You should find a way to realize your shadow in your life somehow. Next comes the problem of gender. Every man has to be a manly man, and all of the things that society doesn’t allow him to develop he attributes to the feminine side. These parts of himself he represses in his unconscious. This is the counterplayer to the persona. They become what Jung calls the anima: the female ideal in the masculine unconscious.

Likewise, the woman carries the animus in her unconscious: the male aspect in herself. She’s a woman, and the society gives her certain things to do. All that is in her that she has associated with the masculine mode of life is repressed within the animus. The interesting thing is that-biologically and psychologically-we
have both sexes in us; yet in all human societies, one is allowed to accent
only one. The other is internalized within us. Furthermore, our imagery and notions of the other are functions of our biography. This biography includes two aspects. One is general to the human species: nearly everybody has a mother and a father. The other aspect is peculiar to yourself: that your mother should have been as she was and your father as he was. There is a specification of the male and female roles as experienced, and this has com- mitted, has determined, the quality of our experience of these great, great bases which everyone experiences. Everyone experiences  Mother, everyone experiences Father.

There’s a lot in you that’s neither being carried into this persona system nor into your ego, as part of what you perceive as “you.” Just opposite to the ego, buried in the unconscious, is what Jung calls the shadow. Now, society will give you a role to play, and this means that you’ve got to cut out of your life many of the things that you, as a person, might think or do. These potentials get shunted down into the unconscious. Your society tells you, “You should do this, you should do that”; but it also says, “You mustn’t do this, you mustn’t do the other thing.” Those things you’d like to do, which are really not very nice things to want to do, those get placed down in the unconscious, too. This is the center of the personal unconscious.

The shadow is, so to say, the blind spot in your nature. It’s that which you won’t look at about yourself. This is the counterpart exactly of the Freudian unconscious, the repressed recollections as well as the repressed potentialities in you.

The shadow is that which you might have been had you been born on the other side of the tracks: the other person, the other you. It is made up of the desires and ideas within you that you are repressing-all of the introjected id. The shadow is the landfill of the self. Yet it is also a sort of vault: it holds great, unrealized potentialities within you.

The nature of your shadow is a function of the nature of your ego. It is the backside of your light side. In the myths, the shadow is represented as the monster that has to be overcome, the dragon. It is the dark thing that comes up from the abyss and confronts you the minute you begin moving down into the unconscious. It is the thing that scares you so that you don’t want to go down there. It knocks from below. Who’s that down there? Who’s that up there? This is all very, very mysterious and frightening.

If your personal role is too thin, too narrow-if you’ve buried too much of yourself within your shadow-you’re going to dry up. Most of your energies are not available to you. A lot can get gathered there in the depths. And eventually, enantiodromia is going to hit, and that unrecognized, unheeded demon is going to come roaring up into the light.

The shadow is the part of you that you don’t know is there. Your friends see it, however, and it’s also why some people don’t like you. The shadow is you as you might have been; it is that aspect of you which might have been if you had allowed yourself to fulfill your unacceptable potential. Society, of course, does not recognize these aspects of your potential self. You are not recognizing these aspects of yourself either; you don’t know that they’re there or that you have repressed them. If you think of the self as a great circle with a center, and you think of consciousness as well above that center, then the ego is up in the center of consciousness, and the shadow would be way down opposite in the deep unconscious. The shadow is interred down there for a reason; it is that aspect of yourself that your ego doesn’t know about, which you bury because it doesn’t fit how you perceive yourself to be. The shadow is that part of you that you won’t allow to show through, that includes good-I mean potent as well as dangerous and disastrous aspects of your potential.

रौशनी के डर से, मैं रातभर जागा हूँ!
ख़ुद की परछाइयों से, मैं ताउम्र भागा हूँ।

“People say they love truth, but in reality they want to believe that what they love is true.” -Robert J. Ringer

We have also seen that religious imagery serves certain functions in mythic systems: to present the sense of awe and mystery before the fact of the universe of being; to give an image of the universe itself, which is that of the mathematical order of the cosmos, the sun and moon in their cycles, the year and its cycles, the eon and its cycles; to relate the society to those cycles; and to relate the individual to society, that cosmos, and that mys- tery. These are the functions of the mythology, and, if they are successful, you get a sense of everything-yourself, your society, the universe, and the mystery beyond-as one great unit.

The ultimate truth, the ultimate mystery of life and being, is absolutely transcendent. One cannot define the absolute. One cannot picture it. One cannot name it. Nevertheless, that which is absolute being an absolute mystery is also one’s own inner reality: one is that. The absolute is both transcendent and immanent; that is to say, both beyond the unive of the senses and within each particle of that universe. All that can be said about it is… nothing. All that can be said points to it. Therefore, the sym bols, the rites, the rituals, and the acts are involved in a world of human experience but point past themselves to that transcendent, immanent force; the rites and symbols lead one to the realization of one’s identity with that absolute. Identity with the transcendent is one’s essence; consequently, in Eastern philosophy, the mere accident of the ego, of the personality, is quite secondary.

Over in the Occident, there is a totally different idea. It came in around 2500 B.C., with the Semitic empires of Sargon and Hammurabi. The idea, which we still adhere to, is that God makes man. God is not man, and man is not of the same substance as God: they are ontologically. fundamentally different.

Consequently, all of the symbols have to do with relationships. You don’t get that in the Oriental system. There, the gods-just like man-are simply manifestations of the greater order. That order is there, preexisting the gods themselves. In India, this order is called dharma; in China, it is called the Tao. In early Greece, it was called moira; in early Mesopotamia, it was called me. This cosmic order is mathematical and unalterable; not even a deity can initiate change. God and man are simply functionaries of that order. To become a responsible citizen, you must learn your job perfectly.

THE ARCHETYPES OF THE COLLECTIVE UNCONSCIOUS

These polarities-the two attitudes and four functions-are all interior, psychological dynamics. They flow through our psyches like ocean tides. Within the mind, Jung also identified certain fixed structures. These struc- tures aren’t learned, Freudian introjections. In Jung’s view, they are there from our birth. They evolved as a part of the human mind, just as the hand or eye evolved. Like the hand and eye, almost all of us share these structures in common. He therefore called them the archetypes of the collective unconscious. By collective, he meant nothing metaphysical; he was merely referring to what he saw as their commonality among all human beings.

The first of these structures Jung called the self. For Jung, the self en- compasses all of the possibilities of your life, the energies, the potentiali- ties everything that you are capable of becoming. The total self is what your life would be if it were entirely fulfilled.

Jung regards the total potential of the individual’s psyche as an entity. Jung describes the self as a circle, its center unknown to you. That center, which is deep in the unconscious mind, is pushing you, your capacities, and your instincts. It gradually wakes during the first part of your life and gradually goes to sleep again in later stages. This is going on in you, and you have no control over it.

Now, this self opens out into nature and the universe because it is simply a part of nature. Yet the particular body has particular capacities, organs, and incapacities, commits you to a certain mode of experiencing that great consciousness of which you are an instrument. So your self will be peculiar to you, and yet it will be simply a local inflection of the model; you have a particular realization and sensibility of the great mystery. As you act as an infant, you are impelled by that self. This is the instinct system operating, purely biological.

The young girl in adolescence and I taught them for thirty-eight years at Sarah Lawrence-is simply startled at what a wonderful thing she is. She didn’t do it, but whenever she looks in the mirror, she sees the mir- acle of something that happened to her that is called by her name. Here is this thing that comes into being. This is the whole flower of the self. But our little consciousness rides on top of that like a ship on an ocean. As you become aware of your self, your ego comes into birth.

In Jung’s schema, the ego is your conscious identification with your particular body, its experiences, and its memories. Memory and experience, limited to a body and identified in terms of the temporal continuity of that body, of which you are consciously aware: this is the ego. By the time you’ve learned to walk and talk, write and drive, you’ve already got a lot of wishes of which you are unconscious, but because you have never fulfilled them or not kept your mind on them, they’ve fallen into the depths of the self, into the unconscious. The self is the whole context of potentials. The ego is your consciousness of your self, what you think you are,

what you think you’re capable of, and it’s blocked by all of these unconsciously retained memories of incapacity, prohibitions, and so forth. So, you have a dawning consciousness; you can watch this awakening in a little baby as it begins to realize itself as ego. The self and ego are not the same. The ego is the center of conscious mind only; it encompasses
your awareness of your self and your world.

Now, when your ego has a plan, and you commit some absurd fumble
that breaks the plan up, it’s as though someone had intruded and destroyed
your plan. You’re interrupting yourself; you forgot something. Freud dealt with this very well; this semi-intentional forgetting is now known as a Freudian slip. You are simply keeping yourself from doing what you only thought you wanted to do. The other side of you is talking. This is coming from that unconscious aspect of the self. The self is the totality, and if you think of it as a circle, the center of the circle would be the center of the self. But your plane of consciousness is above the center, and your ego’s up above that plane of consciousness, so there’s a subliminal aspect of the self of which you do not know. And that is in play constantly with the ego. Now, Jung’s is a slightly different definition of ego from Freud’s, though it is related. For Jung, ego is your notion of yourself. It defines the center of your consciousness and relates you to the world; it is the “I” you experience as acting in the world around you. It has nothing to do, however, with the unconscious portion of the self. The ego normally stays above the line of consciousness.

Now, suppose
you’re driving off the road, a car: you’re on the left side while, you don’t know that there’s another side there. In fact, you don’t at the wheel; mean- we recognize that you’re on one side; you think you’re in the middle. Most people drive their lives in this way, according to Jung. They think their ego is who they are. They go driving that way, and, of course, the car is knocking people down on the other side of the road. How are you going to enable yourself to see that other side? Do you put another wheel up and have a friend drive you? Do you put the wheel in the middle? No! You have to know what’s over there; you have to learn to see three-dimensionally, to use the parallax principle.

So, we have the self, which is the total potentiality, you might say. You have the ego, which emerges gradually in the course of childhood to a com- paratively firm notion of itself. Until that ego is more or less confirmed, it is very dangerous to have experiences that the ego can’t handle. It can be blown, and you lose the ego’s grip on conscious reality entirely. Then you’re in a schizophrenic condition. You’ve got to have your ego in play. We hear so much talk now, particularly from the Orient, about ego- lessness. You are trying to smash this thing which is the only thing that keeps you in play. There’s got to be somebody up there; otherwise you’re not oriented to anything. The self, that’s the great circle, the ship, and the ego is the little captain on the bridge. Now, as you grow up, your family says you belong to this social circle, and you must behave as we do here. Then you go to school, and you begin to find that there’s a certain career dawning, a certain kind of life you’re going to lead. This begins tightening you down. In other words, the circumstances of the society in which you are living are beginning to force you into a certain role, a certain costume. There are certain things the ego must learn to do in order to function in the society you live in. There’s no point in learning to live in a society that does not exist or that lives over on the other side of the Iron Curtain.

This which you have around you is it, my friend. And the first problem of the early stage of life is to learn to live in this society in a way that will relate you to the objective world in terms that make sense now. The critical function can come a little later, but first you’ve got to learn to function here and now. And this is the great task of childhood and youth: the terror, the demands, the restrictions of your will, and so forth have to be faced and assimilated. If you avoid these challenges early on, you will simply have to face them later or go slithering along, partially realized as a human entity, never having had the experiences of playing in a serious situation.

Society has a number of roles it needs us to play. We assume these roles just as an actor might slip into the different pieces of a costume. Society im- prints on us its ideals, a wardrobe of acceptable behavior. Jung calls these per- sonae. Persona is the Latin word for the mask worn by an actor on the stage. Say you’re a teacher: when you’re at work, you put on a teacher mask-you are a Teacher. Suppose you go home and think you’re still a Teacher, not just a fellow who teaches. Who would want to be around you? Sometimes, in high school dramatics, some poor kid plays the role of Hamlet, and his aunt tells him he did it wonderfully. Well, he’s Hamlet from then on. He’s identified himself with the role.

There are other people who find that they have become, to their own amazement perhaps, executives. They are executives at the office. They are executives when they are at home. They are executives when they go to bed-which is disappointing to their spouses. The mask has to be left in the wardrobe, in the green room, as it were. You’ve got to know what play you’re in at any one time. You’ve got to be able to separate your sense of yourself your ego-from the self you show the rest of the world-your persona.

You find this first big tension within the psyche between the dark inner potential of the self’s unconscious portions on the one hand and the per- sona system on the other. The ego learns about the outside and inside and tries to reconcile them.

Now, one of the great dangers, from Jung’s standpoint, is to identify yourself with your persona. In dramatic contrast to the aim of education in the Orient, Jung declares the ego must distinguish itself from its role. This is a concept that does not exist in the East. As Freud put it, the ego is that function which puts you in touch with the empirical actualities of the world in which you live; it is the reality function. And it’s from de- veloping ego that you develop your own value system. Your judgments, your critical faculties, and so forth are functions of your ego. In the Orient, the individual is asked not to develop his critical faculties, not to observe the world in a new way, but to accept without question the teaching of his guru and to assume the mask that the society puts on him. This is the funda- mental law of karmic birth. You are born into exactly that role which is proper to you. The society will give you the mask to wear. You are to identify with it completely, canceling out every creative thought.

In traditional India, China, or Japan, you are your role. The secret is to embody that role perfectly, whether as a mendicant monk or a widow throwing herself on the pyre. You are to become sati. grieving What Jung says is that you should play your role, knowing that it’s not you. It’s a quite different point of view. This requires individuation, sepa- rating your ego, your image of yourself, from the social role. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t play the social role; it simply means that no matter what you choose to do in life, whether it’s to cop out or to cop in, you
are playing a role, and don’t take it too damned seriously. The persona is merely the mask you’re wearing for this game. The people who know best how to change roles are Occidental women. They dress in a different costume and step into a transformed personality. My wife, who is a dancer, is a past master at this. She’s much inclined to be very cold when it’s snowy. But when she dresses with almost nothing on and goes out in the middle of the winter to a party, she does not shiver at all. She is completely there; her whole personality has put itself into the role and voilà.

It goes even further than this, because the whole persona complex in- cludes your moral principles. Ethics and social mores are internalized as part of the persona order, and Jung tells us that you must take that lightly, too. Just remember, Adam and Eve fell when they learned the difference between good and evil. So the way to get back is not to know the differ- ence. That’s an obvious lesson, but it’s not one that’s very clearly preached from pulpits. Yet Christ told his disciples, “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”36 You judge according to your persona context, and you will be judged in terms of it. Unless you can learn to look beyond the local dic- tates of what is right and what is wrong, you’re not a complete human being. You’re just a part of that particular social order.

So, here we have the self with all the potentialities. You have a grow- ing ego consciousness with which you identify yourself, and this is devel- oping in relation to the costumes you have to put on, the personae. It’s good to have a lot of costumes, so long as each costume fits your con- science. The moral order is part of your persona.

In general terms, Freud saw sex as the main determinant in psychol- ogy. Children’s relationships to their parents, as typically played out in the erotic relationship to the mother, the fear of the father, and then the trans- fer of the child’s sexual commitments to an individual of his own age and so on-Freud saw the acting out of these sexual dramas as central to all human behavior.

Among psychologists, the first challenge to Freud’s theory came not from Jung but from Alfred Adler. Adler said that the main drive in the in- dividual is not sex but the will to power. Imagine: the little infant is in a great disadvantage with respect to its parents. It’s there with these two giants, yet it must put through its purposes; it has to learn to wheedle or to frighten way or another to get the parents to do its will. or one All infants initially hold inferior positions, but imagine that that child Adler calls “some inferiority of the organs.” Perhaps it belongs to a physi- cal or behavioral type that is unusual in the neighborhood and is, therefore, for better or worse, outstanding and at the center of attention. Or suppose the parents have been brutal and the child hasn’t been able to put its agenda through at all. It now has a will to compensate, to overcompensate, which leads to what Adler calls an inferiority complex. Adler feels that the drive to overcome a sense of inadequacy is fundamental to human life, that all individuals act from this impulse, not the sex drive. Indeed, Adler believes that sex is itself a field for the enhancement of one’s own sense of value-a field for conquest. In other words, he interprets sexual activity itself as a function of the power drive.

At this point, Jung comes into the picture. Jung says that the psyche actually has a fundamental energy that manifests itself in each of these two directions-sex and power. He calls the tendency toward one or the other direction the basic attitudes.

In some people-possibly due to infant relationships-the stress manifests in a struggle for individual power, in which case the sexual life takes a secondary position. This type of person, oriented primarily toward power, is always asking, “How am I doing? Am I making it?” Jung calls this person the introvert. His meaning is somewhat different from the common use of the word. Jung defines the introvert as a power-oriented person who wants to put through his own internal image of how things should be.

The sex-oriented person, on the other hand, turns outward. Falling in love means losing yourself in another object. This person Jung calls the extrovert. Now, he says, every individual is both, with an accent on one or the other. If you have your accent 60 percent over in the power arena, it’s only going to be 40 percent over in the eras area.

Now, when you run into a situation where your normal orientation doesn’t function, where it isn’t carrying you through, you are thrown back on the secondary drive. Then this inferior personality emerges. The characteristic of the inferior personality is compulsiveness-you can’t control yourself, your voice quivers, you blush, you get angry, and so forth. You are out of control; the inferior character has taken over. It is more primitive than the developed side of the personality.

Jung uses a fine word for this reversal: he calls it an enantiodromia.
you know (of course) from your Greek, dromia is “to run”: hippodrome is where the hippos (or horses) run; a dromedary is a racing camel. Enantio means “in the other direction.” So, taken together, enantiodromia means “running in the opposite direction,” turning turtle.

Now, the interesting thing about middle life is that, quite often, a chronic enantiodromia takes place. You have been, let us say, a power man: you’ve had it all, you have achieved what you set out to achieve, or at least your wits have been about you, and you’ve realized it isn’t worth achieving.

When that moment comes, the change takes place. You have disposable libido, available libido, and where does it go? It goes over there to the twinkle-twinkle side, and Papa begins to see the little girls. Then everybody asks, “What has happened to Daddy?” This is the normal phenomenon of the nervous breakdown in late middle age. A gentleman has gained all the power in the world, and he’s had this image of retirement: “I’m going to retire and go fishing.” Of course that’s what he wants, because fishing was what he was in love with when he was eleven years old. This is Daddy and his quest for mermaids that I talked about before.

For an example of the opposite reversal-from sex to the power drive-just take the woman who has been the mother of a family. Perhaps she’s had several lovers, but she now has grandchildren and recollections of lovely dance engagements and all this kind of thing. At this point, she becomes a power monster: the fabulous mother-in-law whom I also motioned earlier. Her children, whom she’s brought up, are beginning to leave. The whole sense of loss of power inferiority-washes over her. She has to grab on and tell them to shut the window, open the window, put the baby in the bath, take the baby out of the bath, do this, do that. Of course, she is completely compulsive about it. It’s a fantastic and frightening thing to have your second, hidden side come up.

Now, I’m overplaying it; this is a diagrammatic approach, let us grant. Yet even so, almost everyone faces this kind of crisis. The problem is, when this enantiodromia comes, are you going to be able to absorb and integrate the other factor, the other side of your personality?

Jung calls the problem of this so-called midlife crisis integration; the integration of the two sides of the personality in terms of an individual culture experience. Jung’s whole approach of these interactions.

Remember, Freud explored the idea of the wish and the prohibition, essentially a collision between the psychological and the sociological. Jung believed that the collision is intrinsic to the individual’s psyche; that is to say, every time you stress one side, the other side loses. In Wagner’s Ring, Albrecht gets the ring of power by spurning the allure of the Rhine maid- ens-that’s the power man, right there. The other man, over on the oppo- site side, would say, “I don’t want to make history, I just want to make love.” But someday it’ll dawn on him, “Hey, I didn’t make history.” The terrible thing about this enantiodromia is that it is filled with the echo of “too late.” In this way, past decisions assume seemingly disastrous proportions.

Now, there’s more to a person than simply sex and power. Jung sees the psyche as dominated by what he calls four functions, divided into two opposing pairs.

Jung calls the first duad sensibility (or feeling) and intellect. There are two ways of analyzing what you perceive around you. You can base your life on evaluating things by how they feel; then you will have a wonderfully differentiated and developed sensibility. Your appreciation of the arts and the nuances and the richness of life will be great. On the other hand, you can judge things in terms of intellectual decisions-right and wrong, pro- pitious and unpropitious, prudent and imprudent. If you make your decisions on only one basis, the other is not being developed.

Jung calls the first duad sensibility (or feeling) and intellect. There are two ways of analyzing what you perceive around you. You can base your life on evaluating things by how they feel; then you will have a wonderfully differentiated and developed sensibility. Your appreciation of the arts and the nuances and the richness of life will be great. On the other hand, you can judge things in terms of intellectual decisions-right and wrong, pro- pitious and unpropitious, prudent and imprudent. If you make your deci- sions on only one basis, the other is not being developed. In Jung’s experience dealing with Occidentals-this may or may not

be true for all cultures-the society requires men to develop the thinking, intellectual function, while it requires women to develop the feeling func- tion, sensibility. Of course, whichever function isn’t stressed takes on an inferior qual-

ity. Inferior thinking might be called mere opinion. They used to say, “You can’t argue with a woman.” Well, you can’t argue with a woman whose perception has been primarily developed in terms of feeling functions; her decisions do not come from logical connections, and she may have a whole system of opinions that are based on feeling rather than actually thinking anything through. If a young man had any idea about the maturity and so- phistication of the “feeling” that was sitting across the table from him while he’s being a slob, he would be completely surprised.35

Inferior feeling is sentimentalism. We all know what that means. The sentiments of a cruel man, or a man who leads his life purely as a scientist without any thought of feelings, are grossly undeveloped. When he does come forth with sentiment, the kind of books or plays or music he likes will tend to be thin and trite; they’re no good at all.

It is the dialogue between these two functions that educates us. The in- ferior function-whether intellect or sensibility-remains in the uncon- scious. When it comes up, it comes up compulsively; it can’t be argued with. So these two are sides that have to be developed; one will be inferior and the other superior. This works like the sex and power balance, but it is a totally different matter; sex and power, for our purposes, are unrelated.

The other duad offers two ways of having an experience: Jung calls the first way sensation (different from feeling); he calls the other way intuition (also different from feeling). Here we are, sitting in a room, bombarded by sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and so forth. What is here in the room comes to us through our sensation; sensation relates us to the space around us.

A student comes into the room. You try to discover the student’s capacities, why that student came into the room, and what he is likely to do. This is intuition. Intuition is the primary political talent. It is the tact for time, the sense of the possible. The intuitive person sees the future and past stretching out like ribbons of probability.

Again, one function will be superior and the other inferior. If you always live in terms of the potentialities of things-the intuitive realities- then you’re not living in terms of the actualities, the sensual realities. And, of course, vice versa. Once again, at some point in your life, the inferior function will come to the forefront, and it will threaten you when it does.

Now, instead of simply going into the forest when middle age hits and canceling the whole darn show, as in the Indian tradition, Jung says the Occidental approach to the transition from responsibility to old age is that of achieving wholeness, of individuation. This is exactly the Greek idea. He felt you have to balance out these competing functions-sex versus power, intellect versus sensibility, intuition versus sensation-in order to escape the enantiodromia of the midlife crisis. So, as a child, you begin as a whole thing, then certain functions develop more than others, and you are a part thing throughout your social, mature working life, and, finally, in the last stage, you become a whole thing again. You go to an adult education program or something like that, which helps to preserve the sensibility while you’re working on the intellect.