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.