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.