There are four kinds of crisis that can bring about a very serious enantiodromia.

One is that you have passed from one life stage to another and you didn’t know it-the late-middle-aged gentleman who’s obsessed about his golf score and has not moved into the phase of the later half of life.

Jung says life is like the day of a solar journey.

The first part of it is up  moving from birth to the society. And the second part of it is down, moving from participation in the world and the society to death. And whereas the threat of the first half of life was life, the threat of the second half is death, and all the symbols are changing meaning.

Through the remaining part of life, Jung says, the great problem is integrating the inferior with the superior functions. That’s the great task of your later years. So let’s just think of the imagery of the union of opposites. The same symbol that for an extrovert will have sexual content, for an introvert will resonate with battle. Once one begins to reach individuation and integration, one finds the conjunction of those two aspects of one’s own psyche.

The crisis of passing from one life stage to another without being ready to move on arrests this process. This is the difficulty for the forty-year-old infant and for the sixty-year-old who thinks he is still thirty-five. Life brought you up to the solar apex, then it began to curve-and you think you’re still up at the peak? Oh, no, boy. You’re way down here. And what a drop you’re going to have. Much better to know when you’ve started down and enjoy the ride; there are nice things down here, too.

The second kind of crisis is a relaxation of life requirements. You worked like hell to become the shoelace czar of the universe. You own every shoelace factory in the world. And now, at the age of forty-odd, you don’t have to put that energy into it anymore. The thing’s going all by itself, and you’ve got secretaries who are not only taking the job in hand but also looking a little better to you than you thought little girls should look, and suddenly there’s a lot of distraction. You have all of this disposable libido. And where does it go?

The eros-oriented extrovert turns around and suddenly becomes a power monster. Good old Uncle Harry, the shoelace king, the introverted power man, becomes an old lecher that kind of thing. But the tragedy about this crisis is the deep sense that it’s all too late. Nothing is as it should be, and it’s because you’re doing the wrong thing.

Another kind of crisis is the loss of confidence in your moral ideals; this form of enantiodromia is something that one finds often among young people in college. The young person is living with a roommate who comes from another order of society altogether, either the poor person who’s living with the wealthy or the wealthy with the poor, or the Christian with the atheist, or the Jew with the Buddhist. You find out that here is a perfectly decent person also. It’s not that the other person that getting to seduces you into sin; it’s know them makes you question your own moral principles. And since those moral principles-the persona complex-are holding your ego in place, when they relax all the rest comes out. There’s the threat of the allure of becoming a terrible person: what I call the knock knock of the shadow from underneath. That’s your own dark person talking. You might also get what I call the twinkle twinkle of the anima/animus: come, little boy, it’s interesting around the corner. You’ve never seen girls like this.

Well, says Jung, let it come. Let it go. But don’t do it with such aban- don that your ego is entirely shattered. Imagine one of my college students. She’s had her first few classes in a sociology course, and she discovers that her father’s fortune is built on blood and bones. She goes home for the Thanksgiving dinner, and the family wonders what has happened. The student begins coming to her conferences and classes looking like a wreck. She lets her hair go. She has gone over to the other side. She has tipped over. It’s enantiodromia. She has assumed partisanship for the opposite side- she’s waving the banner of the downtrodden proletariat. And that’s just as extreme as being on the side she was on before, in blissful ignorance.

Well, it’s not a bad thing to happen, because you do get to experience all that’s over on the other side. It’s just like the underside of the rug com- ing up. In fact, my students sometimes looked a bit like the underside of a rug. And it’s good to have a thing like that happen in an institution like a college, where you can somewhat protect the person, because the idea is, eventually, to integrate the two halves.

Now, there’s one other crisis, and this is a very serious challenge: the intolerable decision where you really have to do something that you regard as immoral, beneath your dignity, something you’re totally ashamed of. The great example, of course, is Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac. The voice of God invited him to kill his son, and he faced an impossible decision. He was forced either to disobey what he took to be God or to kill his son. If he didn’t sacrifice Isaac, he would have disobeyed God, and if he did kill Isaac, he would have violated the first principle of human decency. Fathers should not kill their sons.

Well, this is an intolerable decision. And intolerable decisions may meet you. I had friends during the Depression who had families and no jobs; they had to do some things that they would not, as people in charge of their own lives, have wished to do for the maintenance of their families. These are the sorts of things that bust up your ego and bring up the whole content of the unconscious.

Now the problem of individuation for Jung, the challenge of the

middle-life crisis, lies in cutting these projections loose. When you realize that moral ideals-the moral life to which you are supposed to be com- mitted-are embodied in the persona, you realize the depth and threat of this psychology. You are to put your morals on and take them off accord- ing to propriety, the propriety of the moment; you are not to identify these morals with cosmic truths. The laws of society, therefore, are social con- ventions, not eternal laws, and they are to be handled and judged in terms of their appropriateness to what they are intended to do. The individual makes his own judgment as to how he acts. Then he has to look out to be sure that the guardians of the social order do not misunderstand or make things difficult for him because he is not totally playing their game. But the main problem of integration is to find relationships to the outside world and to live a rich life in full play.

In effect, the individual must learn to live by his or her own myth.