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The Undiscovered Self

By C. G. Jung ( Princeton University Press )

Release Date: 1990-10-18
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Together for the first time in one paperback volume are two of Jung's major late works, in the version published in The Collected Works of C. G. Jung, as rendered by Jung's official translator. "The Undiscovered Self" (1957) integrates many of Jung's lifelong social and psychological concerns and addresses the uneasy relation between the individual and mass society. The survival of civilization, he maintains, depends on individual awareness of both the conscious and unconscious aspects of the human psyche. The exploration of the unconscious, in particular, leads to self-knowledge and with it recognition of the duality of human natureits potential for evil as well as for good. Jung believes that it is this self-knowledge that enables the individual to resist the collective power of mass society and the state and to cope with their possible threats. Jung's reflections on self-knowledge and the exploration of the unconscious carry over into his essay "Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams," completed shortly before his death in 1961. (It is the original version of his introduction to the symposium Man and His Symbols, conceived as a popular presentation of Jungian ideas.) Describing dreams as communications from the unconscious--as expressions of aspects of the individual that have been neglected or unrealized--Jung explains how the symbols that occur in dreams compensate for repressed emotions and intuitions. In a world dehumanized, in Jung's view, by scientific "progress" and the loss of emotional participation in natural events, symbols recall our original nature, its instincts and peculiar way of thinking. This essay brings together Jung's fully evolved thoughts on the analysis of dreams and the healing of the rift between consciousness and the unconscious, in the context of his system of psychology.

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Product Reviews:

Jung Redux: A Review Essay
One of my counseling colleagues commented some time ago that she wondered if the psychology of Carl Jung had gone the way of the petticoat. Carl Jung was the 20th Century Swiss psychiatrist who eventually broke from the rationalist and scientific reductionism of Sigmund Freud's doctrines.

Toward the end of a career in which Jung wrote many complex and challenging works, The Undiscovered Self was published in 1957. It remains as a remarkable and easily read analysis of Western society's strategic cultural and spiritual difficulties, from the point of view of Jung's theories of the human soul. In its 1990 publication it is under 60 pages of reading.

Here are a few quotations from the book which might invite our further attention to Jung's thought:

Even though the West has considerable industrial power and a sizable defense potential at its command, we cannot rest content with this, for we know that even the biggest guns and the heaviest industry with its relatively high standard of living are not enough to check the psychic infection spread by religious fanaticism.

Psychology's insistence on the importance of unconscious processes for religious experience is extremely unpopular, no less with the political Right than
with the Left. For the former the deciding factor is the historical revelation that came to man from outside; to the latter this is sheer nonsense, and man has no religious function at all, except belief in the party doctrine, when suddenly the most intense faith is called for. . . Today we live in a unitary world where distances are reckoned by hours (!) and no longer by weeks and months. "Exotic races" have ceased to be peepshows in ethnological museums. They have become our neighbors, and what was yesterday the prerogative of the ethnologist is today a political, social and psychological problem... the time may not be so far off (!) when the question of mutual understanding in this field will become acute.

Jung was of course writing these words at the height of the Cold War. This was at the same time Roman Catholic monks like Thomas Merton and Bede Griffiths were looking to the traditions of the East to provide some kind of spiritual alternative to the runaway materialist and overly rationalized culture, as they thought, of the West. In light of the first quotation above, it is interesting to ponder the thoughts of none other than Richard Nixon in his last book Beyond Peace, written in 1994: "The fact that we are the strongest and richest nation in history is not enough."

Jung proceeds by identifying the roots of what he calls mass-mindedness. He then identifies the mentality which produces "statistical reality." "One of the chief factors in mass-mindedness is scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity." For Jung it is religion which provides "a point of reference" outside the partial reality which purports to be the entirety of reality. He places central value on the development of the organized and cohesive individual person. If religion is not available, or not psychologically functional or real in that sense, the modern (and post-modern) social dynamic isolates and atomizes the individual. Jung is specifically thinking in the context of his writing of the Nazi phenomenon as well as the totalizing systems of Russian communism.

He argues that intellectual and rational insight or critique is relatively powerless in the face of these psycho-social systems. One of his more famous comments is: "Just as the addition of however many zeroes will never make a unit, so the value of a community depends on the spiritual and moral stature of the individuals composing it." He says that "resistance to the organized mass can be effected only by the man who is as well-organized in his individuality as the mass itself," noting that such an idea must sound "well nigh unintelligible to the man of today." In this point Jung makes reference to the idea of man the microcosm, apparently without knowing the pre-medieval sources of this view in such very early writers as Basil the Great.(1) One can of course see this perspective in pre-modern cultures throughout the world, e.g. in Celtic, Hindu, Shinto, African, Australian, and Native American traditions of humanity's relation with the cosmos.

Jung's classic formulation--in effect, his definition of modernity, although he does not use the term-- is the split in the individual between his rational, conscious capacities and the "unconscious." The latter reality is what Jung believes that religion and Jung's theories of psychology are capable of integrating into the well developed individual human being. His argument is that the religious reality must not remain an external set of cognitive beliefs and principles, mediated only by an outer system of Church but, as he says, is found in religious experience and immediate relation with God. In this, Jung-- without exploring the Western spiritual tradition which is often in the "basement" of Church-- is making the case for what the Judeo-Christian sacred texts presuppose and illustrate, for what Western mystics have always known in common with their Eastern counterparts, for the "ordinary" religious experience which Evelyn Underhill and William Temple always point to, and for the "poor man's mysticism" of charismatic renewal which latter usually never makes it onto the radar screen of the cognoscenti's dialogue. In 2008 it has only been about forty years or so in the West that such elements of Western culture have been re-emerging out of the "unconscious" of the Western religious basement.

Jung's closing thoughts ask the question of whether modern humanity knows it is on the "point of losing the life-preserving myth of the inner man which Christianity has treasured up for him?" In the consciousness characteristic of the modern world, there has been a defining, nearly exclusive preoccupation with the outer world and creating technical resources. The undiscovered self, according to Jung is the self the modern person has forgotten in the process. According to Jung each of us "slips imperceptibly into a purely conceptual world where the products of his conscious activity progressively replace reality." The highly articulate rationalist atheism of these early years of the 21st century seeks to quickly hasten this development as a desirable goal. This realm of the dominance of the human consciousness, and effects, on the earth is now being called the anthroposphere. I add that the process of teaching people to undertake the transformation of consciousness which Thomas Merton names and which is related to meditation and contemplative prayer--identified by various terms in East and West--remains something of an odd topic, out of reckoning for many contemporary Christians, as well as non-religious folk, of all stripes.

Commentary I make on his thought goes in a few directions.

One, Jung apparently believed that only a cadre of psychotherapists could re-unite the split soul of the West, both in the individual and in the broader culture. This is understandable if our only alternatives are either priests and directors of conscience in the Roman Church who subvert personal healing and spiritual direction to ecclesiastical correctness, or Evangelical Christian leaders who apparently remain preoccupied with filling football stadiums and dosing the multitudes with Bible egoism, or liberal and/or post modernist seminary professors who think religious experience is unreal or at least d�class�.

The problem with Jung's view by now is, of course, that it is not the State or the religious institutions which are dominating the experience of psychotherapeutic processes today. It is the industrialization of the "mental health" world itself which now owes its soul to the company store of the insurance industry collective, which in turn continues to atomize all individual "mental health providers" and the counseling disciplines they practice. Notice the language. One of the promptings for writing this essay was my reading of a promotional article citing a retired clergyman who refers to his own son as a "mental health consumer." As Thich Nhat Hanh would say, please look deeply into these words. I recently received a 70-page application and contract from an insurance company, 10 pages longer than The Undiscovered Self. I decided not to participate. This is also in a broader context of the mindlessly pathological schedules of the training of physicians and, by systemic infection, the similarly pathological training of protestant chaplains in hospital settings.

Secondly, most of us will no doubt need to take care to understand Jung's use of the words symbol and myth. To the non-reflective modern mind, these terms refer to something less than real, whereas to Jung, they point to the undiscovered realities which are just as real, if not more real, than the constructs of the conscious human mind.

Lastly, the atomization of the individual which Jung identified with totalitarian regimes, prospects at the political level which remain as lively ever, has also come about in contemporary life in which the "the State" may be replaced by the term "the Economy." When society becomes an economy, the same atomization of the individual happens. No telephone/communication companies allow a joint contract with husband and wife or domestic partners, perhaps a small, but pervasive example in which one of the smallest social units is atomized for all practical purposes. The individual persons who are "customer service representatives," either in a retail store or on the telephone, all identify themselves as interchangeable. The relational quality of the interpersonal exchange of business is increasingly stripped of its value. It certainly increasingly feels totalitarian to me, since the communications companies are only one segment of hundreds of other business "relationships," all of which besiege the individual in the multiplication of experiences of anomie.

My point here in regard to Jung's analysis is that there is increasingly little middle ground between the atomized individual and any social units which do not approximate the rationalized mass organization.(2) The atomized individuals are increasingly hypersensitive to any social relationships, with each person becoming terminally unique,seeing as authoritarian, patriarchical, racist, controlling etc. etc. any community life which aspires to be intentional about "common life." To use the catch word of post-modernists, all things become a target for a hermeneutic of suspicion. So, in this sense, Jung's organized and cohesive person is also, by definition, able to enter into and to sustain emotionally satisfying social relationships which are also resilient in their immersion in the socio-pathic dynamics of a psychically totalitarian economy. He writes:

The question of human relationships and of the inner cohesion of our society is an urgent one in view of the atomization of the pent-up mass man, whose personal relationships are undermined by general mistrust. . . To counter this danger, the free society needs a bond of an affective nature, a principle like a kind of caritas, the Christian love of your neighbor. But it is just this love for one's fellow man that suffers most of all from the lack of understanding wrought by projection . . . Where love stops, power begins, and violence and terror.

If the process of each individual becoming cohesive and socially resilient is Jung's concern, the process of co-creating similarly cohesive social units is equally vital. If half of the marriages in this society continue to end in divorce, what real prospects are there of genuine religious, political, and international co-operation and co-existence? Hopefully genuine community will become a victorious, statistical anomaly.

(1)In short, scrupulous attention to yourself will be of itself sufficient to guide you to the knowledge of God. If you give heed to yourself, you will not need to look for signs of the Creator in the structure of the universe: but in yourself, as in a miniature replica of the cosmic order, you will contemplate the great wisdom of the Creator. . . Marvel at the manner in which the Artificer has joined the powers of the soul with the body so that they permeate if from end to end, bringing the most widely separated parts of it into alliance and uniting them all under one impulse of the breath.
>Basil the Great, "Give Heed to Thyself," in Ascetical Works (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1950).

(2)Churches and religious bodies, families, carefully grounded not for profit organizations, and intentional spiritual communities are traditional arenas for middle-ground alternatives between the atomized individual and rationalized collective structures

Phenomenally accessible.
Jung addresses the modern individual's failure and to cultivate and understand the self - the whole self, including those dark crevices of the Unconscious that we'd rather pretend don't exist.

According to Jung, self-knowledge occurs through spiritual experience. While modern mass religion ("creeds") attempts to connect the individual to the "unknowable," a true, meaningful understanding of the self is generally excluded from the formula. This results in a religious understanding that ends up consisting of little else other than rote, external experience occurring outside of oneself and only within predefined parameters. There is no personal connection or life context within such arrangements and no knowledge of self can be gained.

Jung asserts that our lack of self understanding makes us susceptible to replacing true spiritual experience with the fake and prefabricated. The innate human drive to seek out the "unknowable" is channeled into mindless, impersonal acceptance of rigid dogmas, fanaticism, absolutism, herd mentality, etc. This lack also leaves us lost in the shuffle of the mass mentality, sans any meaningful self identity or will/strength to resist the current. We have no anchor within ourselves.

I loved reading this and found it to be far less esoteric and dense than other Jung works.

Finding Self ( rrussel52 )
C.G. Jung - within the works of CGJ one may find something extremely important --- SELF ---- Jung assist in the pealing away of societal myths that hide the spiritual part of SELF. This is not for quick reading but - for contemplation. Be still and know thy self.

The power to stand against the World ( oakshaman )
_In this book Jung correctly predicted that Communism had to collapse from within. No one else saw that coming. Why should they? For, as he points out, the mass state had all the force of the big battalions on their side- politics, science, and technology were their natural allies. And yet they collapsed.

_Should we rejoice in this? Why? Jung points out that the West is every bit as materialistic as our former Communist opponents. Our spiritual base is gone- in the place of true religion we have aging cults that serve the status quo. There is no inner power there. Every place Jung uses the term Communist, you can substitute Corporate and you have the same animal. That is because both are hierarchical structures where the individual counts for nothing. Indeed, the self-knowledge or individualization that would produce true men and women capable of standing up to the hierarchy is actively discouraged. They are trapped in the illusion of statistical man and of the organization- neither of which really exist. Only a few at the top can exercise the power of a true individual, and even they are usually no more than mouthpieces for the undeveloped masses and their unconscious drives.

_The hope for Jung lies in true religion. The freedom and autonomy of the individual depends on deep inner experience of a metaphysical nature. This is not "faith"; it is direct knowing. Even the deepest faith may melt away with time and circumstances- but not direct experience. It is only this that gives the individual the power to stand up to mass tyranny- and to the World itself. When you haven't made this breakthrough (which requires deep introspection, effort, and, yes, suffering) then other things get deified and charged with demonic energy- money, work, political influence...

_The shallow, rootless mass-man and his organizations are always going to lose, eventually, to the man with deep religious connection to the Macrocosm. Jung the Gnostic, Jung the Christian, Jung the Alchemist, Jung the Magician saw this. The individuated man has the cosmic correspondence within himself.

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