The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The absence in our culture of rites and institutions designed, like the rites of puberty, to smooth the adolescent’s passage into the world is one reason for the incidence of neuroses in youth, common to all of which is the difficulty of facing up to the demands of life and of adapting to the collective and to one’s partner.  The absence of rites at the climacteric works in the same way.  Common to the climacteric neuroses of the second half of life is the difficulty of freeing oneself from worldly attachments, as is necessary for a mellow old age and its tasks.  The causes of these neuroses are therefore quite different from, indeed the opposite of, those occurring in the first half of life.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The development of the persona is the outcome of a process of adaptation that suppresses all individually significant features and potentialities, disguising and repressing them in favor of collective factors, or  those deemed desirable by the collective.  Here again, wholeness is exchanged for a workable and successful sham personality.  The ‘inner voice’ is stifled by the growth of a superego, of conscience, the representative of collective values.  The voice, the individual experience of the transpersonal, which is particularly strong in childhood, is renounced in favor of conscience.  When paradise is abandoned, the voice of God that spoke in the Garden is abandoned too, and the values of the collective, of the father, of law and conscience, of the current morality, etc., must be accepted as the supreme values in order to make social adaptation possible.

“Whereas the natural disposition of every individual inclines him to be physically and psychically bisexual, the differential development of our culture forces him to thrust the contrasexual element into the unconscious.  As a result, only those elements which accord with the outward characteristics of sex and which conform to the collective valuation are recognized by the conscious mind.  Thus ‘feminine’ or ’soulful’ characteristics are considered undesirable in a boy, at least in our culture. Such a one-sided accentuation of one’s specific sexuality ends by constellating the contrasexual element in the unconscious, in the form of the anima in men and the animus in women, which, as part souls, remain unconscious and dominate the conscious-unconscious relationship.  This process has the support of the collective, and sexual differentiation, precisely because the repression of the contrasexual element is often difficult, is at first accompanied by typical forms of animosity towards the opposite sex.  This development, too, follows the general principle of differentiation which presupposes the sacrifice of wholeness, here represented by the figure of the hermaphrodite.”

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

“The picture we have drawn of our age is not intended as an indictment, mush less as a glorification of the ‘good old days’; for the phenomena we see around us are symptoms of an upheaval which, taken by and large, is necessary.  The collapse of the old civilization, and its reconstruction on a lower level to begin with, will justify themselves because the new basis will have been immensely broadened.  The civilization that is about to be born will be a human civilization in a far higher sense than any has ever been before, as it will have overcome important social, national, and racial limitations.  These are not fantastic pipe dreams, but hard facts, and their birth pangs will bring infinite suffering upon infinite numbers of men.  Spiritually, politically, and economically our world is an indivisible whole.  By this standard, the Napoleonic wars were minor coups d’état and the world view of that age, in which anything outside Europe had hardly begun to appear, is almost inconceivable to us in its narrowness.

“The collapse of the archetypal canon in our culture, which has produced such an extraordinary activation of the collective unconscious – or is perhaps its symptom, manifesting itself in mass movements that have a profound effect upon our personal destinies – is, however, only a passing phenomenon.  Already, at a time when the internecine wars of the old canon are still being waged, we can discern, in single individuals, where the synthetic possibilities of the future lie, and almost how it will look.  The turning of the mind from the conscious to the unconscious, the responsible rapprochement of human consciousness with the powers of the collective psyche, that is the task of the future.  No outward tinkerings with the world and no social ameliorations can give the quietus to the daemon, to the gods and devils of the human soul, or prevent them from tearing down again and again what consciousness has built.  Unless they are assigned their place in consciousness and culture they will never leave mankind in peace.  But the preparation for this rapprochement lies, as always, with the hero, the individual; he and his transformation are the great human prototypes; he is the testing ground of the collective, just as consciousness is the testing ground of the unconscious.

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 hero, as the vehicle of this effort at compensation, becomes alienated from the normal human situation and from the collective.  This decollectivization entails suffering, and he suffers at the same time because, in his struggle for freedom, he is also the victim and representative of the obsolete, old order and is forced to bear the burden of it in his own soul.

“…Jung puts it that the danger to which the hero is exposed ‘isolation in himself.’  The suffering entailed by the very fact of being an ego and an individual is implicit in the hero’s situation of having to distinguish himself psychologically from his fellows.  He sees things they do not see, does not fall for the things they fall for – but that means that he is a different type of human being and therefore necessarily alone.  The loneliness of Prometheus on the rock or of Christ on the cross is the sacrifice they have to endure for having brought fire and redemption to mankind.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The important thing is that the archetypal canon is always created and brought to birth by ‘eccentric’ individuals.  These are the founders of religions, sects, philosophies, political sciences, ideologies, and spiritual movements, in the security of which the collective man lives without needing to come into contact with the primordial fire of direct revelation, or to experience the throes of creation.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“Evil, no matter by what cultural canon it be judged, is a necessary constituent of individuality as its egoism, its readiness to defend itself or to attack, and lastly, as its capacity to mark itself off from the collective and to maintain its ‘otherness’ in face of the leveling demands of the community.  The shadow roots the personality in the subsoil of the unconscious, and this shadowy link with the archetype of the antagonist, i.e., the devil, is in the deepest sense part of the creative abyss of every living personality.  That is why in myths the shadow often appears as a twin, for he is not just the ‘hostile brother,’ but the companion and friend, and it is sometimes difficult to tell whether this twin is the shadow or the self, the deathless ‘other.’”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The instincts of the collective unconscious form the substrate of this assimilative system.  They are repositories of ancestral experience, of all the experience which man, as a species, has had of the world.  Their ‘field’ is Nature, the external world of objects, including the human collective and man himself as an assimilative-reactive, psychophysical unit.  That is to say, there is in the collective psyche of man, as in all animals, but modified according to species, a layer built up of man’s specifically human, instinctive reactions to his natural environment.  A further layer contains group instincts, namely experiences of the specifically human environment, of the collective, race, tribe, group, etc.  This layer covers herd instincts, specific group reactions which distinguish a particular race or people from others, and all differentiated relationships to the nonego.  A final layer is formed by instinctive reactions to the psychophysical organism and its modifications.  For example hunger, hormone constellations, etc., are answered by instinctive reactions.  All these layers intercommunicate.  Their common factor is that the reactions are purely instinctive, the psychophysical unit reacting as a whole by means of meaningful acts which are not the outcome of individual experience, but of ancestral experience, and which are performed without the participation of consciousness.”

The Origins and History of Consciousness

“The relation to the outside world is, in large measure actuated not directly by the individual, but by that imaginary entity the ‘group,’ whose incarnation is the leader or leading animal, and whose consciousness does duty for all parts of the group*.

*That this same relationship still remains catastrophically in force in Western civilization is painfully obvious.  Even today, the ruled are mostly supine members of the herd with no direct orientation of their own.  The ruler, the State, etc., acts as a substitute for individual consciousness and sweeps us blindly into mass movements, wars, etc.”