The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Characteristic of the process of differentiation in childhood is the loss and renunciation of all the elements of perfection and wholeness, which are inherent in the psychology of the child so far as this is determined by the pleroma, the uroboros.  The very things which the child has in common with the man of genius, the creative artist, and the primitive, and which constitute the magic and charm of his existence, must be sacrificed.  The aim of all education, and not in our culture alone, is the expel the child from the paradise of his native genius and, through differentiation and the renunciation of wholeness, to constrain the Old Adam in the paths of collective usefulness.

“…The drying up of imagination and of creative ability, which the child naturally possesses in high degree, is one of the typical symptoms of impoverishment that growing up entails.  A steady loss of the vitality of feeling and of spontaneous reactions in the interests of ’sensibleness’ and ‘good behavior’ is the operative factor in the conduct now demanded of the child in relation to the collective.  Increase in efficiency at the cost of depth and intensity is the hallmark of this process.

“On to the ontogenetic plane there now ensue all the developments which we have described as indispensable for ego formation and the separation of the conscious and unconscious systems.  The child’s primarily transpersonal and mythological apperception of the world becomes limited owing to secondary personalization, and is finally abolished altogether.  This personalization is necessary for the growth of personality now beginning and is effected with the help of ties to the personal environment upon which the archetypes are at first projected.  As the personal ties grow stronger, the archetype is gradually replaced by the imago, in which personal and transpersonal characteristics are visibly blended and active.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“When the individual falls away from the cultural fabric like this, he finds himself completely isolated in an egotistically infalted private world.  The restlessness, the discontents, the excesses, the formlessness and meaninglessness of a purely egocentric life – as compared with the symbolic life – are the unhappy results of this psychological apostasy.

“Following the collapse of the archeytpal canon, single archetypes then take possession of men and consume them like malenolent demons.  Typical and symptomatic of this transitional phenomenon is the state of affairs in America, through the same holds good for practically the whole Western hemisphere.  Every conceivable sort of dominant rules the personality, which is a personality only in name.  The grotesque fact that murderers, brigands, gangsters, thieves, forgers, tyrants, and swindelers, in a guise that deceives nobody, have seized control of collective life is characteristic of our time.  Their unscrupulousness and double-dealing are recognized – and admired.  Their ruthless energy they obtain at best from some stray achetypal content that has got them in its power.  The dynamism of a possessed personality is accordingly very great, because, in its one-track primitivity, it suffers from none of the differentiations that make men human.  Worship of the ‘beast’ is by no means confined to Germany; it prevails whereever one-sidedness, push, and moral blindness are appluaded, i.e., whereever the aggravating complexities of civilized behaior are swept away in favor of bestial rapactiy.  One has only to look at the educative ideals now current in the West.

“The possessed character of our financial and industrial magnates, for instance, is psychologically evident from the very fact that they are at the mercy of a suprapersonal factor – ‘work,’ ‘power,’ ‘money,’ or whatever they like to call it – which, in the telling phrase, ‘consumes’ them and leaves them little or no room as private persons.  Coupled with a nihilistic attitude towards civilization and humanity there goes a puffing up of the egosphere which expresses itself with brutish egotism in a total disregard for the common good and in the attempt to lead an egocentric existence, where personal power, money, and ‘experiences’ – unbelievably trivial, but plentiful – occupy every hour of the day.

“…Not only power, money, and lust, but religion, art, and politics are exclusive determinants in the form of parties, nations, sects, movements, and ‘isms’ of every description take possession of the masses and destroy the individual.  Far be it from us to compare the predatory industrial man and power politician with the man who is dedicated to an idea; for the latter is possessed by the archetypes that shape the future of mankind, and to this driving daemon he sacrifices his life.  Nevertheless, it is the task of a cultural psychology based on depth psychology to set forth a new ethos which shall take the collective effect of these daemonic possessions into account, and this means also accepting responsibility for them.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The line runs, as we saw, from the archetype as an effective transpersonal figure to the idea, and then to the ‘concept’ which one ‘forms.’  A good example of this is the concept of God, which now derives wholly from the sphere of consciousness – or purports to derive from it, as the ego is deluded enough to pretend.  There is no longer anything transpersonal, but only personal; there are no more archetypes, but only concepts; no more symbols, only signs.

“This splitting off of the unconscious leads on the one hand to an ego life emptied of meaning, and on the other hand to an activation of the deeper-lying layers which, now grown destructive, devastate the autocratic world of the ego with transpersonal invasions, collective epidemics, and mass psychoses.  For an upsetting of the compensatory relationship between conscious and unconscious is not a phenomenon to be taken lightly.  Even when it is not so acute as to bring on a psychic sickness, the loss of instinct and the overaccentuation of the ego have consequences which, multiplied a millionfold, constellate the crisis of civilization.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Despite the tendency to conservatism innate in every canon, the Western canon also has in it a revolutionary ingredient deriving from its acceptance of the hero archetype.  It goes without saying that this hero figure is not the central point of the canon, nor is its revolutionary influence very easy to recognize; but when one sees in how short a space of time the most revolutionary figures of ecclesiastical history became assimilated and produced a new variation of the canon, one realizes the full significance of the acceptance into it of the hero archetype.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The hero is not creative in the sense that he decorates embellishes the existing canon, although his creativeness may also manifest itself in shaping and transforming the archetypal contents of his age.  The true hero is one who brings the new and shatters the fabric of old values, namely the father-dragon which, backed by the whole weight of tradition and the power of the collective, ever strives to obstruct the birth of the new.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“All symbols and archetypes are projections of the formative side of human nature that creates order and assigns meaning.  Hence, symbols and symbolic figures are the dominants of every civilization, early or late.  They are the cocoon of meaning which humanity spins round itself, and all studies and interpretations of culture are the study and interpretation of archetypes and their symbols.”

On the Relation of Analytical Psychology to Poetic Art

“Every relationship to the archetype, whether through experience or simply through the spoken word, is ’stirring,’ that is to say, it works because it releases in us a mightier voice than our own.  He who speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthralls and overpowers, while at the same time he lifts the idea he is trying to express out of the occasional and the transitory into the realm of the ever-enduring.  He transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, thereby evoking in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon have enabled mankind to find a refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The activity of instinct lies behind actions which the ego coordinates with its sphere of decision and volition, and to an even higher degree instincts and archetypes are at the back of our conscious attitudes and orientations.  But, whereas in modern man there is at any rate the possibility of decision and conscious orientation, the psychology of archaic man and of the child is marked by a mingling of these spheres.  Volitions, moods, emotions, instincts, and somatic reactions are still for all practical purposes fused together.  The same applies to the original ambivalence of affects, which are later resoved into antithetical positions.  Love and hate, joy and sorrow, pleasure and pain, attraction and repulsion, yes and no, are at first juxtaposed and interfused, and do not possess the antithetical character they subsequently appear to have.

Depth psychology has made the discovery that even today the opposites lie closer together and are more intimately connected than their actual degree of separation would lead one to suppose.  Not only in the neurotic, but in the normal person too, the poles are hard side by side; pleasure turns to pain, hate to love, sorrow to joy, far more readily than we would expect.  This can be seen most clearly in children.  Laughing and crying, starting a thing and then stopping it, liking and disliking follow fast on one another’s heels.  No position is fixed, and none is a flat contradiction of its opposite, but both exist peaceably side by side and are realized in closest succession.  Influences stream in and out from all sides; environment, ego, and interior world, objective tendencies, consciousness, and bodily tendencies operate simultaneously, and all the while no ego worth mentioning, or only a very diminutive ego, arranges, centers, accepts and rejects.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Jung therefore defines the transpersonal – or the archetypes and instincts of the collective unconscious – as ‘the deposit of ancestral experience.’”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“An investigation of the archetypal stages also affords a better psychological orientation in a number of ancillary subjects, e.g., the history of religion, anthropology, folk psychology, and the like.  All these can then be brought together on a psycho-evolutionary basis which would promote a deeper understanding.”