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The
Condensed Version
"Somewhere deep in
the background, I always knew I was two persons. One was the son
of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent,
attentive, hard-working, decent, and clean than many other boys.
The other was grown-up-old, in fact--skeptical, mistrustful,
remote from the world of men, but close to nature, the earth,
the sun, the moon, the weather, all living creatures, and above
all close to the night, to dreams, and to whatever 'God' worked
directly in him."--Psychologist Carl Jung
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Carl
Jung and the Two Personalities
A Shift in Western
Thought
The 19th century was a time
when Western thinkers made a radical break from the dominance of
Christianity. Although there were certainly paradigm-smashing
thinkers before that time (one thinks of Copernicus), it was the
biological theories of Charles Darwin (1809-1882), the
socio-historical mechanisms of Karl Marx (1818-1883), and the
slightly-later psychological speculations of Sigmund Freud
(1856-1939) that determined humankind's self-concept and
consequently sealed the fate of Christianity in the West. Since
Darwin's On the Origin of Species (1859) and his later The
Descent of Man (1871), humans were no longer the special
creations of God, the crowning work of His six days' labor;
instead they were the grandchildren of monkeys (in the popular
imagination). In contrast to this demotion, Marx's The
Communist Manifesto (1848) and Das Kapital
(1867)--both co-written with Friedrich Engels--elevated
humankind, eliminating God's position as the driving force of
history; rather, historical materialism driven by a dialectical
process became the main shaper of human events. Finally, Freud,
in various works, but not least in his A General Introduction
to Psychoanalysis (1910) attempted to replace what had been
considered religious or spiritual processes with scientific
ones. Aberrant behavior resulted no longer from demonic
influence but from illness; happiness was no longer a matter of
knowing God, but of knowing oneself; the path to salvation was
no longer spiritual exercise but psychoanalysis.
One is hard-pressed to pin
down Darwin's spiritual leanings; though he trained as a
minister, he was never ordained and never practiced. His life
took a scientific turn, but he was not openly hostile to
religion. Both Marx and Freud, however, famously rejected the
usefulness of religion to humanity. Marx, in Critique of the
Hegelian Philosophy of Right, wrote in 1844, "Religion
is the opiate of the masses," a means used by those in
power to keep the masses down. And the "illusion" in
the title of Freud's The Future of an Illusion refers to
religion itself; his basic assessment of its "future"
is that it has none, as science will take its place.
Jung's Pivotal Insight
Into this hostile milieu,
this virtually demythologized world, came young Carl Jung.
Jung's work walks a fine line between science on the one hand
and religion on the other. In some ways this is the natural
legacy of psychology, since psyche itself means
"soul." What Jung proposed was a system parallel to
that of the church; he was, after all, descended from both
ministers and doctors. The ministers predominated, yet the young
man chose to study medicine. He brought to it, however, a
refined sensibility, and a history of personal engagement with
"That."
One idea in his
autobiography will make this clear. In Memories, Dreams,
Reflections, Jung wrote about his early understanding of the
distinction between This and That. After being scolded by a
friend's father, the twelve-year-old Jung was outraged that such
a man should castigate him, who felt that "This ME
was not only grown up, but important, an authority, a person
with office and dignity, an old man, an object of respect and
awe." And yet he knew he was, in fact, only a schoolboy.
He continues:
Then, to my intense
confusion, it occurred to me that I was actually two different
persons. One of them was the schoolboy who could not grasp
algebra and was far from sure of himself; the other was
important, a high authority, a man not to be trifled with, as
powerful and influential as this manufacturer [his friend's
father]. This "other" was an old man who lived in
the eighteenth century [Jung was actually born in 1875], wore
buckled shoes and a white wig and went driving in a fly…
(pp. 33-34)
Jung recounts other
encounters with this "eighteenth-century man" inside
himself; these lead to a later thought that will become
fundamental to his future work: the idea of a "No. 1"
and "No. 2" personality.
Because of the importance
of the idea, and because Jung states it so eloquently, I will
again quote him at length:
Somewhere deep in the
background, I always knew I was two persons. One was the son
of my parents, who went to school and was less intelligent,
attentive, hard-working, decent, and clean than many other
boys. The other was grown-up-old, in fact--skeptical,
mistrustful, remote from the world of men, but close to
nature, the earth, the sun, the moon, the weather, all living
creatures, and above all close to the night, to dreams, and to
whatever "God" worked directly in him.
Jung dubs "the
schoolboy of 1890" as "Personality No. 1," and
"this 'Other'" is "Personality No. 2." He
continues:
What I am unfolding,
sentence by sentence, is something I was not conscious of in
an articulate way, though I sensed it with an overpowering
premonition and intensity of feeling. At such times I knew
I was worthy of myself, that I was my true self. As soon as I
was alone, I could pass over into this state. I therefore
sought the peace and solitude of this "Other,"
Personality No. 2. The play and counterplay between
personalities No. 1 and No. 2, which has run through my whole
life [Jung is writing in his 80's], has nothing to do with a
"split" or dissociation in the ordinary medical
sense. On the contrary, it is played out in every individual.
In my life No. 2 has been of prime importance, and I have
always tried to make room for anything that wanted to come to
me from within. He is a typical figure, but he is perceived
only by very few. Most people's conscious understanding is not
sufficient to realize that he is also what they are. (44-45).
Those familiar with Jung's
work will see in this early comprehension the foundations for
his later work in the area of the archetypes and the collective
unconscious.
Freud had posited an area
of the mind called the unconscious, in which the
individual stored repressed memories and forgotten experiences;
in Freud's conception, these later resurfaced to disrupt the
individual's life. Jung accepted this idea, but considered it as
only part of the picture. He termed this the personal unconscious;
in addition, however, he derived from observation of his
patients the idea of a collective unconscious.
Many have misunderstood this to mean some sort of "psychic
connection" between all humans; Jung saw it rather as an
inherited structure of the mind, common because it has been
passed along by DNA, just like the bones of the ear or the
pattern of body hair.
The "New Agey"
permutations are understandable, however, given the magnitude of
Jung's discovery. As described by Robert Hopcke, "To become
aware of the figures and movements of the collective unconscious
brought one into direct contact with essential human experiences
and perceptions, and the collective unconscious was considered
by Jung to be the ultimate psychic source of power, wholeness,
and inner transformation" (14-15). (Note that here psychic
means "of the psyche," not "supernatural.")
Not coincidentally, Hopcke compares the archetypes of the
unconscious to Plato's forms; both of them shape the human
experience along universal lines.
It is easy to see how
Jung's understanding of the collective unconscious grew from his
familiarity with the No. 2 personality. An examination of Jung's
entire system is out of the question here; but of primary
importance to our consideration of This and That is Jung's
introduction of these "forms of instinct" (MDR
161), these archetypes, and the layer of the psyche in which
they reside. These stand in contradistinction to the daylight,
waking, social being that Jung designated as "Personality
No. 1" in his boyhood, and as the personal elements
(personal unconscious and conscious) in his later professional
synthesis.
Contents
(C) 2006 James Baquet
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