wish for sexual intimacies with a closely related
person, but rather a fixation of psychological energy or
libido within the family group, preventing the individual so
bound from seeking a suitable sexual and emotional
relationship outside the family. Unconscious sexual wishes
centring on persons of the home circle may of course exist,
but much more frequently the sexual material that comes to
light during an analysis is to be taken as symbolic of the
psychological tie to the family rather than as evidence of
actual sexual desires.
Freud’s researches brought these hidden tendencies into full
view; but the basis of family fixation has been apparent to
astute observers of mankind from the time of the Greek
tragedians on. Once the correctness of Freud’s conclusions
was recognized, however, they were seen to be so
manifestly true that we have all grown accustomed to the
idea, and unconscious incestuous fixation is referred to
quite openly today in
fiction, biography, and drama. It is accepted as one of the
most important among motives that can prevent men and
women from marrying or from freeing themselves from
childish bondage to family and parents.
In the past, incestuous relationships were not considered to
be harmful in every instance. The social rules and customs
enforcing sexual taboos were sometimes set aside, while
endogenous marriages were even the rule under certain
circumstances. For instance, where inheritance through the
female line still prevailed, though other practices of an
earlier matriarchal society might have been superseded,
marriages of close relatives were sometimes actually
prescribed in order to conserve the family property. In other
cases cross-cousin mating was the usual cultural form.
Layard 14 suggests that it is the natural one. In certain
cases marriage of close relatives was obligatory for religious
reasons. This rule was especially maintained in royal
families (it is still held that a king’s consort must be of the
blood royal) and in priestly ones. The members of such
families were believed to be incarnations of gods or at least
representatives of divinities; hence these marriages of
closely related members of the human family re-enacted, as
it were, the marriages of the gods recorded in the myths. In
this way the union of the two aspects of the deity, male and
female, was consummated once again upon earth; and
since in the myth this marriage of the gods always
inaugurated a period of well-being and of fruitfulness, it was
believed that the union of the royal pair would similarly
produce prosperity for the realm and all within it. 15 The
family of the Pharaohs presents the outstanding example of
brother-sister incest continued from generation to
generation. For the Pharaohs were believed to be
incarnations of Isis and Osiris, the divine twins, whose union
had been of such supreme importance in the found
14. “The Incest Taboo and the Virgin Archetype,” Eranos-
Jahrbuch XII, 254-307.
15. See Jung, Mysterium Conhmctionis (C.W. 14), § 108-9:
“The psychopathological problem of incest is the aberrant,
natural form of the union of opposites, a union which has
either never been made conscious at all as a psychic task
or, if it was conscious, has once more disappeared from
view. The persons who enact the drama of this problem are
man and woman, in alchemy King and Queen, Sol and
Luna.”
ing of the kingdom of Egypt and in the initiation of the
spiritual culture for which the Egyptians have deservedly
been famous. 16
An entirely different condition is produced in the children
when the home life is not happy. If the parents have not
been able to create a satisfactory relationship between
themselves, but are restless and insecure, the children too
will lack emotional stability. It is unlikely that they will be
able to create satisfying marriages themselves, as they
have never had the example of conjugal happiness before
them. More probably a youth in such a family will find that
an impassable gulf separates his love and his sexuality, and
this leads either to promiscuity, or, because sexuality
presents itself only in unacceptable forms, to complete
repression.
In either case, whether the home life is too secure or too
unsatisfactory, it is probable that the daemonic aspect of
the sexual instinct will remain in a primitive and
undeveloped condition. In the first case, it will be lulled to
sleep by the surface contentment, thus remaining buried in
unconsciousness; in the second it will either be forcibly
repressed in an attempt to live according to conventional
standards, or it will break forth in asocial ways that may well
be both undisciplined and destructive.
it is this daemonic aspect of sexuality that is involved in the
second motivation of the libido. While marriage and children
represent the cultural values to be achieved by the outward-
going stream of the sexual instinct, the inner aspect, which
is at first concerned only with physical and auto-erotic
satisfaction, has for its part also a cultural goal. This is
manifested in subjective experiences and in creations of no
less significance than the objective achievements of
marriage and the forms of social advancement related to it.
The inner or subjective aspect of sexuality has always had
great importance. In the primitive, auto-erotic stage of
development, the greatest satisfaction is gained when the
physical
16. Cf. C. G. Jung, “Psychology of the Transference,” in The
Practice of Psychotherapy (C.W. 16), p. 229.
tension is raised to the highest possible pitch. In the
romantic age in history (and this is true also of the
corresponding psychological stage in modern individuals)
the very intensity of the emotional experience becomes an
end in itself. The segregation of the sexes, the seclusion of
young girls, the form of dress, and the whole array of
conventions and customs controlling the social relations of
men and women were designed (though probably more than
half unconsciously) to heighten the mystery and charm of
femininity and so to increase the emotional and physical
tension between the sexes.
This new attitude found its expression in the impulse to go
in search of
,and rescue the maiden in distress or to abandon
wife and home for the sake of some Helen of Troy. It did not
arise from the domesticated side of the sexual drive, which
would have found its fulfillment in a conventional marriage,
but came from an untamed streak in the nature of both man
and woman, which was captivated by the unconventional,
the hard to attain. This fact accounts for the special allure of
the lover as over against the marriage partner. The
compelling power of the impulse was an expression of the
unredeemed part of the sexual instinct, which was not as
yet harnessed to the conscious personality through ego
development. It was a nonpersonal factor that, like a
daemon, can drive a human being on to seek experience
beyond the range of the safe and the known, in a realm
where he may be plunged into emotional situations far
beyond his personal control.
In everyday life the actual situation between any man and
woman is intensified or even distorted if a projection of the
soul image occurs. The being who carries this image and so
impersonates the lover’s soul is alluring beyond compare,
or, conversely, may seem threatening. The beloved thus
wields an uncanny influence and attraction arising not from
his actual character or personality but from that which he
reflects, namely, the unknown, unrealized other half of the
lover. Union with one’s own lost soul is of such vital
importance that whenever an opportunity for drawing near
to it is offered by life, psychic forces belonging to the very
depths of one’s being are stirred. The urgent longing
actually experienced by
the individual when he falls in love does not present itself to
his consciousness in any such psychological language,
however. To him it is just that the object of his love appears
desirable beyond measure. She draws him with a power and
fascination he cannot evade or escape. Through the urgency
of his love he is enabled to rise above himself, to overcome
all obstacles between himself and his beloved, and if fortune
favours him, even to achieve union with her. This union is
simultaneously the means of satisfaction of his human love
and a symbolic drama, played on the stage of real life; its
deeper meaning, however, lies hidden within the psyche.
For it is a ritual representation of the marriage between the
individual and his own soul.
For this reason a man who falls profoundly in love (and this
applies equally in the case of a woman) finds himself able,
even compelled, to transcend his own limitations. During
the courtship his character and psychological attitude
usually appear to be deeply affected, and it seems as
though a radical change had taken place. In some persons
this is but a reflection of the “in love” period, as fleeting as
the emotions from which it springs. But in others the
experience may initiate a permanent change of character
that persists even after the first intensity has subsided—
showing that the soul drama has been consummated, at
least in part, through the living out of the external event in
the actual life situation.
For the union of the lovers is more than a simple act of
physical sexuality whereby release from tension is achieved
and the biological aim of reproduction is satisfied. More
profound instinctual depths are touched by it—realms
beyond the scope of the conscious personality. For the
satisfaction of a sexual desire for union with the beloved,
intensified by the projection of the soul image, demands
that the lover renounce himself and his limited personal ego
and receive into himself another. This means a sort of
spiritual death, in which he feels himself to be lost to
himself, through union with something other than himself
that is at once within him and beyond him.
Thus the supreme satisfaction is sought in the act of union
with the loved one; but even in the moment of closest
physical embrace, final possession of the beloved seems to
the lover to
elude him because of the very intensity of the experience
itself. For the highest bliss is an ecstasy, a going out from
oneself. Ecstasis involves a loss of oneself in something
beyond oneself. When ecstasis is reached through sexual
expression (there are other ways in which it may be
experienced), the lover’s complete intensity must be
concentrated upon the partner. Nevertheless, the
experience itself is not of union with the beloved, but a
completely separate and separating absorption in an inner
happening of the greatest significance. To the lover it is as
though his personality were dissolved and merged in a
greater being, or as though he were being united with a
nonpersonal other within himself—a happening that makes
him at once smaller than his ego and very much larger.
Mystics of many religions and of many different epochs have
used the imagery of this archetypal sexual consummation to
describe their subjective experiences of ecstasy, which they
attributed to an actual experience of union between the soul
and God. When St. John of the Cross wrote the verses
following, he was describing the inner experience of the love
of God and an intimate communion between God and the
soul, but his words might apply equally to a human
relationship:
Into the happy night In secret, seen of none,
Nor saw I ought,
Without, or other light or guide,
Save that which in my heart did burn.
This fire it was that guided me More certainly than midday
sun,
Where he did wait,
He that I knew imprinted on my heart In place, where none
appeared.
Oh Night, that led me, guiding Night,
Oh Night far sweeter than the Dawn;
Oh Night, that did so then unite The Lover with his Beloved,
Transforming Lover in Beloved.
150
I lay quite still, all mem’ry lost,
I leaned my face upon my Loved One’s breast;
I knew no more, in sweet abandonment
I cast away my care,
And left it all forgot amidst the lilies fair . 17
The Song of Songs likewise undoubtedly expresses a
mystical experience of union of the soul with God, although
its form is that of an erotic poem. Rabi’a, an initiate of the
Sufi sect of Mohammedan mystics, speaks constantly of God
as her lover, and many others, Christian saints among them,
have written of their deepest and most sacred experiences
in terms that would be applicable to sexual love.
This does not by any means imply that the experience is
“nothing but” displaced sexuality. In some cases the
phenomenon might be so explained; in others it is certainly
referable to an inner experience that takes place not in the
physical but in a psychological sphere. The religious mystics
felt themselves to be renewed or transformed through such
experiences; the transformation was often spoken of as due
to a rebirth of the soul and was sometimes termed the birth
of the divine child within.
The desire for ecstasis, though it is not felt by everyone,
bespeaks a widespread and deep-felt need among human
beings, albeit expressed in many different forms with widely
differing significances. I have just been discussing it in a
very positive aspect. But it must not be forgotten that the
desire to plunge into the unconscious—even a passionate
yearning of this kind —may have a very different meaning
and outcome. Sometimes it is au fond, a regressive or
renegade tendency, a desire to “get away from oneself.”
Then it is really a wish to lose oneself for a time or to forget
oneself, with an obvious emphasis on escape from the
responsibilities or the difficulties of reality. One who seeks
this kind of forgetfulness hopes perhaps that his sense of
personal inadequacy may be assuaged for a time, if only
consciousness with its critical attitude can be lulled to sleep.
For then the unconscious instinctive personality can
17. The Dark Night of the Soul of San Juan of the Cross (tr.
G. C. Graham), p. 29.
come to the fore and take charge of the situation, while
personal responsibility ceases for the time being. Another
than oneself will be acting through
,one, and so one cannot
be held responsible for the consequences. Such might be
the argument of the renegade. But he never voices it aloud,
even to himself; for then he could not remain innocent of
the realization that he has deserted the cause of human
freedom.
An escape from the nagging of conscience and the sense of
duty can be achieved through a sexual embrace, in which
the individual loses himself in the ocean of instinct. Or it can
be found through indulgence in alcohol or one of the drugs
that produce forgetfulness and euphoria. Neurotic
drowsiness and the extreme fatigue of neurasthenia may
have a similar etiology. In the most serious cases of all,
when the conflict produced by life and temperament has
proved insoluble, so deep a plunge may be made into the
maternal depths of the unconscious that the conscious
psyche may be completely swamped by archetypal
materials, and a psychotic interlude may result.
However, the desire for ecstasis is by no means always a
renegade tendency. As already pointed out, it is part of the
experience of union between the separated parts of the
psyche and is felt by many to be a means of gaining, for a
time, freedom from the littleness of the personal ego,
through being dissolved into or being united with a force
greater than oneself. If this is the nature and meaning of the
experience, it does not prevent one from fulfilling one’s task
in life; rather, it supplies the inspiration by force of which
tasks that formerly seemed impossible can at last be
accomplished.
To the creative artist, his art (or his genius) is like a
nonpersonal creative spirit, almost a divine being, that lives
and creates quite apart from his ego consciousness. While
the creative urge is on him he feels lifted out of himself; he
is exalted, inspired by a spirit breathing through him. What
he portrays is not invented by himself; it comes to him he
knows not whence. This is a very different kind of creation
from that of the rational thinker. For it is just exactly not
conceived by thought. It is envisioned, or heard, or given.
For instance,
l52
Nietzsche tells us that he heard practically the whole of
Thus Spake Zarathustra shouted in his ears as he marched
over the mountains, chanting the words to himself in a
mood of ecstasy. The whole work came to him of itself,
practically complete. In such experiences of inspiration and
rapture, the poets of all time have felt themselves to be
filled with a divine influx; and through the experience they
have been purified of the taint of mortality, which is division
within oneself. For a short space of time such an individual
feels himself to be made whole through submitting to
possession of his being by a power greater than himself.
In the orgiastic religions, in which awe of the god and
inspiration by him were experienced as part of the ritual,
the goal of the religious practices was the attainment of an
ecstasy in which the worshipper felt himself to be possessed
by his god . 18 In many periods of human history this
condition has been deliberately sought, with resort to
various means to bring it about. The wild and prolonged
dancing of the dervishes of Mohammedan countries
produces an ecstatic, trancelike condition. Ascetic practices
are also undertaken for the same purpose, as among the
medicine men of some of the American Indian tribes, and
also among the Eskimos, who become nearly crazed from
fasting, loneliness, and self-inflicted pain. The latter practice
played a part also in the ritually produced ecstasy of the
flagellantes of mediaeval times, whose cult has survived
even to the present day. The reports that Christian martyrs
often gave no evidence of pain while undergoing torture or
even death at the stake, but instead wore expressions of
rapture, can probably be similarly explained. In India, the
yogin seeks this ecstatic state, called samadhi, through
meditation and other yogic practices, of which exercises for
control of the breath, or prana, are perhaps the best known
in the West. Drugs such as hashish, soma, marijuana, or
peyote, in addition to alcohol, have been used in widely
separated parts of the globe in connection with religious
rituals to induce states of trance or of excitement.
18. Cf. Harding, Woman's Mysteries, Ancient and Modern,
chap, xv. Rebirth and Immortality.” r
In the worship of Dionysos, orgiastic rites were of particular
importance. For this deity was not only a phallic god and the
god of fertility, but also the god of wine, of poesy, of
ecstasy, and of illumination. His festival was celebrated by
maenads, women who became drunk on the wine that was
believed to be the spirit of the god himself. In this condition
they held orgies in the forests, killing deer, which
symbolized Dionysos himself, and eating the flesh raw. As
Harrison says:
The Maenads are the frenzied sanctified women who are
devoted to the worship of Dionysos. But they are something
more, they tend the god as well as suffer his inspiration
[italics mine ]. 19
She quotes from the Bacchae of Euripides as follows:
I have seen the wild white women there, O King, Whose
fleet limbs darted arrow-like but now From Thebes away,
and come to tell thee how They work strange deeds . 20
The same writer says:
Maenad is the Mad One, Thyiad [another of the worshippers
of Dionysos] the Rushing Distraught One, or something of
the kind. . . . Mad One, Distraught One, Pure One are simply
ways of describing a woman under,the influence of a god, of
Dionysos. . . . When a people becomes highly civilized
madness is apt not to seem, save to poets and philosophers,
the divine thing it really is . 21
It is this desire to achieve divine madness, to be raised to a
state of consciousness so far exceeding the normal that it
can be explained only as an experience of being beyond
oneself, or lifted out of oneself into a state of divine
consciousness, that underlies many religious practices of
emotional or even orgiastic character. These manifestations
of excitement, these excesses practised in the name of
religion seem, when viewed from the standpoint of the
rational or conventional person, to partake more of
debauchery than of religion. But to those who undergo them
these experiences have a value that cannot be
19. J. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion,
p. 401.
20. Ibid., p. 395.
21. Ibid., p. 396.
154
explained in rational terms nor accounted for in accordance
with conventional ways of thinking. For through them the
individual is put in touch with the powerful and compelling
energy of instinct that lies deep within the human psyche.
He is reunited with the nonpersonal source of life; he
achieves an inner marriage with his soul. Through such a
union with the inner spirit, the primal flow of life is restored
in him.
What then of the other aspect of such experiences—the
debauchery, the frenzy, the abrogation of self-control, the
debasement of culture and disregard of decency? These too
may be the results of union with the forces of the
unconscious; for the energies thus released can be
destructive as well as creative. The dynamism that has
erupted in Europe in our own times is an example of this
aspect of reunion with the collective and instinctive forces of
the unconscious. Those who gave themselves up to this
dynamism experienced a release not unlike the ecstasy of
the maenads, which perhaps accounts for its widespread
and profound influence.
If a study of the religious experience of ecstasis could yield
any information as to how men can establish a positive
relation to such a dynamism, instead of falling helplessly
under its spell, it would be most helpful. There is no doubt
that life is renewed through contact with these instinctive
depths, dangerous though such a contact is to the structure
of conscious values so laboriously erected. Moreover, when
the ecstasy is experienced in what may be called, for want
,of a better phrase, the right way, it is not destructive but
life-giving. Individuals who have had such experiences
assert that they attained a sense of redemption or of
wholeness through such a consummation of union with the
daemonic force, which they conceived of as God.
Even so, the new realization may be seriously at variance
with the conscious attitudes formerly considered moral and
right. For this reason, a direct experience of the nonpersonal
forces within is never an easy matter to one who is aware of
the moral obligation to seek wholeness. For it will surely
bring with it the necessity of re-evaluating much that has
previously
been taken for granted. It will raise problems that it may
take years of conscious effort to solve. The saying of Christ,
“I came not to send peace but a sword,” is true today as of
old.
those who attempt to describe the experience of ecstasis
commonly use the language of erotic love. The essence of
the experience seems to be that in the ecstasy the
individual loses his personal self and merges into something
beyond himself. He does not feel this to be a loss, but rather
a gain, as though he were thereby renewed, or transformed,
or made whole. Something, some other, of greater power
and dignity and of greater authority than his ego, takes
possession of his house, which is willingly resigned. This
other may be a good daemon or an evil one. At the moment
of ecstasis, the individual is in no condition to determine
which it is, for his whole being is centred on the inner union
that is being consummated. The ego is cured of its littleness
and its separateness, and is made whole through union with
the nonpersonal daemon of instinctive life.
Although at the moment of this inner surrender the
individual may not be able to concern himself with the
nature of the other in whom he is allowing himself to be
merged, the effect upon his whole being ’frill depend very
much on whether it is demonic or divine. John, it will be
recalled, warned his disciples to “prove the spirits whether
they be of God” or of the devil. He is not alone in warning
those who follow the ecstatic road of the dangers it
involves, in that false or evil spirits may usurp the place of
the god whose presence is being invoked. It was probably
on account of the very dubious effects of these ecstatic
experiences that the restraints and repressions by which
man has tried to control the nonpersonal powers within the
psyche were developed. These repressions, long practised
by the Roman church, reached their apogee under the
Puritans, who sought to repress all spontaneous or original
promptings of the inner spirit by an overdevelopment of
control by the conscious ego.
When the instinctive expression of life is denied too dras
tically, it must sooner or later burst forth from its
confinement. Its manifestation will then not be adapted but
will probably take an atavistic or destructive form. For
instance, during the height of the Puritan repressions, an
archaic and debased form of phallic worship appeared in
western Europe and in America, in the form of witchcraft .
22 The central rituals of the witches’ sabbats were sexual.
The leader, a man, impersonated the devil; he was
worshipped as a phallic god by women, with whom he
performed sexual rites, often of a perverted character. This
cult was stamped out only with the greatest difficulty and
with a fantastic cruelty that surely had its origin not in
heaven but in hell. Hundreds of persons suffered torture and
burning in preference to recanting. For the ecstasis they had
experienced in their orgiastic rites was of such reality and
significance that they were willing to face death rather than
to renounce or to deny it. This historical ffict attests the
value and importance that such an experience holds, even
when it occurs in a debased form. How much more then
must the experience of union with God mean to those who
achieve it. Yet it is not without danger. For unless the
psychic structure is made firm through having attained
wholeness—the one-sidedness of the conscious attitude
being balanced by a recognition and acceptance of the
other side—the individual will be unable to withstand the
influx of unconscious, primitive forces, and will lose his
human value in a torrent of instinctive compulsions. But if
he has achieved a sufficient inner stability to stand the
impact, he will be regenerated by the new energies released
in him.
Sparkenbroke, a novel by Charles Morgan, presents a very
interesting discussion of the quest for ecstasy and the
release it may give from the bondage of self. The hero of the
story longs for the experience, feeling that it could bring
him illumination or even transformation. Morgan describes it
under three aspects or modes: the ecstasy of consummated
sexual love achieved through union with the beloved
woman, who in the novel is obviously an anima figure; the
ecstasy of the act of artistic creation, which is a union of the
artist with his genius; and the ecstasy of death, a union with
the world spirit—with God.
22. Cf. M. A. Murray, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe.
The Buddhists 23 describe four stages or aspects of
samadhi, or illumination, in the highest of which the finite
mind of the seeker attains at-one-ment with its source, the
dharma-kaya, the divine body (or state) of perfect
enlightenment. During this condition of ecstasy, the mind of
the seeker ceases to exist as finite mind, being absorbed
into the infinite mind.
Such descriptions Obviously refer to subjective experiences
that must be accepted by the psychologist as valid, even
though he may not be able to subscribe to the theological or
other hypothesis invoked to explain them. In the ecstasis
there is without question a sense of enlargement of
consciousness, in which the finite mind, to use the Buddhist
phrase, or the personal ego, in the terms of Western
psychology, is replaced by an all-mind, an infinite mind, or,
in psychological terms, by a nonpersonal psychic factor
transcending the conscious ego in both scope and power.
The experience of being given over to something beyond
the ego brings with it a sense of wholeness that persists
after the ecstatic state has passed, and may result in an
enlargement and unification of the personality. He becomes
more truly an individual, less divided, more whole. These
effects can be observed by an onlooker. To the individual
who has undergone the experience, it seems that the whole
world has changed. This is because the very structure of his
psyche has been altered, so that his moods, his reactions,
his thoughts—his whole experience of himself—are no
longer as they were. His perception of the world about him
has changed too, with the result that conflicts previously
insoluble are seen as it were from a different angle. His
reactions become unified instead of being partial and
therefore inconsistent, for they now come from a deeper, a
more fundamental level.
Perhaps it is because Western religious mystics are
concerned with the aspect of the search for wholeness
symbolized by union with the soul figure, the anima or
animus, that their experiences are so often expressed in
sexual terms. It may be that where the experience is
concerned with a further exploration of the unconscious,
and where the figure involved in the union is of the same
sex as the conscious ego (the Wise Man
23. W. Y. Evans-Wentz, Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines,
pp. 90, 99 ff.
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE 15$
in the case of a man, the Magna Mater in the case of a
woman), the ecstasy has a different form.
For the Western man to seek ecstasis as an end in itself, or
to follow the road travelled by the Oriental yogin or the
mediaeval religious mystic, would obviously be quite false
and even dangerous. For in the West we have committed
ourselves to the search for truth by the scientific road, and
we throw away the consciousness
,that has been achieved
on this path only at our peril. If we are to experience the
enlargement of personality that comes from an acceptance
of the nonpersonal forces beyond our limited consciousness,
it must be accomplished not by a denial of all that our
fathers have built up but rather through an extension of
their conquest. The aspects of experience they disregarded
must in their turn be included in our Weltanschauung. In
other words, it is through a psychology based on scientific
observation that we must approach these strange and
unknown regions of the psyche. While permitting ourselves
to experience the nonpersonal or archetypal realities within,
we must also seek to understand them and weld them into
the totality of our psychic structure.
If an individual throws himself into the ecstatic experience
without restraint and allows himself to be swallowed up by
the nonpersonal forces of the psyche, through temporary
sacrifice of his individual and conscious standpoint, he
achieves a sense of wholeness, it is true; but when he
comes to himself again, he may return to his former
condition of limited consciousness dominated by the
rational ego, while that aspect of the per4 sonality which
lived during the ecstasy will fall back into the unconscious.
Thus his consciousness is split and he lives as two distinct
personalities.
In other cases the man who has such an experience may
remain in the ecstatic state, going over completely to the
condition of “superior” consciousness. If this happens he will
lose his contact with everyday reality: he may become a
fanatic, or even a psychotic, being alienated from himself,
while what was formerly his conscious personality drops into
the depths of the unconscious and is lost to sight. This man
will escape the experience of conflict, just as does the one
who identifies
Reproductioti: Sexuality
159
completely with his rational and conscious personality and
represses the irrational experience.
But if a man who has had an ecstatic experience succeeds
in holding to his conscious standpoint and its values, and
also retains the new influx that has come to him from the
very depths of the psyche, he will be obliged to endure the
conflict that two such widely different components will
necessarily create, and will be compelled to seek for a
means of reconciling them. This attitude is the only
safeguard against falling under the spell of the nonpersonal,
daemonic powers of the unconscious; it is the modem way
of following John’s advice to “prove the spirits.” 24 If the
effort is successful, an inner marriage will be consummated,
the split between the personal and the nonpersonal part of
the psyche will be healed, and the individual will become a
whole, a complete being.
this brief discussion of the instinctive forces manifested in
sexuality has merely indicated the many aspects of life that
spring from the libido sexualis. Not only are the urge to
physical satisfaction and the biological aim of reproduction
served by it, but many other trends, cultural and religious,
stem from the same source. Much that is most
characteristically human has been achieved because man
has been compelled to strive for release from the
domination of this strange and mighty instinct whose
potentialities have been so little understood. Well may the
Buddhist aver that the cock, embodiment of sexuality, is
one of the three creatures whose insatiable desirousness
keeps the wheel of life forever revolving . 25
24. Cf. the discussions in Jung’s writings on the following
topics: the inflation of personality resulting from the
inclusion of nonpersonal factors, as it happened to Christina
Alberta’s father (“The Mana Personality,” in Two Essays on
Analytical Psychology [C.W. 7]); the attitude of the modern
psychologist towards religious experience (“Psychology and
Religion,” in Psychology and Religion: West and East [C.W.
11 ]); the Western scientific attitude and Eastern yoga ( The
Secret of the Golden Flower).
25. For a discussion of the part sexuality may play in
psychological development, see below, “Coniunctio” in
chap. 12; and see also Jung, “Psychology of the
Transference,” in The Practice of Psychotherapy (C.W. 16),
and Mysterium Coniunctionis (C.W. 14).
Reproduction
II. MATERNITY: The Nourishing and
the Devouring
he instinct that assures the preservation of the race ful
1 fills only a part of its aim in the satisfaction of sexuality. By
means of this gratification, it is true, the individual is lured
into playing an active part in the fertilization of the ovum.
But the end result of this action is, so far as the sexual urge
itself is concerned, an epiphenomenon—a fortuitous
occurrence that neither adds to nor detracts from the
experience of the sexual act per se.
In all animals except man, awareness of the connection
between sexual intercourse and pregnancy is absent. Even
in human beings who are fully aware of the connection, the
knowledge may be only intellectual; it is not usually an
integral part of the desire for sexual contact nor of the
actual experience of union. This is particularly true in the
case of men. It does not hold true to the same extent in the
case of women. For so important is the maternal instinct
that the reproductive urge may appear in a woman’s
consciousness in the form of a desire for babies, with no
physical or psychological realization within herself of a
corresponding desire for intercourse. In such women the
sexual aspect of the reproductive instinct is repressed or
inadequately developed. Some women who are frigid, or
completely anaesthetic sexually, nevertheless long to bear
children—a strange phenomenon that probably occurs only
under the conditions of modern civilization.
This situation has its psychological counterpart in the
curious way in which the development of love may skip the
stage in which the focal emphasis is on love of mate, and
which should occupy the middle position between the
childhood stage of love for the parent and the parental
stage of love for the child. Many young people pass directly
or almost directly from childhood to parenthood not only
outwardly but also in the character of the love relationships
they are able to establish. A young woman, for instance,
centres her love in childhood and adolescence upon
someone older and wiser than herself, who is able to guide
and protect her—in other words, a parent or parent
surrogate. Then she marries. Almost immediately she either
makes her husband into a father or thinks of him and acts
towards him as if he were her child. A similar type of
transition can occur in a man; because of the greater
urgency of the sexual impulse in the male, however, it is not
found quite so commonly in men as in women, except
where the relation to the mother has been a particularly
important element in the man’s emotional development.
The sexual impulse itself is satisfied in the union of the
partners, and this apparently marks the end of the cycle.
But if fertilization occurs and an embryo begins to develop,
a change is initiated in the woman’s body and as a rule in
her psychological condition as well. The man does not
experience this psychological transformation, just as he
does not undergo the physical one; he may even be
ignorant of the fact that pregnancy has resulted from the
act in which he participated, for once the sperm has left his
body its physical fate is apart from his.
The situation of the woman, however, is entirely different. If
she is sufficiently conscious and introspective to have a
critique of her subjective condition, she will observe that
she is reacting in a new way. Her feelings, her thoughts, and
those deeper impulses which arise from unconscious levels,
undergo a change characteristic of pregnancy. This
psychological change is connected in some way with the
physiological processes taking place in the woman’s body.
These processes go on below
,the threshold of
consciousness, and she can neither
162
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
observe them directly nor control them; they manifest
themselves to her only through their physical effects. The
new psychological factors related to these biological
changes also originate below the threshold of
consciousness, and the woman experiences them as
inducing strange moods and altered reactions to life that are
not due to any ideas she may hold in regard to motherhood;
they arise of themselves and may seem very strange to her.
They constitute a new experience of life.
A reaction on a deeper level of the unconscious may also be
observed. For pregnancy usually releases psychological
images of a mysterious and archaic type that arise from
profound reservoirs of the unconscious. This phenomenon is
bound up with the fact that childbearing is a collective or
racial task, imposed by the instinct for race preservation. It
is at the same time a personal matter having an individual
significance for each man and woman. But it would be a
mistake for them to consider it as solely personal; for in
creating children they are obeying one of the oldest laws of
nature, namely, the law that the life of the individual must
be devoted not only to self-preservation but also to
continuance of the race. For this reason the experience of
maternity puts a woman directly in touch with the primordial
female being deep within her, who awakes from her slumber
when the age-old task of reproduction is begun. This
archetypal woman takes a greater share in controlling the
situation than most women realize. If this were not so, how
could a woman who has had no personal experience or
instruction about pregnancy and childbirth instinctively
know, as it were, how to nourish the child in her womb and
how to bring it forth when the right time comes?
It is strange to use the word “know” in discussing
unconscious and instinctive functions that every female
animal can perform unerringly. Nevertheless these
constitute for each woman who becomes a mother a new
experience, part of which at least requires conscious
collaboration that she does not know how to give until the
moment arrives. Then very likely she will have the quite
irrational feeling that she has always known. A young
mother once said to me: “I felt anxious about my delivery,
for fear that in my ignorance I might do something
wrong. But when the time came I suddenly realized that I
had known all about it from the beginning of the world.”
This unknowing “knowing” comes from the archetypal
woman in the unconscious, who has experienced childbirth
countless times in the long past.
Materials dealing with this archetype are at hand in great
profusion. From the beginning of history, it has formed the
theme of myths and legends showing how it functions in the
spiritual and emotional spheres and how it has changed and
developed throughout the centuries. Thus primitive
cosmogonies often refer quite literally to the earth as the
mother that gave birth to the human race. Further evidence
is available to us in the world’s inherited store of statues
and pictures representing the Great Mother.
These art expressions are most helpful in exploring the
significance of the maternal archetype. For the being of the
mother has appealed to the artist in man in all times and
places, and he has felt himself compelled to express in
painting and sculpture what it has meant to him. Jung
writes:
The most immediate primordial image is the mother, for she
is in every way the nearest and most powerful experience;
and the one, moreover, that occurs in the most
impressionable period of a man’s life. Since the conscious is
as yet only weakly developed in childhood, one cannot
speak of an “individual” experience at all. The mother,
however, is an archetypal experience; she is known by the
more or less unconscious child not as a definite, individual
feminine personality, but as the mother, an archetype
loaded with significant possibilities. 1
Through his attempts to express these “significant
possibilities” in concrete form, man sought to release
himself from the inner burden of them. Fie could then relate
himself to the value they represented through the rites he
performed before the externalized image; at the same time,
he could separate himself as a free individual from the
nonpersonal, daemonic instinct represented in this being.
For this reason, the artist has not usually portrayed the
Mother in a personal form, reproducing the likeness of his
own
x. “Mind and Earth,” in Contributions to Analytical
Psychology, p. 122.
mother; rather, he has depicted the universal mother—
Mother Earth, Mother Nature, the Mother Goddess, or Magna
Mater. Mrs. Olga Frobe-Kapteyn made a collection 2 of over
a thousand representations of this goddess, dating from all
periods of historic and prehistoric time and culled from all
parts of the earth. This collection, considerably enlarged,
was used by Erich Neumann as the basis for his classic
interpretation of the meaning of this fundamental
archetype. 3 One cannot but be impressed by the
universality of the image. And, indeed, that so many
representations of woman as mother should have been
created throughout the ages is evidence of man’s
passionate concern with the experience of woman as bearer
and nurturer of life. Whether we think of her as the mother,
or designate her merely as a fertility figure, the fact remains
that woman as creator and nurturer of life has been of
overwhelming importance to mankind. Artists have sought
to create a general, even a universal image of woman that
should embody a sense of the power or influence she
carries: that is to say, each has tried to portray his inner
image of this aspect of womanhood.
This inner image has been depicted countless times. Often,
in order that it might persist as a permanent record, it has
been carved in the hardest and most refractory of materials.
For instance, many of the statues are of stone, carved at a
time when only the crudest of stone implements were
available. We are left with amazement at the extraordinary
power and persistence of the impulse that drove even
primitive man, whose attention was notoriously fickle, to the
concentrated effort necessary for such achievement.
Man has been impelled—by a deep instinct, it would seem -
to represent in permanent form the images of his most
significant experiences. The images most frequently
portrayed will obviously be those embodying human
experiences of the most general or universal character, the
so-called archetypal images. For the archetypes are built up
out of the accumula
2. Also see Eranos-Jahrbuch 1938, which is devoted to the
theme of the Great Mother.”
3 * Neumann, The Great Mother. See also M. E. Harding,
JMoman’s Mysteries, Ancient and Modern.
tion of countless actual experiences embedded in the whole
of the history of the race. They are the psychological
counterpart of the instincts, being, as it were, instinctual
patterns. One of the most fundamental of the archetypes is
the mother image. The experience of mother is universal,
reaching back into each individual’s earliest memories. Long
before the father held any great importance for the child,
the mother was present, the most significant, the most
inescapable fact in his life. The experience of mother also
reaches back into the most remote memories of the race. In
early societies the family consisted of a woman and her
children; the father was merely a visitor. Thus, for the race
as for the child, the mother is “the one who was always
there.” She is the eternal, the unborn, the primal cause.
Accordingly, the mother or the old woman is a universal
figure in nearly all mythologies. This woman has a child but
no husband. Sometimes a mother and daughter are
venerated, as in the Greek worship of Demeter and
Persephone; sometimes it is a mother and son—Ishtar and
Tammuz, Aphrodite
,and Adonis; or occasionally it is a
grandmother and her hero grandson, as in some of the
American Indian myths. The earliest religious practices of
mankind relate in no small measure to this Magna Mater,
her deeds, her attributes, her relations to men. The
biological fact of the mother as the source of life on the
physical plane is perhaps the earliest form of the archetypal
image entering into religious ritual, but religious symbols
are not static and fixed for all time. Through the long stages
of history they undergo a very slow change that is closely
related to the evolution of culture. The transformation of the
symbols corresponds with the psychological development
taking place in men as their instincts are modified through
the centuries in the process described by Jung as
psychization. The evolution of the Greek gods from the
swashbuckling adventurers of the Iliad to the serene
Olympians of the later Greek poets and philosophers, is a
well-recognized example of the change that takes place in
the character of a nation’s gods as the people emerge from
barbarism to civilization.
A similar change takes place in the symbols arising in the
l66
dreams of modern individuals. During a period of transition,
such as occurs during a psychological analysis, archetypal
images appear in the dreams and phantasies, often in very
archaic forms, indicating that problems or themes of ancient
date, or deep-rooted in the psychic structure, have been
activated and need attention.
When for instance the relation to the parents has not
developed in an orderly way, and the individual becomes
aware that his road is obstructed so that he can go no
farther, the parent archetypes will begin to arise in his
dreams. At first they may appear in modern guise; but if the
problem cannot be solved on this cultural level, the images
encountered in the dreams and phantasies will take on more
and more remote and archaic forms. The dream content
may present first the actual mother, then the grandmother,
then a generalized old woman. It may be an old woman of
bygone times—in the case of a European possibly an
oldtime peasant or a mediaeval figure, in the case of an
American an old Negro nurse or an Indian squaw.
Sometimes the figure is a mythological old crone who seems
hardly human and acts in an archaic or barbaric fashion.
In these circumstances, the problem obviously must be
solved in more fundamental terms. This individual
apparently is unable to accept the psychological outlook of
his generation, taking it for granted as his contemporaries
do, but must return to his psychic origins and recapitulate in
his own experience the history of the race. This process may
take place unconsciously, in dreams or phantasies not
understood by the individual himself. But the full value of
the process cannot be realized unless the recapitulation is
experienced consciously, for only through conscious
understanding can the lessons of the past be made
available for effecting a present-day adaptation to life.
An individual who, for whatever reason, is unable to base
himself unquestioningly on the stage of achievement of his
generation, is obliged to live for himself the long history of
the development of mankind and to come by a conscious
process to a state of psychic civilization. As he does not
participate in the cultural development of his era, which
comes to many
persons naturally as the gift of their inheritance, he must
win his culture by his own effort. Development for him must
be an individual attainment. This process corresponds to the
psychic evolution that religious initiations are designed to
produce. In some religious systems, this educational process
is only roughly worked out; in others, however, especially in
the Orient, a very high degree of differentiation has become
established. The levels of consciousness these systems
define are found, in actual practice, to correspond with the
stages of development that an individual experiences while
undergoing psychological analysis. In addition, the symbols
used in the religious rituals often correspond in an
extraordinary way with those appearing in a progressive
sequence in dreams and phantasies that arise from the
unconscious during analysis. Individuals initiated into ritual
practices of ancient religious systems were believed to be
thereby released from the bondage of their animal or
instinctive natures. Thus they were endowed with souls and
became men instead of remaining mere animals: as we
should say, they became conscious individuals.
The relation of the individual to the mother is one of the
crucial factors in psychological development, both because
the early relation to the mother spells dependence, and
because for the child she represents the feminine side of
life. And, as Jung remarks:
In the unconscious the mother always remains a powerful
primordial image, determining and colouring in the
individual conscious life our relation to woman, to society,
and to the world of feeling and fact, yet in so subtle a way
that, as a rule, there is no conscious perception of the
process. 4
Thus the mother represents the principle of relatedness, of
the feeling values, and of love, called by Jung the principle
of eros. 5
4. “Mind and Earth,” in Contributions to Analytical
Psychology, p. 123.
5. “Woman in Europe,” ibid., pp. 175 f.: “Before this latter
question [i.e., the psychic or human relationship between
the sexes], the sexual problem pales in significance, and
with it we enter the real domain of woman. Her psychology
is founded on the principle of eros, the great binder and
deliverer; in modern speech we could express the concept
of eros as psychic relationship.” Cf. also Harding, Woman's
Mysteries, Ancient and Modern, pp. 34 ff.
168
So long as the eros remains under the influence of the
mother, symbolized by her image, it must continue
undeveloped. For when the feeling values are vested in the
mother, she is necessarily the one who takes the initiative.
The child is only the recipient of feeling, not the initiator,
and so does not explore nor develop the potentialities of his
own nature. To a person whose relation to the mother has
remained unchallenged and unbroken, love means not “I
love” but “I am loved.” The ability to love as an adult can be
gained only after the individual has made good his escape
from his childish bondage to the mother. So long as he
continues to be under the necessity of receiving mother
love, he remains the conditioned one. If he cannot give love
and himself create warmth of feeling, he has acquired no
personal initiative in the realm of love. His position may
seem to be dominant, for he is the demanding recipient
—“King Baby”—with mother always at his beck and call. But
he is really conditioned in his love life by an a priori
presence, the mother—who, because she is the one who
was there first, has made or seems to have made the
conditions that rule her child’s whole world.
When such a child grows up, he may achieve a satisfactory
work adaptation to the world outside the family circle and
may even develop a highly differentiated relation to the
intellectual and masculine side of life, in which he is quite
competent. Yet he may remain very childish in his emotions
because he has failed to release himself from the mother. So
common is this condition that many people in the modern
world are hardly aware of its existence. It might almost be
called normal for adult men and women to consider the
bond between child and mother as the ideal of love. But
although this relationship is entirely suitable for children, it
is hardly adapted to the emotional needs of adults. So long
as the eros remains under the sway of the personal mother,
however, it is not possible for men and women to envisage
a new ideal of relationship, let alone create it in reality.
It is necessary to bear in mind that the precursor of the
emotion
,we call love is to be found not in the sex instinct
and the relation between sexual partners but in the
maternal in
stinct and the relation of the mother to her child. Therefore,
unless this relationship is a positive one and unless it
develops favourably, the adult will be hampered all his life
for want of a satisfactory foundation on which his later
relationships can be based. Long before the evolution of any
relationship between adults of opposite sex—other than the
most transitory coming together for sexual purposes—the
mother’s concern for her young, even among animals,
contained the germs of love. This concern, being hardly
more than a biological prompting, was based, it is true, on
identification with the offspring; nevertheless, it gives
unmistakable evidences of having been the forerunner of
love.
In archaic times, and in certain primitive tribes today, sexual
contact is marked not by affection but by combat. In the
sexual play of more sophisticated lovers, the element of
combat is often present as an instinctive feature, appearing
usually as play because of the psychic modification of the
instinct, but still carrying a reminder of a more primitive and
brutal past. Indeed, even modern, so-called civilized persons
may discover elements of sadism or masochism latent in
themselves, or repressed into the unconscious, and only
awaiting a sexual involvement to raise their ugly heads.
When—relatively late in human evolution—true mating, as
distinct from mere sexual congress, made its appearance, a
certain loyalty towards the partner was developed, although
at first the alliance was usually made for the protection of
the young rather than on account of any emotional bond
between the mates. Even in present times, in a marriage
where love has died, the husband and wife may decide the
problem of the family by giving precedence to the needs of
the children as against their own wishes or the demands of
the situation in terms of their mutual relationship. For love
as we know it today grew out of the relation of mother to
child, and in its beginnings it was love of mother for child
and not love of child for mother.
On its most primitive level, however—among the
uneducated natives of some backward country or among
would-be civilized and developed Western people—the love
of a mother for her child is an unconscious and instinctive
reaction. It
is still not a real concern for the offspring as a separate
entity; rather, it is based on identification. The mother
reacts to her baby as if it were still a part of her own body
as it was throughout the period of gestation. The child is a
part of herself, to be loved as she loves herself, and to be
disposed of as she sees fit. This instinctive identification
forms the root and source of mother love, however much it
may be modified. Among animals and primitives, no law
protects the persons of the young, who are fed and tended
or neglected and ill-treated as the unconscious instinct of
the mother may dictate. If the infant seems superfluous to
her, she will kill or desert it, just as in other circumstances
she will sacrifice her own well-being or even her life to
protect it.
For this reason the archetypal figure of the mother 6
appears in the most primitive myths and sculptures as
huge, allpowerful, and overwhelming. Correspondingly, the
rituals practised in relation to her were concerned not with
seeking her love but rather with placating her. The mother
of these myths is represented in a barbarous or bestial
aspect most repugnant to civilized people. On the other
hand, it is not uncommon to hear of unwanted infants being
destroyed or deserted by desperate mothers today even in
Christian countries; and an acquaintance with the seamy
side of family histories reveals that the so-called rejected
child is by no means rare, even in situations in which the
physical and material welfare of the child has always had
scrupulous attention. In the dreams of such children, or of
the men and women they become, there can be found
traces of the archetypal, barbaric mother. For she has
exerted a far greater influence upon their psychological
development than has the outward, conscious attitude of
the actual mother, whose solicitude for their health and
happiness has been only skin deep.
This situation is illustrated by the history of an artist of great
sensitivity, whose whole life had been warped by fear and
bitterness. These negative feelings were directed to his
dead mother and his older sister, and in particular to the
Catho
6. For a most valuable discussion of the subject, see C. G.
Jung, Symbols of Transformation (C.W. 5), chap, vn, “The
Dual Mother.”
lie church. He felt that his sister and the church (Mater
Ecclesia) both sought to dominate him, to strangle and
destroy him. During the course of his analysis he recalled
with great emotion an episode that had occurred when he
was six or seven years old. He was playing in a vacant lot
near his home, where he had been forbidden to go, as it was
frequented by tramps and the riffraff of the city; boylike,
however, he was lured to it mainly because of its
atmosphere of strangeness and adventure. On this occasion
he had just crawled through a hole in the fence when he
saw two policemen coming across the lot to meet each
other. One of them carried a bundle. The boy dodged down
behind a bush and remained hidden. The men met opposite
the bush and opened the bundle, and the child saw to his
horror that it contained the body of a dead baby. Intuitively
he realized that this infant had been “thrown away” by its
mother. Here the unconscious came into play, and he felt
that his own mother had likewise wanted to throw him
away, but had been prevented from doing so—a frustration
that accounted for her habitual faultfinding. In addition, he
felt that his sister, who knew of this secret wish on the part
of the mother, was only waiting for an opportunity to put it
into effect. Needless to say, he did not dare to tell his
mother what he had seen; and although in time it faded
from his mind, the vision of the inhuman mother remained
with him, a predominating influence in his life, till at the age
of forty-eight he came to me for help. This problem, as one
would expect, formed the focal point of his analysis, and just
before his death a new feeling was born in him and he
became able, for the first time in his life, to love and to
trust. This experience was like a rebirth to him and he
represented it in a drawing in which the eyes of a little boy
are being opened by a beautiful nude woman obviously
representing both anima and mother in her divine aspect. 7
For, indeed, his eyes had been opened to see an entirely
new world. He was reborn as a little child, but, strange to
relate, within a week he died in an accident.
In this case there had been actual and very traumatic
experiences that would amply account for the negative
aspect 7. See plate V.
of the mother image he experienced, which persisted for a
good part of his analysis. These had been so severe that, in
spite of the insight and renewal that came to him at the
end, this man was not able to create a new life for himself.
But there are other cases where, although there has been
no such actual experience in childhood to focus the negative
aspect of the archetypal image in the unconscious, it may,
nevertheless, appear in a negative form in dreams , 8
.especially at those times when the individual should be
venturing upon some new enterprise and is held back by a
childish need for encouragement or support. At such times
he may dream of an old witchlike woman who kills and eats
small animals that in the moment turn into human infants.
For his own life effort is being devoured by the archetypal
mother, who represents the unconscious source from which
he has failed to free himself.
throughout the ages man has sought to make some
representation of this
,back into
pagan forms, notably Wotanism, were galvanized into life by
the Nazi call. For that which is the ideal or the virtue of an
outworn culture is the antisocial crime of its more evolved
and civilized successor. >
The energy that could change the despondent and
disorganized Germany of 1930 into the highly organized and
optimistic, almost daemonically powerful nation of a decade
later, must have arisen from deeply buried sources; it could
not have been produced by conscious effort or by the
application of rational rules either of conduct or of
economics. These dramatic changes swept over the country
like an incoming tide or a flood brought about by the release
of dynamic forces that had formerly lain quiescent in the
unconscious. The Nazi leaders seized upon the opportunity
brought within their reach by this “tide in the affairs of
men.” They were able to do this because they were
themselves the first victims of the revolutionary dynamism
surging up from the depths, and they recognized that a
similar force was stirring in the mass of the people; they had
but to call it forth and release it from the civilized restraints
that still ruled the ordinary, decent folk. If these forces had
not been already active in the unconscious of the German
people as a whole, the Nazi agitators would have preached
their new doctrine in vain; they would have appeared to the
people as criminals or lunatics, and would by no means
have been able to arouse popular enthusiasm or to
dominate the entire nation for twelve long years.
The spirit of this dynamism is directly opposed to the spirit
of civilization. The first seeks life in movement, change,
exploitation; the second has sought throughout the ages to
create a form wherein life may expand, may build, may
make secure. And indeed Christian civilization, despite all its
faults and shortcomings, represents the best that man in his
inadequacy has as yet succeeded in evolving. But the greed
and selfishness of man have never been adequately dealt
with. Crimes against the corporate body of humanity are
constantly being perpetrated not only in overt acts but also,
and perhaps more frequently, through ignorance and
exclusively ego-oriented attitudes. Consequently the needs
of the weak have been largely disregarded, and the strong
have had things their own way.
But those who are materially and psychologically less well
endowed have as large a share of instinctive desire and as
strong a will to live as the more privileged. These natural
longings, so persistently repressed, cannot remain quiescent
indefinitely. It is not so much that the individual rebels—the
masses of the people being proverbially patient—but nature
rebels in him: the forces of the unconscious boil over when
the time is ripe. The danger of such an eruption is not,
however, limited to the less fortunate in society, for the
instinctive desires of many of the more fortunatedikewise
have been suppressed, not by a greedy upper class but by
the too rigid domination of the moral code and conventional
law. This group also shows signs of rebellion and may break
forth in uncontrollable violence, as has so recently
happened in Germany. If this should happen elsewhere, the
energies unleashed would pour further destruction over the
world. But there remains another possibility, namely, that
these hidden forces stirring in countless individuals the
world over may be channelled again, as they were at the
beginning of the Christian era, by the emergence of a
powerful archetype or symbol, and so may create for
themselves a different form, paving the way for a new stage
of civilization.
The expansionist movement in Communism exerts a very
similar threat to world order. Under the guise of offering
succour to underprivileged and underdeveloped peoples the
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
8
communist overlords seek world dominion and world
exploitation. That their own people will support them in their
ambition, in spite of the hardships entailed, speaks
eloquently of the dynamic unrest in the unconscious of the
mass of the people.
For this new dynamic or daemonic spirit that has sprung
into being is endowed with an almost incredible energy,
which has remained completely unavailable to
consciousness until the present time. Can it conceivably
create a new world order? So long as it continues to
manifest itself only in destruction, it obviously cannot, nor
can it be assimilated to that older spirit which seeks all
values in terms of the established and welltested. On the
other hand, it does not look as if it could be repressed once
more into the unconscious. It has come to stay. And the
spirit that conserves and builds up, if it survives at all,
cannot remain unaffected by the impact of so vital a force.
These two world spirits, which Greek philosophy called “the
growing” and “the burning,” stand in mortal combat, and we
cannot foretell the outcome. The fear that they may literally
destroy each other is not ended with the coming of peace.
Will the revolutionary spirit triumph and become the
dominant spirit of the next world age? Will war follow war,
each armistice being but the excuse for another outbreak of
aggression? Or dare we hope that out of the present
struggle and suffering a new world spirit may be born, to
create for itself a new body of civilization?
These questions only time can answer, for even in this
cataclysmic epoch, world movements unfold themselves
very slowly, and it is hardly probable that anyone now living
will survive to see the outcome of this struggle on the global
stage. Yet, since it is a conflict of philosophies, of “spirits,”
that is, of psychological forces within individuals and
nations, perhaps the psychologist can give us a clue as to
their probable development, through an understanding of
the laws that govern them. For the psychologist can observe
the unfolding of this same conflict in miniature in individual
persons. The problems and struggles disturbing the peace of
the world must in the last analysis be fought out in the
hearts of individuals before
they can be truly resolved in the relationships of nations. On
this plane they must of necessity be worked out within the
span of a single life.
In the individual, no less than in the nation, the basic
instincts make a compulsive demand for satisfaction; and
here too civilization has imposed a rule of conduct aimed to
repress or modify the demand. Every child undergoes an
education that imposes restraint on his natural response to
his own impulses and desires, substituting a collective or
conventional mode of behaviour. In many cases the result is
that the conscious personality is too much separated from
its instinctive roots; it becomes too thin, too brittle, perhaps
even sick, until in the course of time the repressed instincts
rebel and generate a revolution in the individual similar to
that which has been threatening the peace of the world.
In the individual, as in the nation, the resulting conflict may
produce asocial or criminal reactions; or, if such behaviour is
excluded by his moral code, neurotic or even psychotic
manifestations may develop. But no real solution of such a
fundamental problem can be found except through a
conscious enduring of the conflict that arises when the
instincts revolt against the too repressive rule of the
conscious ego. If the ego regains control, the status quo
ante will be re-established and the impoverishment of life
will continue, perhaps eventuating in complete sterility. If,
on the other hand, the repressed instincts obtain the
mastery, unseating the ego, the individual will be in danger
of disintegrating either morally or psychologically. That is,
he will either lose all moral values— “go to the dogs,” as the
phrase is—or he will lose himself in a welter of collective or
nonpersonal, instinctive drives that may well destroy his
mental balance.
But if the individual
,source—the dark abyss from which he
emerges as a separate being. The cavern of the womb
whence the child is extruded, laved in the natal, the primal
waters, has fascinated him. The mystery of birth has
seemed to hold the secret of life itself, the life of the spirit
as well as of the body. The mother great with child embodies
this mystery, as does also the womb. And so a great
rounded stone 9 was often worshipped as representing the
mother, and a dark cave or round building could serve as a
womb in which the mystery of second birth might be
enacted.
The stone representing the Mother Goddess appears in
many forms. Sometimes it is simply a rounded cone; or
there may be a knob at the top and extensions or crossbars
at the sides, so that it resembles a crude human figure and
suggests a stone woman. Long ago, sacrifices of human
infants were made to stone mothers such as these. The
Mother Goddess, giver of life and fertility, guardian of
childbirth, is also the Terrible One, Death, the Devourer. She
represents the invol
8. See J. Jacobi, Complex/Archetype/Symbol in the
Psychology of C. G. Jung, for an analysis of dream material
of this type in a child.
9- Cf. Harding, Woman's Mysteries, Ancient and Modern, pp.
39 ft.
untary, compulsive urge to bring forth life, which functions
quite blindly in the female. After the young have left her
womb, she suckles and cherishes them as long as her
biological urges impel her to do so; beyond that, she has no
concern for them or for their welfare. They exist for her only
as the means of fulfillment of her own instincts.
In the Celtic countries the Mother Goddess was represented
by a great stone cauldron 10 over which human sacrifices
were made. The “Cauldron of Gundestrup” (see plate VI)
shows a sacrificial scene, embossed on the inside of this
silver vessel. The chief priestess, we are told, was charged
with the slaying of the victims, who were generally prisoners
of war rather than infants offered in sacrifice by their
parents as in the Phrygian ritual. Where infants were
sacrificed, it was believed that the goddess drank their
blood, which renewed her own powers of fertility. In the
Celtic sacrifices, the blood of the victims slaughtered over
the cauldron that represented the womb of the Great Mother
served a further purpose, for the cauldron became a kind of
baptismal font. Persons bathed in it were believed to be
endowed with eternal life, while those who drank of the
blood it contained were granted the grace of inspiration.
This ritual is obviously'connected with the legends of a
magic cauldron that recur frequently in the romantic
literature of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. These
themes date from a much earlier time: many of them are
pre-Christian, even prehistoric. Such is the story of Branwen,
daughter of Llyr, which tells of a cauldron that had power to
bring the dead to life:
And Bendigeid Vran began to discourse, and said: “I will
give unto thee a cauldron, the property of which is, that if
one of thy men be slain to-day, and be cast therein,
tomorrow he will be as well as ever he was at the best,
except that he will not regain his speech.” 11
10. J. A. MacCulloch, The Religion of the Ancient Celts, p.
383; idem, “The Abode of the Blest,” in J. Hastings,
Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, II, 694.
11. C. Guest (tr.), The Mabinogion, p. 37. Cf. also J. A.
MacCulloch, Celtic Mythology, in L. H. Gray (ed.), Mythology
of All Races, III, 112.
'74
Later Bendigeid Vran related how he had got the cauldron
from Ireland. This is probably the same cauldron that was
possessed by the Tuatha De Danann, gods of ancient
Ireland, whose name means “the folk of the goddess Anu”
(Anu was a moon mother goddess). One legend relates that
at a time when the Tuatha were residing in Asia, and were at
war with the Syrians, they were enabled to triumph because
they had the art of resuscitating those killed in battle. It is
also said that the Tuatha owned a well in Ireland whose
waters healed the mortally wounded . 12
MacCulloch 13 relates another Celtic myth, centring about a
cauldron that supplied abundance and gave life to the dead.
It had been “fetched” from the Land beneath the Waves,
and was owned by Cerridwen, who dwelt by the Lake of Bala
in Wales. She was a goddess of plenty and of inspiration, for
her father Ogywen was god of language, poetry, and the
alphabet, that is, he was god of the magic runes. This
cauldron is connected with the “grail,” also called a
cauldron, that Arthur caused to be fetched—or stolen—from
Annwfn, the underworld. This cauldron too had life-giving
powers, and after boiling for a year, gave inspiration and
knowledge of all things to those who tasted its elixir.
This symbolism is familiar to us in the Christian sacrament
of baptism. The font, or fountain of life-giving water, is
known as the uterus ecclesiae. In old churches, especially
those of Norman architecture, it has the form of a hollowed-
out stone. It is taught that immersion in this font endows
the recipient of the sacrament with an immortal soul, just as
immersion in the Celtic cauldron was thought to bring life to
the dead or to bestow immortality. The idea of the mother,
source of the life of the body, is here expanded into the idea
of a divine mother giving birth to an immortal spirit in the
mortal being, who is born a second time through immersion
in the living waters of the font.
The symbol representing the mother underwent a similar
development in Egypt. Mother Isis, whose emblem is an
amulet
12. Guest, The Mabinogion, p. 295.
13. Celtic Mythology, in Gray, Mythology of All Races, III,
109 ff.
possibly representing a knot of flax tied so that it closely
resembles the Great Mother stone at Paphos, came to be
symbolized by a vase of water. In the festival called
Phallephoria, 14 this vase of water was carried before the
colossal image of the phallus of Osiris. It symbolized the
female creative principle, the womb, and the water it
contained represented the moisture that brings fruitfulness
to the desert. In figure 7 we see Nut, a variant of Isis,
represented as a tree numen. The figure comes from a
vignette in the Book of the Dead, where the text reads: “
‘Flail, thou sycamore of the goddess Nut! Grant thou to me
of the water and of the air which dwell in thee.’ The goddess
is seen standing in a tree. . . . She sprinkles water upon [the
deceased] as he kneels at the foot of a tree.” 15
But Isis was not only the mother who gives life. In certain
elements of her story 16 the negative aspect of the mother
appears. For instance, twice in her life she nursed with great
tenderness the victims of a serpent that she herself had
created to wound them. This bespeaks the maternal instinct
that must at all cost have something to mother. It is a
primitive instinct that can even injure the loved object if it is
thereby handed over to the mother like a helpless infant.
The compulsion of the mother to tend and nurture someone
may lead her to create the need in the filling of which her
own instinct and craving are satisfied.
In the Isis story these incidents are told with primitive
simplicity. There is no attempt to conceal the expressions of
the instinct under a mask of good feeling. Mother Isis lived
her impulses uncensored: the juxtaposition of the negative
and positive aspects caused her no conflict, and apparently
her worshippers felt none either. The contradiction in her
character may have caused some difficulty to the devotees
of later centuries, but they probably accounted for it as a
divine mystery. For as man developed a conscious
standpoint and ethic, the opposition of yea and nay in the
primitive instinct was
14. Plutarch, “Isis and Osiris,” tr. in G. R. S. Mead, Thrice
Greatest Hermes, I, 279, 312.
15. E. A. W. Budge, The Gods of the Egyptians, I, 107.
16. Frazer, The Golden Bough, p. 260.
176
Fig. 7 . The Goddess Nut as
,who is caught in such a problem has
sufficient courage and stability to face the issue squarely,
not allowing either contending element to fall back into the
unconscious, regardless of how much pain and suffering
may be involved, a solution of the conflict may develop
spontaneously in the depths of the unconscious. Such a
solution will not appear in the form of an intellectual
conclusion or thought-out
plan, but will arise in dream or phantasy in the form of an
image or symbol, so unexpected and yet so apt that its
appearance will seem like a miracle. Such a symbol has the
effect of breaking the deadlock. It has power to bring the
opposing demands of the psyche together in a newly
created form through which the life energies can flow in a
new creative effort. Jung has called this the reconciling
symbol. 3 Its potency avails not only to bring the impasse to
an end but also to effect a transformation or modification of
the instinctive drives within the individual: this corresponds
in the personal sphere to that modification of the instincts
which, at least in some measure, has been brought about in
the race through the ages of cultural effort.
This is something entirely different from a change in
conscious attitude, such as might be brought about by
education or precept. It is not a compromise, nor is the
solution achieved through an increased effort to control the
asocial tendencies, the outbursts of anger or the like. The
conflict arose initially just because these attempts at moral
control were either not successful, so that the individual
remained at the mercy of his own passionate desirousness,
or perhaps all too successful, so that the vital springs of life
were dammed up within him and his conscious life became
dry and sterile. It is only after all such conscious efforts
towards a solution have failed that the reconciling symbol
appears. It arises from the depths of the unconscious
psyche and produces its creative effect on a level of the
psychic life beyond the reach of the rational consciousness,
where it has power to produce a change in the very
character of the instinctive urge itself, with the result that
the nature of the “I want” is actually altered.
This sounds almost incredible. Yet has not such a change
taken place in very fact as a result of the cultural evolution
of mankind? It represents the difference between the
primitive or barbarian and the cultured man. The primitive
can be taught all the arts and sciences of Western
civilization, yet his deepest reactions will remain primitive:
he will continue to
3. For a discussion of the reconciling symbol, cf. Jung,
Psychological Types, pp. 320 ff., 606 ff., and chap. v.
be at the mercy of his unconscious impulses whenever he is
subjected to any strong emotion or other stress. In contrast,
the instinctive reactions of the Western man are in far
greater degree related to his conscious ego and much more
dependable. However, as we have good reason to know, he
is by no means always civilized in this deeper sense of the
word. Very many individuals have not truly achieved the
psychological development that has in general profoundly
affected the ideals of our civilization and the character of
not a few who are, in virtue of the fact, truly cultured
persons.
A historical example showing the difference in the quality of
the instinctive reactions of different men under great stress
will make this point clearer. When the Greely polar
expedition was trapped in the far north without provisions or
fuel and compelled to await the arrival of a rescue ship
through a whole winter, some of the men deteriorated under
the terrible hardships and uncertainties they were forced to
endure. David Brainard has recorded the story in The
Outpost of the Lost. Some of the men refused to allow a
comrade to thaw himself out in the common sleeping bag
after he had been out in the Arctic cold seeking food for the
entire group; others began to steal from the tiny reserve of
food, and more than once there was danger that some
quarrel would result in murder. Yet this degeneration did not
affect all the members of the party. Some, notably Brainard
and Greely himself, maintained self-mastery throughout the
ordeal, and sacrificed themselves as a matter of course for
the welfare of the group.
What was it in them that kept them from disintegration?
Was it that in these persons the conscious ego was better
organized and better disciplined and therefore better able to
control the primitive urges on which the human psyche is
built? These men suffered just as much from hunger and
cold as their fellows, and even more from anxiety than the
rest. Why did they not break down or fly into uncontrollable
rages? Could it be that in these two men the form of the
instinctive urge had itself undergone a subtle
transformation, so that the primitive man within was not so
crude, not so selfcentered as in their companions?
We cannot dismiss this problem simply by stating that
Brainard and Greely were finer individuals than the rest, for
instances are not wanting of men who at a given time,
under conditions of great stress, acted in a completely
selfish way in response to unrestrainable instinctive
impulses, and who later, after having undergone certain
never to be forgotten inner experiences, discovered to their
own amazement that their spontaneous reactions to such
an ordeal had changed, so that they were no longer even
tempted to act asocially. In these cases one is forced to
conclude that the nonpersonal impulse has been altered in
character. For it is not that these individuals are more
consciously heroic or more deliberately unselfish than
before. The fact is that consciousness in them has changed.
Their own need and their own danger simply do not obtrude
themselves; thus, while they are reacting to the situation
quite spontaneously, the nonpersonal instinct is no longer
manifested in purely selfish ways. Such a man is freed from
the compulsions of his primitive urges; his consciousness is
no longer identified with the instinctive or somatic “I” but
has shifted to a new centre, and consequently his whole
being is profoundly changed.
Transformations of character of this kind have frequently
been recorded as following religious conversion. They were
indeed expected to take place as the result of the disciplines
and ordeals of religious initiation; and they have been
observed in individual cases after profound emotional
experiences of a quite personal nature. Paul’s experience on
the road to Damascus is a classical example: through it his
character and the whole direction of his life were altered—a
change that persisted until his death. It was not simply the
expression of a passing mood; nor was it an example of
enantiodromia , that dramatic change-over to an opposite
and complementary attitude which frequently occurs in the
so-called conversions of popular revivals, and which can be
reversed as easily as it was produced. On the contrary, the
illumination that came to Paul resulted in a far-reaching and
lasting transformation, affecting his whole being.
Profound psychological changes of comparable type may
occur as a result of the inner experience that Jung has
named the process of individuation, 4 which can be
observed in persons undergoing analysis by the method he
has elaborated. This change likewise affects the very
character of the basic instincts, which, instead of remaining
bound to their biological goals in a compulsive way, are
transformed for the service of the psyche. 0
These transformations observable in individual persons are
similar to the psychological changes that have occurred in
the race from the days of the ape man up to those of the
most developed and civilized type of modern man. It is
possible to trace, at least roughly, the stages by which the
instinctive urges have gradually been modified and
transformed in the long course
,of history through the
increase and development of consciousness. The
development of the individual follows a similar path: what
has been achieved only through untold ages by the race
must be recapitulated in the brief space of a few years in
every man and woman if the individuals of any one
generation are to attain to a personal level of consciousness
suitable for their epoch. And this process must actually be
accelerated if each generation is to be in a position to add
noticeably to the psychological achievements of the race.
Throughout the ages various techniques have been evolved
for accelerating the process in the individual. Some of these
techniques worked for a time and were subsequently
discarded. Sometimes a method that suited the mode of
one century did not appeal to the next. None has proved
universally successful. Foremost among modern methods is
that evolved by medical psychologists, who made the
discovery that neurotic and other psychological illnesses are
often caused by an infantility or primitivity persisting in the
background of the patient’s psyche. Jung’s work has dealt
particularly with the cultural aspects and implications of the
human problems
4. A detailed account of this process, based on the study of
two cases, has been published by Jung in “A Study in the
Process of Individuation,” in The Archetypes and the
Collective Unconscious (C.W. 9, i) and “Psychology and
Religion,” in Psychology and Religion: West and East (C.W.
11). Two other case histories, with detailed subjective
material, are recorded by H. G. Baynes in Mythology of the
Soul. Practical aspects of the process are discussed in later
chapters of the present volume.
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE 14
that his patients have presented to him; thus he has done
more to enlarge our understanding of the processes by
which consciousness develops than any of his predecessors
in the field, who have been preoccupied mainly with the
therapeutic aspects of their psychological work. The value
and significance of these discoveries can hardly be
overestimated, for Jung has demonstrated that it is indeed
possible to hasten the evolution of the instinctive drives and
so to assist in the cultural development of the individual,
who not only gains release from his asocial compulsions but
at the same time comes into possession of the energy that
was formerly locked up in biological and instinctive
mechanisms. Through such a transformation the man or
woman becomes a truly cultured and civilized person— a
worthy citizen of the world.
It may seem absurd to suggest that the attitude of the
individual to his personal conflicts and problems could have
any appreciable effect on an international situation involving
the fate of millions, or to turn from the general problem to
the personal one as if they were equivalents. Yet that is
exactly what anyone with even a minimum of psychological
insight is obliged to do if he seeks to understand the age in
which he is living or to contribute in a conscious way
towards the solution of the world problem.
The millions involved in world crises are individuals; the
emotions and dynamic drives motivating the clashes of
armies are engendered in individuals. These are psychic
forces that dwell in individual psyches. Thousands of
persons are still infected, at the present moment, with those
psychic infections which so recently produced a world war.
Not only have the totalitarian nations themselves suffered
from this psychic disease; we too are liable to the contagion,
for the simple reason that we inhabit the same world. For
psychic forces know no geographical boundaries.
In the individual, as in the state, the totalitarian attitude
denies the basic freedoms to a part of the whole. One part
arrogates all power and all advantages to itself, while
virtually enslaving or penalizing other parts if they do not
agree to support the dominant element. The one-sidedness
of the psy
Introduction / y
chological development of Western man has been not unlike
the rigid singleness of this attitude. The conscious ego has
assumed rights over the whole psyche, frequently
disregarding the very existence of other real needs and
values. It has repressed these other aspects of the psyche,
forcing them into the hidden depths of the unconscious,
where they are seized upon by the dark, ardiaic forces that,
like “the shapes that creep under the waters of sleep,”
forever move in the unknown reaches of the human psyche.
If any further step in the psychological development of man
is to be taken, the exclusive domination of the conscious
ego must be terminated, and the ruthless barbarism of the
primitive instincts themselves must in some way be
modified, so that their energy may be made available for
the cultural advancement of the individual and in this way
for society as well.
When, through a study of the products of his own
unconscious, an individual’s awareness of the hidden realms
of the psyche is increased, and the richness and vitality of
that unknown world is borne in upon him, his relation to the
dynamic and nonpersonal forces within himself is profoundly
changed. The I, with its petty, personal desires, sinks into
relative insignificance, and through his increased insight and
his greater understanding of life’s meaning and purpose, he
is enabled to release himself from the dominance of the
unconscious drives. The fact that such a change is possible
in the individual may give us a clue as to the direction that
must be taken if mankind is to be released from the
recurrent outbreaks of violence that threaten its very
existence. For the human race is endangered not by lack of
material wealth or of the technical skill for using it, but only
by the persistent barbarity of man himself, whose spiritual
development lags so far behind his scientific knowledge and
mechanical ingenuity.
The Transformation of the Instinctive
Drives
T hat the very nature of the basic instincts can, under
certain circumstances, undergo a fundamental modification
or transformation, is a very strange idea, unfamiliar to most
people. As a result of such a modification the instinctive
drives cease to be exclusively and compulsively related to
the biological aims of the organism—aims that are
necessarily concerned with the survival and well-being of
the individual and his immediate progeny—and are
converted at least in part to cultural ends. In the present
chapter this process will be further explored, and the rest of
Part I will be devoted to a more detailed study of the
problem as it affects the three basic instincts. Part II will
centre on the discussion of the technique used in analytical
psychology to further this transformation.
The instinctive drives or life urges always present
themselves to consciousness in quite personal guise, as “I
want,” “I must have,” whether it be hunger for food, or
sexual satisfaction, or security, or dominance that arouses
this urgent and compulsive demand. But this personalness
of the need is illusory: actually the “I want” is just a personal
expression of the fact that life itself “wants” in me. The urge
is more correctly called nonpersonal; it is ectopsychic in
origin and functions in the individual quite apart from his
conscious control and not infrequently to his actual
disadvantage. It is concerned only with the continuance of
life and, generally speaking,
16
with the survival of the race rather than of the individual,
'/he individual may even be sacrificed through the blind
working of such an instinctive compulsion, or may sacrifice
himself for the continuance of the species—not, as we might
suppose, v/ith an altruistic purpose, but all unknowing of
what his obedience to the impulse within him will involve. 1
bus for instance the drone flies inevitably and without
choice after the nubile queen, little guessing that this flight
Is his last. If he is successful in the race to
,possess her, he
will die in the consummation of his instinctive desire. If he
loses, he may be too exhausted to make his way back to the
hive, or on reaching it will be slaughtered on the threshold
as being of no further use to the community. Nor is it only
among the insects that the nonpersonal character of the
instinctive drives can be observed. The strange compulsion
that periodically leads lemmings to drown themselves in the
ocean is of an instinctive nature; and can we say that the
battle furor that ever and anon takes modem man into its
grip is so very different?
The extremely personal quality that is characteristic of the
instinctive urgencies is due to a lack of consciousness. An
individual who has outgrown the compulsive “I want” of the
infant is not unaware of his bodily needs, but he has
acquired a certain degree of detachm'ent from them. He is
no longer completely identified with his hunger or sexuality
or other bodily necessities, but can take them with a certain
relativity and postpone satisfaction of them until conditions
are adapted to their fulfilment. The infant cannot do this. If
it is in bodily discomfort it screams until relieved and has no
thought for the comfort or convenience of its nurse; nor will
it hesitate to snatch another’s food, recking little of the
complications that may follow.
During the course of the child’s development, some small
part of this nonpersonal, instinctive energy is redeemed
from its purely biological orientation and released for more
conscious aims. Through this process a part of the
unconscious psyche is separated from the rest, forming the
personal consciousness. This personal consciousness, which
the given individual calls “I,” often seems to him to
represent the whole
psyche; but this is an illusion. It actually represents a very
small part of the total psyche, which for the rest remains
largely unconscious and is nonpersonal or collective in its
aims and manifestations. The nonpersonal part of the
psyche is not connected with the subject, the I, nor under
his control; rather, its functioning happens in him as if
another or something other were speaking or acting within
him. For this reason Jung has called it the objective psyche.
It is as' much an object to the observing I as are the objects
in the outer world.
To the extent to which the unconscious part of the psyche is
not personal, it lacks those qualities which are characteristic
of consciousness and which depend on an established I as a
focus of consciousness. The conscious I sees everything
from its own point of view. Things are either good or bad—
for me; objects are near or far from, above or below myself;
to the right or to the left, within or without, and so on,
through the whole gamut of the pairs of opposites. But in
the unconscious these conditions do not prevail. There
forward and backward are undifferentiated, for there is no
discriminating point of consciousness against which to
define the movement; similarly good and bad, true and
false, creative and destructive, lie side by side and, like the
great fishes of the poem of Nicholas Barnaud Delphinas,
“they are two, and nevertheless they are one.”
When an unconscious content breaks through into
consciousness, its duality becomes apparent and a conflict
results. A choice has to be made. Values that seemed
secure and unassailable become uncertain, issues appear
confused; the solid ground, till then believed to be firm
beyond any doubt, quakes and dissolves; and only after a
new standpoint has been gained can a reconciliation be
achieved and peace be re-established.
The average person, who assumes that his conscious ego
represents the whole of his psyche, believes that he is really
as civilized and cultured as he appears to be. If at times his
thoughts or conduct would seem to cast a doubt on this
flattering self-estimate, he condones his failure to live up to
his own standard as due to an excusable fault or human
weakness of no special significance.
Transformation of Instinctive Drives ip
This general complacency was sadly shaken by the
researches of Freud, who demonstrated that under the
seemly garment of convention there lurk in all men and
women the impulses and desires of primitive instinct. This
discovery was exceedingly shocking to the average man of
the day. Indeed, each individual who experiences the force
of primitive instinct as a prime mover in *his own heart,
whether as part of the analytical experience or because of
some situation in life, is usually still profoundly shocked,
even though the Freudian theory itself no longer appears
particularly startling.
Freud’s theory has popularly been supposed to apply chiefly
or exclusively to the realm of sex, but it is also applicable to
other aspects of life; indeed, during an analysis much
attention is usually given to aggressive and vengeful
impulses. For example, most people believe themselves to
be peaceful folk, reasonably free from the compulsive drive
of the instinct of self-preservation. In times of peace such
people would say that nothing could ever bring them to kill.
Yet it is well known that in the heat and fear of battle, the
instinct to kill rather than be killed can take possession of
one who is naturally gentle in disposition and perhaps even
of pacifist tendency. Such a man may be seriously disturbed
at finding a blood lust latent within him, for in ordinary
civilian life we remain unaware of the strength of our
primitive instincts and are blind to what lies beneath the
smooth exterior in each of us. We simply do not see the
jungle animal lurking in the unconscious.
Similarly, those of us who have never known want have not
the remotest idea of how we should behave under
conditions of starvation. Under such circumstances lying
and deceit, theft, and even murder for the sake of satisfying
the voracious instinct are not impossible to apparently
civilized men. Crimes of passion, which form a large
proportion of the more serious cases in the criminal courts,
are committed not only by persons of the criminal classes
but also by men and women who in all other respects are
decent and respected citizens. These are examples of the
way in which the control of the ego can
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE
20
break down before the urgent demands of an outraged
instinct that on throwing off its customary restraints appears
in all its naked and primitive barbarism.
The instinct of hunger and the reproductive urge, with its
by-product of sexuality, are the basic manifestations of life.
By their presence or absence we determine whether a given
structure constitutes a living being or not. The behaviour of
every organism that has not yet developed a central
nervous system is completely controlled by these primordial
instincts. In the earliest stage of development, the response
to the stimulus of hunger or sex is automatic and
compulsory, being set in motion whenever an object
adapted to the satisfaction of the urge appears. With the
development of a central nervous system, however, a
change becomes apparent. The organism begins to acquire
the capacity to exercise choice. It is no longer merely a
reacting mechanism, compelled to respond to the stimulus
in a purely automatic way.
This element of choice and the consequent liberation from
the dominance of instinct become more marked as the
central nervous system evolves, until we are obliged, in the
case of the higher animals, to speak of a psychic factor
separate from, though dependent on, the control of the
nervous system. With the emergence of a psyche, the
instincts are increasingly modified and come in some
measure under the control of the individual organism. Jung
has called this process the psychization 1 of the instincts.
With the development of the psyche through the centuries,
control over the instincts gradually increased. Bit by bit they
were changed, losing to a certain extent
,their automatic and
compulsory character, so that the individual gained
increasing freedom of choice and of action. Yet under
conditions of stress he may still lose his hard-won control,
temporarily or even permanently, and fall again under the
arbitrary domination of instinct. This is always felt to be a
regression, entailing a loss of humanness, even though it
may bring with it an uprush of
I. C. G. Jung, “Psychological Factors Determining Human
Behaviour,” in The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
(C.W. 8), p. 115.
21
Transformation of Instinctive Drives
energy and a sense of release from a restraint that has
become intolerable.
That the compulsoriness of primitive instinct has been
modified by the emergence of the psyche is an obvious fact
accessible to daily observation, but the course by which this
change has come to pass remains largely unexplained. We
cannot say that the change was instituted by the conscious
ego, because the conscious psyche itself arose, by some
unexplained process, out of unconsciousness. If the basic
urges to selfpreservation and reproduction and the will to
dominate were the only motivating forces in the organism, it
is hardly conceivable that the psyche could have arisen. For
this reason Jung differentiates three other urges motivating
the psychic life of the individual organism and having the
characteristic compulsoriness of instincts, namely, the drive
to activity, the reflection urge, and the so-called creative
instinct. He designates the last-mentioned urge as a psychic
factor similar to though not identical with an instinct. He
writes:
The richness of the human psyche and its essential
character are probably determined by this reflective instinct.
. . . [By it] the stimulus is more or less wholly transformed
into a psychic content, that is, it becomes an experience: a
natural process is transformed into a conscious content.
Reflection is the cultural instinct par excellence, and its
strength is shown in the power of culture to maintain itself
in the face of untamed nature. 2
As a result of this urge or necessity to reflect on experience
and to relive it in drama and relate it in story, the basic
instincts in man—and in him alone among all the animals—
have to some extent been modified and robbed of part of
their compulsive effect, thus coming to serve the growing
needs of the psyche instead of remaining bound irrevocably
to the needs of the nonpsychic, that is, the biological or
animal life.
This transformation has occurred in the case of each of the
basic instincts: sexuality, in addition to fulfilling a biological
function, now serves the emotional needs of the psyche;
2. Ibid., p. 117.
the instinct of self-defence has motivated the establishment
of community life, with its collective enterprises and its
basic social relationships; the satisfaction of hunger,
originally a purely biological activity, has come to be the
focus around which human companionship is cultivated. The
primitive need of the hungry animal has been so brought
under the control of the psyche that satisfying hunger in
common has become the most prevalent way of fostering
and expressing comradely relationship with our fellow men.
Elaborate rituals and customs have accrued around what
was originally the simple matter of eating, and the instinct
has been largely made over to serve emotional needs. We
hardly feel comfortable about eating constantly alone, and
experience a real need to share our delicacies with others,
to make a little party of our good fortune: the feeling is, as
the Chinese / doing puts it, “I have a cup of good spirits;
come and share it with me.” 3 And when we want to express
pleasure at being with a friend, we quite spontaneously
mark the occasion with a meal, while even our religious
festivals are celebrated with emphasis on this interest —the
joyous ones with feasts, and the periods of repentance or of
mourning with fasts.
When the instinct of hunger has been partly modified in the
interest of the psyche, it may begin to show itself in quite
different terms, as for instance in some other urgent desire
characterized by insatiability. Love of money, inordinate
ambition, or any other unlimited desirousness may be an
expression of the hunger instinct, even though the
individual in whom it occurs is completely unconscious of
this fact.
The craving for food is the expression of hunger in the
biological sphere; but the human being has need for
sustenance in other realms—a need that can be as urgent in
its demands as physical hunger and that may exert a
compulsion no less inexorable. We need only note the
language employed in reference to these other needs to
realize how naturally and unconsciously the very terms of
physical hunger are applied to them. We “assimilate” an
idea or “imbibe” a thought; propaganda is “fed” to an
unthinking public. The collect advises
3. Cf. I Ching, I, 252.
Transformation of
Instinctive Drives 25
us to “read, mark, learn and inwardly digest” the teaching.
In slang phrase, we “chew over a new idea” or, rejecting it,
“spit it out,” saying, “I could not stomach it.” Such words
are almost unavoidable in talking of ideas, and the
symbolism of eating and digesting is used in relation to
other matters as well. For instance, the phrase “to hunger
and thirst after righteousness” refers to something deeper
than intellectual understanding and has nearer kinship with
the ideas represented in the rituals of “eating the god,”
whereby the participant in the ritual meal assimilates the
divine qualities. In our own Christian ritual of communion,
the communicant is believed to assimilate in actual fact not
only the Christ nature but Christ himself, who thenceforth
will dwell in his heart “by faith.”
As a result of modification and development, the hunger
instinct has emerged from the purely biological realm,
where it is the manifestation of a somatic or bodily need,
into the realm of the psyche. There it serves the conscious
ego in the form of ambition, self-esteem, or desire for
possessions. But it may undergo a still further modification,
and a stage may be reached in which the hunger is no
longer concerned exclusively with personal possessions or
aggrandizement but instead seeks, as the supreme goal, a
suprapersonal or religious value.
From this brief outline it will be realized that the gradual
transformation of the instinct of hunger takes place in three
stages: these correspond to the three phases of
development of the human being that I have elsewhere
called the naive stage of consciousness, the ego stage, and
the stage of consciousness of the Self . 4 The same steps
can be traced in the evolution of the other basic instincts—
the urge to self-preservation, sexuality with its concomitant
parental motive, and the will to power. In each of these
realms, the biological needs and the instinctive impulses
associated with them dominate the field of consciousness in
the first stage, in which the focal centre, the I, is completely
dominated by auto-erotic desires. I have
4. The Way of All Women, p. 6. Throughout the present
volume, the term Self, as connoting the centre of the psyche
in its totality, is thus capitalized to differentiate it from
references to the personal I, which is frequently spoken of
as the self-in such terms as myself, himself, etc.
PSYCHIC ENERGY: ITS SOURCE 2 4
called this centre the autos . 5 In the second stage the ego
becomes the centre of consciousness, and the instinctive
drives are modified through their relation to the new-found
ego consciousness, which in its turn says “I.” In the third
stage the ego is displaced from its central position,
becoming relative in importance to the new centre of
consciousness, the Self, whose categorical imperative takes
over ultimate control.
Jung uses the term Self to represent the centre of psychic
awareness that transcends ego consciousness and includes
