Somewhere in one’s person, relatively distinct from the ego and supraordinate to it, is a self that knows what is good for itself.

Fundamentally the organism that each of us is – the totality of what we call psyche and body – knows what is good for itself. We can see this most vividly in infants who have not yet been significantly conditioned by their environment. They suckle, they sleep, they cry, they smile, not on any imposed schedule, but, as we might say, “naturally,” in response to something innate. In Jungian terms, this “innate something” that regulates the organism – the physiological processes as well as the stages of physical, emotional, and psychological growth and development – functions as an “authority” with an agenda and a goal. This is part of what we mean by the term Self: an inner authority “distinct from the ego and supraordinate to it.” The inner authority with its agenda and its goal “knows what is good for itself,” which means that the Self in you and the Self in me knows what is good for you or for me as whole persons. This “knowing” is evidence of the feeling function in operation, independently of the conscious personality.

“Feeling” is a messy word in English: we use the same word to refer to several different experiences. “I feel hungry.” “I feel happy.” “I feel we should do xyz.” “What do you feel like doing?” Here we have four different usages of the same word: a physical condition (hungry), an emotional state (happy), a thought or belief (we should do xyz), and a desire or preference (feel like doing). 

The first two usages – feel hungry, feel happy – express a perception of something going on in oneself. We could more accurately say “happiness is happening” and “my consciousness perceives happiness,” or “hunger is happening” and my consciousness perceives it. The third usage – “What do you feel like doing?” – may really be asking: “What does the Self in you want you to do?” “What does that part of you, not your conditioned ego, want you to do that is good for itself [and therefore good for you, too]?” The fourth possibility – feel we should do – expresses some sense of duty or obligation and the possibility of choice. That may be the Self nudging consciousness, but it could just as well be a “learned should,” an artifact of something taken in from our environment that may have very little to do with the Self, with our innate capacity that “knows what is good for itself.” 

Our conditioned conscious personalities – your ego – and my conditioned conscious personality – my ego – may have other ideas of what’s good for you or for me. That’s where our conditioned consciousness and the essence that we call Self come into conflict. The conflict between the innate feeling function (one of the voices of the Self) and what our environment tells us is right and good for us collide shortly after birth. This conflict arises because we have to adapt to the environment in order to survive. In fact, we have to adapt to our environment throughout life, but we also have to find a way to live as much of our innate uniqueness as possible (i.e., the potential contained in the Self). Typically in the first half of life – up until 35 or 40 – establishing ourselves in the world takes most of our energy and attention. But after the decade of our 40s it becomes progressively more important and even urgent to develop a better balance between adaptation to the world and adaptation to what in us “wants” us to pay attention to it. 

Adaptation to our environment necessitates compromises, but they become problematic when the compromises block expression of our innate potential, i.e., the actualization of the Self. Blocked potentials don’t disappear; they remain as unlived life, showing up in daydreams, night dreams, fantasies and fascinations, or emotional and/or physical symptoms, and various forms of “acting out.” As we get older, the more the Self does not inform our waking life, the more our level of vitality suffers. We can recognize one aspect of our compromises in the sense – sometimes vague, sometimes clear and distinct – that what we are doing doesn’t suit us, “goes against the grain,” takes our energy but doesn’t give us anything in return. One of the major tasks in therapy with people after age 40 consists in developing a conscious relationship to the feeling function so that they can chose to evaluate everything in terms of suitable or unsuitable. “Am I operating out of habit, because it ‘feels’ comfortable?” “Is an activated complex driving me?” “Have I been infected by an emotion that could carry me off somewhere that really isn’t good for me?” “Am I crossing a developmental threshold, hence the ‘feeling’ of unfamiliarity?” “Is the Self is moving me on in life?”  

Developing a conscious relationship to the feeling function (one of the voices of the Self) means we have to scrutinize everything that moves us, pulls or pushes us toward one choice or another. We have to ask whether conditioning taught us to prefer something, or whether what we sense as a preference is the Self nudging us to actualize more of our innate potential. In principle, this is simple. In practice this demands careful reflection on what we value and why we value it. 

As I was writing this piece a former client in her mid-fifties whom I hadn’t seen for several months scheduled a “tune up” session. She had had “Great Success,” she said. “I have managed to disappoint several people.” She went on to relate several instances when she, an independent contractor, had gotten several job offers, all of which she had turned down. This had not been easy. Typically in the past she would have devised some compromise work-around to accommodate the other person. “I can make it work for a few months,” she rationalized as she thought about how to accept the offer. “Then I heard myself.” She had begun to be able to notice and honor the voice of the Self.

Somewhere in one’s person, relatively distinct from the ego and supraordinate to it, is a self that knows what is good for itself.

Recently the United Nations published its 2018 research paper, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World. “In addition to conflict and violence in many parts of the world, the gains made in ending hunger and malnutrition are being eroded by climate variability and exposure to more complex, frequent, and intense climate extremes ….”

In November, Mary Hoff wrote in Scientific American that

In the 1990s, reports started cropping up around the world of disappearing pollinators. In 2006, researchers reported dramatic declines in counts of moths attracted to light traps in Great Britain. A 2010 international gathering of firefly experts reported unsettling downward trends(1).  In 2017, scientists reported a decline of more than 75 percent(2) in insect biomass across 63 nature areas in Germany between 1989 and 2016. A 2018 census(3) found an ominous drop in monarch butterflies along the California coast. Anecdotal evidence from Australia(4) earlier this year indicates insect declines there as well.

……….

Although these results are disturbing, they’re not definitive.…

Nevertheless, there are plenty of reasons to expect declines. Widespread use of insecticides is one obvious one. Others include habitat loss and degradation; declines in or disappearance of plants or animals that specific insects depend on for food and shelter; displacement by nonnative species; air, water and light pollution (5); the global spread of insect diseases; climate change; and even, says Wagner, nitrification due to fossil-fuel burning.

On Friday, March 1, William Brangham interviewed David Wallace-Wells, a fellow at the New America Foundation and a columnist and editor at “New York Magazine,” who has just published The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming.”It is worse, much worse, than you think,” Wallace-Wells writes. “The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions ….”

In addition to what climate change brings, we see all around us bullies and tyrants imposing their view and their will through disinformation, spin, fear, lies, and money. In the 7 December 2018 Washington Post, Charles Edel discussed the message of Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz’s novel, The Captive Mind.

It was his attempt to explain why individuals moved along the path from resistance to surrender, submission and ultimately advocacy of a system of government they had detested. Written to explain what intellectual life was like behind the Soviet Union’s Iron Curtain, Milosz’s work is freshly relevant today…. This process [of accommodating to an authoritarian regime] hardly ever occurred all at once. The changes happened slowly, almost imperceptibly, and began by a weakening of the will to resist.” [Milosz left Poland and fled to the relative safety of the West. Edel quotes Milosz: ]“I have won my freedom; but let me not forget that I stand in daily risk of losing it once more.”

Edel continues, “For those willing to resist, and for those wanting to encourage others to do so, Milosz recognized that refusing to be complicit is insufficient. The harder and more enduring task was recognizing that they had merely won the privilege to fight for [their freedom] for another day.”

Adding more examples of nastiness happening on the planet would be easy. These references set the background for discussing why I do what I do.

As a young man in my 20s, many of my contemporaries engaged (at least verbally) in various forms of protest and political activism. They vigorously criticized me for pursuing the psychological point of view. Of course, I felt both attacked and guilty. I couldn’t deny that awful things were happening on the planet. Neither could I deny that angry confrontation, or the prospect of angry confrontation, terrified me.

What I “do” is psychotherapy and psychoanalysis (as well as teach analysts-in-training and write my monthly blog for the Ommani Jewel). Since my 20s I have struggled with my awareness of the world mess and with my innate preference to work with individuals. How can I justify doing psychotherapy and analysis with one person at a time, or teaching psychotherapy and psychoanalysis to fifteen or twenty people at a time, when “the world is burning”?

For a long time, I have been painfully aware that an inclination, a predisposition, a fantasy, or an impulse in the psyche precedes whatever happens in the world. I know this from self-observation and from decades of working intimately with individuals. I also know that the native endowment for self-observation varies from person to person. Some people are naturally more predisposed to self-awareness than others. Fortunately, anyone can develop greater skill in self-observation and self-awareness. A person feels compelled to do this when one becomes a problem to oneself. Self-awareness and self-observation before acting give one time to evaluate the immediate situation as well as the fantasy, impulse, image, thought.

Victor Hugo is credited with saying that nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.(Fascinating and important as it is, I will not attempt to establish when the time has come for any particular thought. That would make for a good essay; I’ll think about it.) Suffice it to say here that “ideas” often precede “their time,” some by decades (e.g., racial, ethnic, and gender equality) and others by seconds (e.g., the pertinent or impertinent observation that the king has no clothes, or is a cheat, liar, racist, con, and thin-skinned bully). Effectiveness depends on timing, and timing depends on some ability to sense the other person’s receptivity for what arises in one’s awareness. Effectiveness also depends on action, and action depends on a sense of self and on courage.

“Know thyself” is as old as western civilization. It admonished pilgrims to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, and we find it in the Bible. In several of his letters, St. Paul repeats this injunction. In both instances – classical Greek and Biblical – self-knowledge comes from a source other than the conditioned mind. In the Greek context, pilgrims sought the guidance of Apollo – the Greek god of the sun, light, reason, medicine, and healing – through his mouthpiece the  priestess called the Pythia. Similarly, St. Paul references the Holy Spirit as the source of knowledge. Both the Greek and the Biblical sources clearly imply a “source” other than our empirical, worldly personalities. As C.G. Jung has pointed out, since we no longer experience either the classical gods or (for many people) the Christian deity as vital experiences, they have become, for many, myths, stories, historical images that have no relation to how we live or to our sense of ourselves. The vitality they once carried has disappeared from our conscious experience. They have, in effect, fallen into the unconscious.

Nowadays people say “from the unconscious,” as if that were a place or a part of the brain. The “unconscious” is everything of which I am unaware at the moment. Now the energies that filled the gods of Greece, or the Biblical Prophets, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit still move in us, but instead of recognizing them as powers greater than we are, we say “It,” thereby lumping a host of emotional energies together under one puny pronoun. “It makes me angry.” In mythological terms, that would be the god of War, Mars. “It demands a lot of me.” Saturn, the Greek god of limits, confinement, the difficulty would be a more vivid and informative way to talk about the experience. “I’m really enthusiastic!” Who asks, “What god fills me with energy?”

I am arguing that energies exist outside our conditioned consciousness which can sweep us up and carry us away if we cannot perceive them infecting us. When that does happen many of us may say, “I never behave like that. Something must have gotten into me.” Indeed. Self-awareness and self-knowledge must also include our awareness and knowledge of exactly these powerful energies that can and will have their way with us unless we can notice, monitor, and chose how to express them.

“Psychological polytheism” (i.e., what I have been talking about with the Greek gods as figures imaging energies with specific emotional and behavioral characteristics) represents a significant development of consciousness beyond unreflecting victimization by these and other energies. Remember, however, that whether the appeal goes to Apollo’s Pythia or to the Holy Spirit or a Higher Power, the supplicant seeks direction from a source other than his or her ego-consciousness that “stands” behind or above or outside of the manifest world, but is nevertheless involved in and concerned with the here-and-now. The notion of a  “higher power,” and I mean a “power” superior to the plurality of mythological gods, becomes desirable when one recognizes the reality of powerful conflicting forces, each trying to dominate our consciousness and our behavior. If this sounds far-fetched, just look around: Where did you recently see a bully on the loose? What about somebody driven by rage? Or another person crushed by physical or circumstantial or emotional limitations?

Theological terms (God, and gods, and demons, and such) don’t mean much to many people these days. Many branches of psychology prefer to talk in terms of diagnostic categories. Alas, many people identify themselves with diagnostic labels: “I’m OCD.” “I’m a depressive.” I am not trying to “sell” mythology or theology. What I want to emphasize is this: People do have a sense of incompleteness, that something is lacking, that they don’t feel themselves. How often do we hear someone say, “I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.”

These words imply some people’s dim awareness that there must be more to what they essentially are than what they have manifested, embodied, developed. For want of a better word, I will refer to this as “core,” the central, essential core of the individual.

I think of “core” as a “higher power,” superior to all the other powers that have at us as emotions and passions and sufferings. To be in touch with one’s core subordinates everything else to a more comprehensive sense of self than the passing fascination, fury, passion, or sadness. As C.G. Jung eloquently expressed the experience of being in touch with one’s core:

It is always a difficult thing to express, in intellectual terms, subtle feelings that are nevertheless infinitely important for the individual’s life and well-being. It is, in a sense, the feeling that we have been “replaced,” but without the connotation of having been deposed.” It is as if the guidance of life had passed over to an invisible centre.

This brings us back to why I do what I do: psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, teaching, and some writing.

If it is in fact true and real – as my study and experience testifies – that whatever happens manifestly on the planet emerges through the individual as an impulse, fantasy, reaction to something, or a thought, then changing the world depends on individuals’ having enough consciousness to notice what’s moving in them and being able to choose when, where, and how – and whether – to give expression to that impulse, etc.

Many of the impulses and fantasies we experience are less than pure gold. Often these impulses and fantasies are the expression of activated complexes. Technically, what we call complexes – more precisely, feeling-toned complexes – are emotionally-colored memories or memory clusters. Many complexes form around hurts and wounds. When something in our environment resembles any complex in us, that complex responds to some degree, first with the emotion characteristic of that complex, and then often with memory associations. “I cringe every time I hear that voice because it sounds just like my father when he was trying to be funny.” Hearing “that voice” activated emotions and memories experienced with father, and the present begins to feel like the past. To the extent we are conscious of what’s happening, we have the possibility of choosing what to say, what to do, how to react. If we aren’t aware, the activated complex takes over and we become its mouthpiece and agent, often to our regret.

But not all the energies that invade us come from personal complexes. C.G. Jung’s writings have made the words “archetype” and “archetypal” part of our contemporary vocabulary and each and every one of us has a full pantheon of archetypal patterns just waiting for the opportune moment to come alive in us and take over our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors. Jung wrote that the gods of the pantheon are not dead:

We are still as much possessed by autonomous psychic contents as if they were Olympians. Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room, or disorders the brains of politicians and journalists who unwittingly let loose psychic epidemics on the world.

So part of what I do aims at helping people identify their complexes and the archetypal potentials that may be activated: both the typical emotions as well as the specific triggers that activate them. But beyond the complexes and archetypes we have yet to deal with the issue of the “core,” the essence of the individual.

As I wrote above, a person experiences the core, the essence, the Self (in Jungian terms) as a “higher power.” Some people are blessed with powerful experiences in which their essence reveals itself to them in a vision, a dream, a waking-life encounter.  Near-death experiences, for example, can have this effect. The paradigmatic example is Saul on the road to Damascus. I suspect, however, that most people are not granted this sort of boon. Most of the people I see professionally struggle with their complexes and their adaptation to the world and to themselves, wondering what they will be when they grow up. Through trial and error, they – and I – grope toward finding and following what C.G. Jung called “the implacable law of one’s being,” their “life-lines … not to be confused with the “guiding fictions’….”

Jung goes on to write that these life-lines have only “provisional value.” They are “points of view,” “never general principles or universally accepted ideals.” We do the best we can at the time, maybe not the best we know, but the best of which we are capable. Hence struggle, false starts, blind alleys, bad choices, dead ends, messy relationships. And, we hope, learning something along the way toward identifying, as well as we possibly can, the life-lines that lead toward the implacable law of our individual (and collective) being. All this is necessary but not enough.

It’s not enough because all over the planet we see people driven by their wounds and passions and visions and fantasies and hates and loves. And by the look of it, they are not plumbing their depths to examine what’s driving them.

As fundamental as it is, working with individuals is not enough. I will continue doing what I do, but I also have to do the hard thing – speak out and act publicly – not only in a blog in the Ommani Jewel, not only in the classes I teach but as a human being and a citizen. The prospect does not appeal to me. I’d much prefer to get lost in my books and follow the ideas that appeal to me.

In October 1916, Jung lectured his group of colleagues in Zurich. Three years had passed since he and Freud broke off their relationship. During this time Jung was plumbing his depths. In his lecture Jung  identifies the roots of neurosis: When a person prefers to look only within or only to look without, that is a one-sided, and therefore inadequate, adaptation, a failure in affirming the wholeness of one’s being.  We have to learn how to live with what we are (inner adaptation) as well as figure out how to live in the world (outer adaptation).

As if this weren’t demanding enough, Jung then talks about the individual’s relationship to the collective, specifically the individual who prefers to look inward, who preferences inner adaptation. This is the person who goes his or her own way, following his or her life-line for as long as it has energy.  This often violates the expectations, norms, and values of his or her society. Going one’s own way – the path of individuation – “cuts one off from personal conformity and hence from collectivity” and produces guilt. The individual “must offer a ransom in place of himself, that is, he must bring forth values which are an equivalent substitute for his absence in the collective personal sphere.”

For years I have struggled with my sense of guilt in relationship to the society and to the world in which I live. I have struggled with Jung’s hard words about “ransom” and about bringing forth “values which are an equivalent substitute for [my] absence in the collective personal sphere.” As my sense and acceptance of what I essentially am has grown, I feel safer with myself. Self-knowledge and self-acceptance make it easier to speak and write more openly about what I have experienced, what I have observed, and the “lessons” I have learned. I am less fearful than I used to be. I like to believe that in the course of my life I have recognized some “objective values,” as Jung puts it.

We now need all the self-knowledge, self-acceptance, and courage we can muster. Why? Because going beyond one’s comfort zone is what offers us the only opportunity to know what we are made of and to discern if what we do is good enough.

I will continue “to do what I do,” and I must now speak out more publicly. I must now contribute to the public discussion, the public dialog, the public debate. And to the public protest against what is hateful, wrong, and destructive. I have to move beyond my comfort zone to work in concert with others because isolated individuals cannot effectively confront the challenges we face as a species.

And so, Gentle Reader, what about you? Are you gaining ground against the complexes and archetypal energies that will colonize and run you if you let them? Is your self-knowledge and self-acceptance increasing? Do you have a sense of the “core” you, your essence, from which you can speak with integrity and act with others beyond your comfort zone?

March 2019 Boris Matthews, PhD, LCSW practices Analytical Psychology (a.k.a. Jungian Analysis) at the Ommani Center for Integrative Medicine in Pewaukee, WI. He is a teaching and supervising faculty member of the C. G. Jung Institute of Chicago, IL, and Director of the Analyst Training Program. He has been in practice since the mid-1980s.  To schedule an appointment, call the Ommani Center, 262-695-5311. Learn more at www.ommanicenter.com

1 http://www.firefliesandglow-worms.co.uk/lampyrid-journal/vol2/selangor-declaration-conservation-of-fireflies.html

2 https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0185809

3 https://xerces.org/2018/02/01/western-monarch-butterflies-continue-to-decline/

4 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-02-24/decline-in-insect-population-baffles-scientists/9481136

5 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ece3.4557

References:

¹ The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World,  http://www.fao.org/3/I9553EN/i9553en.pdf, vi.

² Hoff, Mary (2018). As Insect Populations Decline, Scientists Are Trying to Understand Why. Scientific American, November 1, 2018.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/as-insect-populations-decline-scientists-are-trying-to-understand-why/

³ https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/why-climate-change-is-an-all-encompassing-threat

⁴ Edel, Charles (2018). “How democracies slide into authoritarianism.” The Washington Post, 2018-12-07, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2018/12/07/how-democracies-slide-into-authoritarianism/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.81f5ec85a594

⁵ Attributed to Victor Hugo. Various references found on the Internet (2018-02-27).

⁶ See 2 Corinthians 11:31-32, Galatians 6:4, 2 Peter 1-10. Also 1 John 1-9.

⁷ “Pertaining to possession by a deity,” from Greek enthousiastikos “inspired,” c. 1600.

⁸ Jung, C.G. (1938/1967). “The Secret of the Golden Flower,” Alchemical Studies, vol.13 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton” Princeton University Press, para. 4. 

⁹ Jung, C.G. (1938/1967). Para. 54.

¹0 Ibid., para. 77.

¹1 Jung, C.G. (1916/1980). “Adaptation, Individuation and Collectivity,” The Symbolic Life, vol 18, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton” Princeton University Press, para. 1095.

¹2 Ibid.

¹3 Ibid.

Writing this between Christmas and New Year’s days, and having seen a few clients in between, the experience remains fresh: the year-end holidays offer the occasion for alienation. I mean the worst kind: self-alienation.  It’s been this way for as long as I can remember. I hesitate to say “universal,” but certainly many people know what I’m talking about. And I know, too.

By self-alienation I mean that terrible feeling of having lost your sense of who you really are. The set-up is perfect: Cultural and family expectations around the year-end holidays, family patterns going back years, if not generations, and the reality that people really are different from one another. Christmas and New Year’s “as usual” present two ways you can end up feeling self-alienated. You can participate, blend in, “go with the program;” or you can attempt actively to structure the situation, hoping to make everybody involved comfortable and feeling welcomed.

To the extent that you blend in long enough without holding on to who you really are, you run the risk of losing your sense of self in the business-as-usual of the holidays. That tends toward depression.

To the extent you actively try to make everybody else feel at home, but don’t adequately attend to your own need for being real and authentic, you lose yourself. This route tends toward anger and exhaustion.

What I write here doesn’t apply to those for whom the Christmas message of spiritual renewal really works. Once upon a time (I want to believe), the Winter Solstice and the birth of the Christ child signaled the end of Darkness and the renewal of the Light, not only the solar light and the coming days of increased daylight but, more importantly, the re-awakening of an “inner” Light that promised to save us from our condition as mere human animals. In the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas Jesus is quoted as saying, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you have will save you. If you do not have that within you, what you do not have within you [will] kill you.” “Whoever lacks the “inner light” cannot bring it forth.

“Inner Light,” as I understand it, informs my sense of self: that which gives me the sense of being real, authentic, “on track,” doing and being “what I’m meant to do and be.” Jung expressed it in psychological terms when he wrote about the “life-line”: The construction of “life-lines” reveals to consciousness the ever-changing direction of the currents of libido [i.e., psychic energy].”(1)

An individual’s “life-line” (usually) does not appear as a four-lane super highway. Neither does it follow a straight course nor does the same direction last forever. “These life-lines, therefore, are never general principles or universally accepted ideals, but points of view and attitudes that have a provisional value.”(2) You can begin to recognize your individual, current life-line as an interest, an inclination, as a fantasy that preoccupies you, that time and again appears in your consciousness. “I think I’d like to . . . .” By noticing and following our current, provisional individual life-line as soon and as far as we can, over time we gradually uncover “an individual nucleus which is covered by the personal mask,”(3) by our conventional adaptation to whatever situation we find ourselves in at the moment. In this way we discover progressively more of ‘that which we have inside us that will save us if we bring it forth.’ Over time—months and years—the meanderings of our individual life-line reveals the path our life has taken, “made up, unfortunately, of fateful detours and wrong turnings,” the goal of which is the “whole” individual that reveals and incarnates the essential nucleus, “hidden and as yet unmanifest.”(4) I understand the notion of the individual life-line as one way of imaging a spark of the “inner light” of which Christmas and the Winter Solstice (should) remind us.

In the moment, however, when you recognize that you have lost your “feel” of who you really are, you need to reconnect with yourself. Psyche may help in the form of a thought, image, memory, or fantasy of some activity—however inconsequential or significant—that you have found to some degree satisfying. (Often for me it is either going back to studying something that interests me, putzing-around in my wood shop, or tending my house plants.) If nothing comes to mind, your situation is more distressing. Then you may have to try one thing, then another, and another for a few minutes until you discover something, some activity or focus of attention that holds your interest for a while. Paraphrasing, the Gospel of Thomas tells us, we have to find something within us and bring it forth that will save us—and I add: from self-alienation and meaninglessness. Recall what Jung wrote: the life-line is provisional. It works for a while until the flow of your psychic energy changes direction. Then you have to pay attention and change with it if you don’t want to end up stranded in some sort of self-alienated funk.

You are reading these lines—mid-January— and, I hope, you have survived. To the extent you have recovered from holiday self-alienation, you again have a sense of being your real (at least to some degree). The challenge does not end with the holidays. Everyday each of us has the opportunity to lose our sense of who we are and the challenge of re-discovering our life-line, that provisional sense of self-identity. We can’t take the current life-line for granted because our psychic energy does not follow any straight line, as we know from observing how our interests wax and wane.

So with these cheerful (?) thoughts, I wish you a Happy New Year. Best Wishes for staying in touch with who you really, essentially are this and every year.

(1) Jung, C.G. (1916 / 1970).  Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, vol. 7, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press, para. 500ff. (“Libido” is Jung’s term for psychic energy.)

(2)Ibid., para. 501.

(3)Ibid., para. 504.

(4)Jung, C.G. (1953/1968). Psychology and Alchemy, vol. 12 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton: Princeton University Press, para.6

  

The mood of the times in which we live affects all of us in one way or another. Weary, discouraged, disoriented, and depressed—and I could add angry—describe what many people feel. These emotions affect each and every one of us to some degree. We could talk about the political situation, or climate change, or the stock market, or corruption in high places, or any number of “issues.” But what, if anything, lies at the root of the malaise many perceive in our society?

In a recent essay, Henrique C. Pereira (2018) addresses this issue. In “The weariness of the hero: depression and the self in a civilization in transition” Pereira “raises the hypothesis that depression could be related to an increase or inflation of ego-consciousness which, in turn, is inseparable from the development of modernity.” (p. 420). He acknowledges that there can be many causes of depression. However, historically the ‘hero’ has symbolized the process of the development of self-consciousness and autonomy. As the sense of independence increases, the sense of interdependence tends to decrease. At a societal or cultural level, emphasis on individual aspirations and goals tends to lose sight of shared community aspirations and needs. Gradually some people begin to wonder: Where are we (as a couple, a family, a nation, as a species) going? Hence the confusion and call for strong leadership to set things right, and the appeal to get back to the way things used to work. But we also know that trying the same old thing hoping for a different outcome is one of the definitions of insanity.

In her introduction to the 2004 edition of Joseph Campbell’s 1949 classic, The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Clarissa Pincola-Estés describes the heroic attitude when functioning healthily:

This heroic way offers depth of insight and meaning. It is attentive to guides along the way, and invigorates life. We see that the journey of the hero and heroine are most often deepened via ongoing perils. These include losing one’s way innumerable times, refusing the first call, thinking it is only one thing when it really is, in fact, quite another—as well as entanglements and confrontations with something of great and often frightening magnitude. Campbell points out that coming through such struggles causes the person [or the culture, I might add] to be infused with more vision, and to be strengthened by the spiritual life principle—which, more than anything else, encourages one to take courage to live with effrontery and mettle.” (p. xxiv)

When an individual, or a society, cannot pay attention to the guides along the way, nor face ongoing perils, nor deal with “entanglements and confrontations with something of great and often frightening magnitude,” that individual or society can become depressed; or worse, endangered. As William Butler Yeats wrote so powerfully in his poem, The Second Coming, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” The heroic attitude runs amok is weary or misdirected. Perhaps the current hero attitude doesn’t know what to make of or do about an endangered civilization in transition.

We need to say more about the hero, specifically in terms of ego. The journey of the hero or heroine models the development of ego, that sense of “I.” Joseph Henderson (1964) writes that in the myths of diverse peoples all over the world,

Over and over again one hears a tale describing a hero’s miraculous but humble birth, his early proof of superhuman strength, his rapid rise to prominence or power, his triumphal struggle with the forces of evil, his fallibility to the sin of pride (hybris), and his fall through betrayal or a “heroic” sacrifice that ends in his death. [This pattern, he continues,] has psychological meaning both for the individual, who is endeavoring to discover and assert his personality and for a whole society, which has equal need to establish its collective identity. (p. 110)

The hero pattern informs the development of both individual and society, and both individual and society risk hybris when they become inflated with their accomplishments, as Shakespeare has Anthony ironically say of Caesar in act 2, scene 1, “scorning the base degrees by which he did ascend.”

Hybris, inflation, in the psychological sense, identifies a condition of consciousness characterized by “a feeling of power in which we are blown up by an unknown force that is not our own . . . . However, it feels as if it were and we claim it as our own. It makes us feel cocksure and self-righteous . . . .” (Whitmont, 1969, 59) Inflation differs from the experience of being “swept away.” When one feels swept away, one recognizes one’s loss of control and feels the exhilaration or terror that accompanies it.   Inflation feels strong, powerful, self-righteous, holier-than-thou. Assertions like “I’m the most successful” and “I’m the greatest” and “I’ve got the biggest audience” betray ego-inflation.

To return for a moment to Clarissa Pincola-Estés’s words about the hero’s or heroine’s struggles, “These [ongoing perils] include losing one’s way innumerable times, refusing the first call, thinking it is only one thing when it really is, in fact, quite another—as well as entanglements and confrontations with something of great and often frightening magnitude.” What are these “entanglements and confrontations with something of great and often frightening magnitude”? Societal and cultural habits, natural challenges (such as climate change), as well as personal and tribal conflicts constitute one set of challenges. The other set of challenges with which both the individual and a society or a culture must contend consist in the “invisible” transpersonal/archetypal forces once upon a time referred to as “gods and goddesses,” or the Zeitgeist which we now can also study astrologically and psychologically in the writings, for example, of Richard Tarnas (2006) and Stan Groff (1988, 2012).

The development of modernity (from the late 18th and through the 20th centuries) has included the mechanization and industrialization of work, the development of experimental sciences, the historical-sociological-critical study of Christianity but also the steadily increasing interest in “Eastern” beliefs and religions as well as the rise of various psychologies that have, to a great extent, supplanted the role counseling and therapeutic role formerly fulfilled by clergy (to name only a few salient characteristics). Many people in industrialized countries have gradually but steadily lost their living connection with the  “invisible” transpersonal / archetypal / astrological forces, those “powers” greater than the individual ego-consciousness that one must take into account lest one risk ego-inflation, the erroneous belief that “I did it all myself; aren’t I wonderful,” and the consequent fall from power that every hero and heroic consciousness or society must experience when it meets its match as outer opponent, inner obstacle, insuperable limit to its expansion, or the sense that all the toys aren’t worth the effort. When the experience of feeling held back lasts long enough, weariness or discouragement or depression follows. Then neither pill nor stimulant nor conquest can alleviate. So what do we do now?

 “Head knowledge” doesn’t help much. Intense experience does. Intense experience worked through transforms. The client who deeply grieves with me in session does the emotional work necessary to move past the loss. The client wracked by sobs about life and opportunities squandered does the emotional work necessary to move on to new opportunities, often never dreamed of. The client raging to exhaustion at mistreatment suffered often settles the old score with a parent or an abuser and can return to life with renewed energy. The client shaken by a dream has met with an “inner” reality that can no longer be avoided. Further, the client who has some knowledge of the archetypal forces working on her or him can better understand and address current moods, impulses, and experiences.

As a child of our times, for several months I have been keeping up a faster pace than I really like. Many people with whom I talk have also felt similarly pressured. Maybe, I thought, I’m “just” getting old and can’t keep up like I used to. Then recently my wife and I watched the 1977 movie, “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” I almost got impatient at the end when what seemed like several minutes passed as we watched the leisurely approach of the spaceship. What a contrast to the velocity of current films! There appears to be some degree of objective reality to the difference between the pace in 1977 and the haste in 2018. Clearly, I (we all) need to slow down, intentionally make time to clear our busy minds so that we can become aware of “ guides along the way” that appear as dreams, synchronistic events, meaningful encounters with other people, and conversations in depth with dear and trusted friends.

Recently I notice that both my wife and I are more irritable, more impatient with each other. Our tempers flare faster than in the past, but the old irritants have no new additions. What’s going on? Finally, it occurred to me to check my astrological birth chart. What might be going on there? Am I experiencing a transit to something? Is my wife experiencing a transit to something?  

What I found in both her and my natal charts made sense. The planet Uranus—which, among other things, corresponds to an energy that volatilizes whatever it touches—was coming into relationship with the Mars, the planet corresponding to self-assertion, action, drive. Our Mars energy was getting supercharged by the Uranus contact. Knowing this bit of “astrological weather” made sense. We’re still short-tempered, but we don’t have to take it so personally as we might have without the astrological knowledge.

Individually we suffer to some degree. Similarly, our society or culture suffers. The Greatest Generation endured and mastered terrible times—the Great Depression and World War II—and discovered the power of shared ordeal and support of community. As a species we live in terrible times: climate change, massive species loss, and continuing population explosion endanger not only human life but all higher forms of life on this planet. Where is the collective grief? Where do we see the shared suffering that reminds us that we’re all in this together?

 “We the people” are in fact keeping a faster pace than we did in the 1970s. What has changed in the forty intervening years? We pay less attention to feelings, intuitions, physical signals (“symptoms”), dreams. That signifies a diminished conscious connection to those well-springs that invigorate life. Hence Pereira relates depression to an increase or inflation of ego-consciousness in the context of a civilization in transition. First, what does an inflation of ego-consciousness mean?

Intense experience worked through transforms. “Working through” means finding ways to come to terms with what has been experienced. Working through means integrating the content of the intense experience into ego-consciousness. Working through the “entanglements and confrontations with something of great and often frightening magnitude” (as Pincola-Estés wrote) reconnects ego-consciousness with something beyond ego-consciousness, sometimes even the Source.    

We are all children of the times in which we live—willingly cooperating with or bucking the system. In therapy and analysis, I see women and men—problems to themselves—who bring their experience of the world with them. Explicitly or implicitly for most of them, their ‘heroic’ attitude is weary.

Part of my task with clients consists in helping peel away layers of conditioning and accommodation in order to get to the vital core where the real hero awaits, the real hero who can face the challenges, the “false starts, and wrong turnings and blind alleys,” as Jung once wrote. We need the heroic attitude that is willing to face the perils, the dangers, the personal and cultural unknowns. As we work through the layers, both of us—client and analyst—must feel and experience what we are touching. That, too, is part of the heroic attitude. Otherwise, we’re on a head-trip that fails to transform and liberate.

There is a saying attributed to Gandhi: Be the change you want to see happen. This may not be accurate. In a column in the New York Times, “Falser Words Were Never Spoken,” Brian Morton (2011) writes:

Sure enough, it turns out there is no reliable documentary evidence for the quotation. The closest verifiable remark we have from Gandhi is this: “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.”

One client and one analyst in one room for one hour a week—that seems so pathetically little in the face of the challenges we face as a species. Repeatedly I have to remind myself that change begins one person at a time; first with me, then through me, perhaps in others. Yes, there is any number of small acts; it is not the stuff of passivity, but the stuff of courage. As you reflect upon what the “mood of the times” means for you…how will/do you live and embrace the heroic attitude?
Bibliography:

• Henderson, J. (1964). Ancient myths and modern
• Groff, S. (2012). Healing Our Deepest Wounds: The Holotropic Paradigm Shift. Newcastle, Washington: Stream of Experience.

_____. (1988). The Adventure of Self-Discovery: Dimensions of Consciousness and New Perspectives in Psychotherapy and Inner Exploration. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. [Any and all of Stan Groff’s books are important.]

• Jung, C. G. (1921). Psychological Types. Vol. 6 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Princeton; Princeton University Press.
• Morton, B. (2011). New York Times, August 29, 2011.
• Pereira, H. C. (2018). The weariness of the hero: depression and the self in a civilization in transition. Journal of Analytical Psychology, 2018, 63, 4, 420-439.
• Pinicola-Estés, C. (1949/2004). Introduction to Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Princeton Princeton University Press.
• Tarnas, R. (2006). Cosmos and Psyche: Intimations f a New World View. New York: Viking. (There are a number of YouTube videos featuring lectures by or interviews with Rick Tarnas.]

Whitmont, E. C. (1969). The Symbolic Quest. Princeton: Princeton University Press.