This article is based on a talk given September 27, 1998 to the Round Table Associates, an organization in the Philadelphia area that has been devoted to the study of Jungian ideas for the past 30 years.

This article is based on a talk given September 27, 1998 to the Round Table Associates, an organization in the Philadelphia area that has been devoted to the study of Jungian ideas for the past 30 years.

When I first was asked to deliver this talk, and the topic was suggested, I was a bit intimidated by it, and very much aware of the hubris in presuming an answer to the questions. In trying to imagine something personal, yet something cogent and still be able to speak to the demanding question, What is Jung about?, I realized that the people of this group have, over the course of the years, heard a number of lectures on familiar ideas from the Jungian lexicon. You've heard lectures about persona, shadow, anima/animus; you've been instructed about archetypes and images and a whole range of symbolism and the role that it plays in psychic life. So, I knew this was not an afternoon when we would come again and flip the familiar pages of that library of Jungian ideas. This afternoon I think we want to do something a bit different. What is Jung all about? The more I thought about that question, the more I realized the answer had to be personal.

I can't tell you what Jungian psychology is about in any final or concrete way. The discovery of the answer to that question is a process that will go on for a very long time. I can tell you what Jung is about insofar as the whole thing has come into my life, so this is, in fact, an Apologia pro Vita Sua in the ancient way of defending one's own standpoint and ideas and thoughts. I could even formulate a certain kind of answer at once and say that I think Jung and his psychology, depth psychology, analytical psychology, are about the creation of consciousness. That whole body of psychological thought is about the process imbedded in life by which consciousness grows out of the abyss of unconscious biological life.

If we let our imaginations play over the nature of Nature in the eons before the appearance of a specifically human creature, we see that there was a very long time during which the entire planetary process seems to have been suspended and motionless. Nothing seems to have disturbed the intactness, the wholeness of the slowly gathering life process. Creatures in incredible variety, each seeming to be a perfect expression of its type, came and went. Then, in some way even yet not clear, human consciousness appeared, and in this new animal the original unity of Nature was split in two. From then until now, we bear in each one of us that deep split between the experience of individual consciousness and the deep well of the unconscious. Because of this primeval psychic splitting into opposing worlds and values, it is the fate of every person to experience the world through oppositions, through the pairs of phenomenal opposites.

Jung and his psychology are about that process, its dynamics and its consequences. (1)

A large part of my life work has revolved around the study of the problem of opposites and especially their alchemical symbolism. . .

They are also about learning how to develop the psychological instrument to live in the space, the gap, between the rational and the not-rational, and in a more general way to live in the turbulent space of the pairs of opposites, that psychic space that Jung called the complexio oppositorum. That's kind of a second answer, and I will have more to say about that. But first let me state my answer to the question in this form: Jung is about learning the psychological skills and developing the instruments that enable one to live with courage and grace in the complex field of the play of opposites. This personal task is full of the flavor of opposition and contradiction.

It is important to say here that Jung's psychology, despite its very deep engagement with the problem of opposites in psychic life, is not for that reason a dualistic psychology. Quite the contrary. The pairs of opposites are seen to be phenomenal expressions of a unitary reality, and the process of psychological development is seen to be a movement toward the experience of that reality in a union of the opposites, the unio oppositorum. In its most central form, the unio means that the original split in the psyche is healed by a synthesis of mind at a new level in Nature. This union is the work of the individual personality as well as of the social collective. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Jung's treatment of the problem of good and evil. That is, perhaps, the subject for another time.

Let us look again at this pair of opposites, the rational and the not-rational that I now want to call Reason and Faith and the task of learning to live in the paradoxical ground between. This is at the heart of what Jung is about – for me. D. W. Winnicott points to a right attitude in the face of paradox and contradiction. (2)

[It is vital] for a paradox to be accepted and tolerated and respected, and for it not to be resolved. By flight to split-off intellectual functioning, it is possible to resolve the paradox, but the price of this is the loss of the value of the paradox itself.

At the moment I write these lines, it has been announced in the New York Times of 16 October, 1998 that Pope John Paul II has just published a new encyclical entitled "Fides et Ratio" (Faith and Reason). In this treatise, the Pope, according to a headline, "denounces the 'fateful separation' of faith and reason in modern times." This synchronous event makes me feel that the forced separation of these opposites is widely and deeply felt in the West today. The Catholic Church speaks to the matter from its own interests and concerns, while a Jungian perspective has drawn this 'fateful separation' to general attention in our culture over the past seventy-five years.

But, what does it mean in practical terms to live at the paradoxical intersection of reason and faith, to accept and tolerate the contradiction, as Winnicott suggests? It means resisting the ego-driven impulse to swing to one extreme finding there a final solution to life's uncomfortable complexity. It means embracing the brilliant achievements and possibilities of the rational mind while opening oneself at the same time to the mystery and beauty of what the Sufis name "the world beyond the world beyond this world." It means being a partisan of Mme. Curie, Einstein, and Watson and Crick while walking in the company of Dame Julian of Norwich, the Dalai Lama and Hildegarde von Bingen, and all of this at the same time! Finally, it means accepting the possibility of a life lived not in the half-world of a one-sided vision but in the mysterious unity of the whole contradictory world. We are allowed to do this, and we are summoned to do it. That's all it means!

In trying to understand the psychology of this process as Jung taught about it, we will discover the various concepts of persona, shadow, anima/animus, archetype, as well as the beginnings of a theory of personality types; it is very important to talk about and study and try to understand and express in ever deeper ways what those ideas mean. But, we are here, I think, talking about the work, the opus, from another point of view; what the essential task might be, what the point of all this effort of understanding might be in the end. Our attention shifts from the leaf and branch to the root of the tree. Remember that Jung spoke of the psyche as "the perennial rhizome beneath the earth" and said "the root matter is the mother of all things." (3)

So, lets continue our look at opposites. We understand from our own experience how difficult it is for consciousness to apprehend a paradoxical pair of opposites at the same time. Its a very difficult thing to hold both ends of that continuum in consciousness simultaneously. It takes a lot of energy, a big libido investment, to do that. Something in the unconscious structure of ego life screams out against that kind of effort, finds it wearying, exhausting, too difficult. It takes just too much! As a result, we find it is something we can't do with very much consistency. It is very difficult, for example, to be a devoted worker in the garden of reason and have a stake and an interest in what is growing in the garden of faith.

That's not an easy thing to accomplish. As a result, the ego throws its hands up and chooses the easier thing, which is to slide toward one end of this continuum and choose to be identified with one or the other poles of the pair predominantly, if not exclusively. This is a much more comfortable position for the way the ego functions in the world. It's comfortable because one has, by an inner act of choice or (?) by an unconscious action, split up and gotten rid of a large portion of this pair of opposites and the constant sense of exertion it required, and one has cleared up, seemingly, those damnable contradictions.

But we know very well that what has dropped out of consciousness because it is inconvenient, or undesirable, or contradictory falls straightway into the unconscious – it doesn't go any further than that. All of that split-off material remains active, of serious consequence in psychic life. We also know that the things we choose to identify with and take into our image of ourselves are the things that we become relatively good at, and we become relatively muscular at that end of the spectrum and in that particular pole of opposites. This instrument of living is daily honed and practiced and can become formidable.

But the opposite is true of all of that potential, that other portion of reality that has been dumped into the unconscious. Those potentialities of life do not get practiced or used, those muscles of psyche do not develop, they remain somewhat childlike, even infantile, in their character. You wouldn't expect your child to hear a dissertation on, say, the mechanism of cloud formation and a little later rise and give the same speech. That doesn't happen. The same is true in the unconscious psyche. All of those neglected parts are used so infrequently that they don't get honed and strengthened. The psychic "muscles" don't get toned and enlarged; they have not learned how to operate in waking life. The whole picture that forms around this unconscious material is that of awkwardness, inappropriateness, infantility, and it's no wonder that we are ashamed of that part of ourselves.

When consciousness is so limited that it has angelic standards, the rejected creative power becomes a devil. The psyche compensates any extreme with its opposite. (4)

We have begun to talk about shadow and persona, haven't we? You see how inevitable it is that we come eventually to the various ideas that are so familiar from Jung's writings. But we won't stay with those very long, because I want to suggest as a first principle of Jungian thinking that no matter which aspect of a pair of opposites that one chooses to be predominantly identified with, the other end remains as a latent part of the personality – but not anything that does us a whole lot of credit or a whole lot of good. It turns out to be a very awkward instrument indeed.

Those people who tend to identify with reason as a predominant mode for organizing conscious life tend to be people who are interested in, say, the sciences. Let's be a bit stereotypical and not try to be subtle or too detailed in our analysis, and let's say that on that end of the spectrum we are probably dealing with those who are devoted to science, and to the power of human rationality and intellectual functioning to create a reasonable and complete picture of the world through experimentation, observation, calculation and logical thought. For those persons, everything having to do with faith and mystery, with the non-rational side of their personality, will be dumped into the unconscious, will be an embarrassment at times to the developed side of the personality and will generally be kept in the dusty and un-visited attic of Psyche.

On the other hand, those persons identifying predominantly with the faith end of that spectrum will tend to have a powerful interest in things spiritual, things mysterious, things for which reason and rationality are very inadequate instruments. Those persons might be the philosophical or religious pioneers who break new ground of spiritual thought, but whoever they are and however they practice these strengths in the realm of the spiritual or religious life, it is very likely that powers of rational thought and interest and concern in approaching life through reason will not be of primary interest to them. In fact, that whole side or possibility for them will be to some extent split off and lost to conscious life.

Consider that around 1530 A.D., when the new theories of Copernicus about the heliocentric universe were becoming known, a famous man of the church said the following: "People give ear to an upstart astrologer who strove to show that the earth revolves, not the heavens or the firmament, the sun and the moon. . . . This fool wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy; but sacred Scripture tells us that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, not the earth." That was the voice of Martin Luther. From Geneva came another voice quoting the 93rd Psalm: "The world also is stabilized, that it cannot be moved" and saying, "Who will venture to place the authority of Copernicus above that of the Holy Spirit?" Calvin and Luther represented so powerful an attitude that a discouraged Copernicus withheld his completed work from publication for a time. (5)

In the contemporary scientific community that is unraveling the structural details of the human genome, there is a prevailing feeling that when that work is done, the mysteries of the human organism will be spread out like a book for us to read. Periodically, there are enthusiastic claims that this or that complex piece of human behavior has been traced to a particular location on a certain gene. Those claims have often been quietly retracted as the profound depths of cause and effect in the psyche-soma become more appreciated.

In the physics community there is a search of almost monastic intensity for the TOE, the Theory of Everything, which will finally unite all of physical reality under the tent of a single over-arching system. In our admiration for the stupendous intellectual achievements of Western science (an invention, by the way, of an historically and geographically limited psychological apparatus), can we see a difference between the limited task of pushing back the curtain of ignorance that clouds the intellect and, on the other hand, the wish to remove all mystery from the peculiarly human experience of life?

Now, we know that in historical reality there are individuals who are great scientists with profound spiritual bent. We know also that there are people of great spiritual genius who have no difficulty with the rational intellect and have used it to great advantage. We are not here talking about geniuses or those who have managed in some way to live in some kind of conjoined sense of the contemporaneous reality and value of this pair of opposites. However, it is just this achievement that Jung suggests is possible in some measure for all of us.

As these two very differently organized individuals look at each other across the field that lies between their prevailing systems of value in life, they will often see in the other an image of their own worst parts. In fact, we can say that each has become the shadow of the other. Each person who stands on his own pole of that pair of opposites and looks across to the other pole looks at his own shadow. Each of these parties – and they are numerous in the world (the party of rationalists and the party of faith) – will look at the other and see all of the neglected parts of themselves that do not work very well. And each will have an emotional reaction toward the other of dislike, disdain, aversion and even a murderous hatred. This fact alone is responsible for a great deal of the agony and suffering that the world holds.

If we enlarge our discussion to talk about other pairs of opposites, body/spirit, black/white, rich/poor, we would have the same kind of analysis. Jung is speaking, in his essential voice, about this predicament. His discourse is also about a way out of it. This is what makes him so important to each of us, and that is why the second question of today is such an important adjunct to our discussion.

How are we going to represent pictorially the continuum between the two poles of reason and faith? We can draw a straight line and say that on that line lie all possible states of psychic life in the field of these two opposites and also represent some degree of integration of them, some degree of capacity of living in the paradoxical reality of their opposition and containing that contradiction in consciousness.

For example, we can say that the parties I have described somewhat stereotypically live very close to the ends of the line with an intense local sense of the value that prevails in their neighborhood. Each person who lives at the pole has a sense that the local reality is the total reality. The poor, struggling, undeveloped, needy ego lives very much in a local psychological situation that it construes as the total, as the whole. Jung is about the discovery that this is a false perception, and an individual who lives in a local reality exclusively is living in a very one-sided state. If one moves toward the center of the line, the implication is that from a condition of extreme identification with a polar opposite, one moves in a variety of ways toward an awareness of the greater complexity of the reality in which one is living.

It is characteristic of persons who undertake the work of analysis or therapy that very soon into the matter it becomes obvious that things have to change. Things cannot remain the way they were because they way they were is responsible for the way a person has felt in life, the depression, anxiety, phobias, all those ailments to which the mind is prone. In moving toward the center of the line, there is a growing perception of something else that has to be added in.

Sometimes, an individual can reach something like a saturation point of individuation and growth and development. It will not be possible for every person in actual fact, although it certainly is in the theory, to move to the center of the line. That will not happen. Psyches are different with different capacities and aptitudes. It seems to be true that certain individuals move to a point and find that the standpoint they have reached becomes a platform for a satisfying life, so different that it feels like an endpoint. For them perhaps it is an endpoint. No one can say where this point is for any person, but the population on this hypothetical line very likely follows laws of probability.

In thinking of the line so far, it seems like a flat horizontal line stretching between two points. We can improve this image and add another piece of meaning to what Jung says about this situation. He makes it very clear that moving from one-sided polarized organization of personality to a more integrated, whole one, in which the opposites find to some degree an integrated resting place, is a development very much to be wished. There is a great value in this movement.

Anytime a person makes a leap in development it means that this individual has included within the scope and field of his/her life a far greater range of things than were there before, things of meaning, things that become part of the nexus of conscious life, that vastly, or perhaps just significantly, increase the range of experience of oneself, and inevitably of the world and of others. I'm reminded of some lines of Ortega y Gassett:

So many things fail to interest us, simply because they don't find in us enough surfaces on which to live, and what we have to do then is to increase the number of planes in our mind, so that a much larger number of themes can find a place in it at the same time.

That whole process is one of increase, enlargement, growing complexity of psychic life. Jung pointed to this process constantly and consistently, and it is, I believe, primarily what he is about. He made it clear that there is a great value to be attached to that kind of integration. Our image of the "line" grows to become one of a psychological space between the opposites and takes into account the notion of "value" of position within the space.

To express this value, I will draw the line rising toward the middle. It might take on the shape of the familiar bell curve that you may remember from your courses in statistics. It might look like the roof of a house rising to a peak in the middle.

The midpoint is the place of maximum value and integration, the place of maximum realization of the possibilities of a personality. Once again, I don't think it is in the cards for every one of us in fact to reach the peak point. What that point really means is that there has been a psychic development of such a magnitude that life no longer consists to that individual of separated, isolated, contradictory aspects. Life feels like a totality, a wholeness, a unity. My sense is that there are persons in the human story who have actually experienced that. Some (are the familiar pioneers of human experience. I think it is not the exclusive list of those who have "attained," as the Sufis would have it, but that there is attainment everywhere in life, in places and persons one would not imagine. It reminds me of the last paragraph of the great novel Middlemarch by George Eliot in which the author, after the wonderful weaving of stories that unite many lives, says of the heroine Dorothea:

Her full nature. . . spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive; for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. (6)

This is also true of the panorama of psychological development. It is, to say the least, not entirely administered through institutes and associations and analytical endeavors. The process of development, growth, and realization is an archetypal reality, a pressure in Nature that struggles to happen, and it does happen. What we do with all of our efforts at developing and understanding and practicing psychologies and undertaking the difficult task of analysis, is to help that process along. But it is a profoundly rooted archetypal energy in the soul, and it goes on everywhere and at all times. That is why it is important to hold oneself open in the whole matter of human relationship and encounter. We never know if the person we meet might not have attained a good deal more value than we have.

Now we have created a symbol: something that points to the character of the continuum between the opposites in a psychological and developmental point of view. We have added the notion of value to what we can express. We can say with this picture that there is a value to be obtained by moving from the ends of the spectrum toward the center. What are the consequences of not doing so? Jung was very much about this also.

What I am describing is nothing less than a revolution in patterns of thought and judgment and a way of being in the world – a kind of metanoia, which is a Greek word that combines the notion of "repentance," that is, a feeling of contrition and regret, with that of a "new mindedness," that is, a revised understanding about life. With this as an end to my reflections today, I am reminded of a story, one appropriate to tell here in this Meeting House, from the account in the Book of Luke, Chapter 13 (RSV).

(Jesus is talking with a group of followers who are all abuzz with two recent catastrophic events in the area.)

There were some present at that very time who told him of the Galileans, whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered them, Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans, because they suffered thus? I tell you, No: but, unless you repent, ye will all likewise perish.

Or those eighteen, upon whom the tower in Siloam fell, and killed them, do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others who dwelt in Jerusalem? I tell you, No: but, unless you repent, you will all likewise perish.

In my view of this episode, Jesus was saying that if people remain in an old and incorrect way of thinking about how the world works – one in which there is a simple causal relationship between events in which God gives good things to the good and bad things to the bad – they are trapped in wrong, simplistic thinking and utterly fail to comprehend that in this world things just happen. They will "perish" in a psychological sense because their vision of the Transcendent is puerile and sterile.

This way of understanding is puerile because it conceives of God as a sort of lofty referee apportioning out events in the world according to a naive scheme of causalistic reward and punishment. It is sterile because it fails to comprehend that the Divine actually works in the souls of men and women to transform and deepen their grasp of the psychic reality in the process of individuation, and this failure actually blocks that process.

In the short parable that follows the account in Luke, an orchard owner is dissatisfied with a tree that for three years gave no fruit and instructs his gardener to uproot the tree. The gardener asks permission to put manure around the roots and wait another year before giving it up. How striking that tree is as an image of a personality caught in a static, non-fertile and fruitless condition! And, how provocative to think that there might be, even in such a dire and depressed state, a possibility of new energy and new life.

In regard to metanoia, Paul wrote to the Corinthians about repentance using the expression: "I rejoice not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed unto repentance." When Paul writes "unto repentance," he uses the word eis metanoian, which means "to the point that you made a change." The psychological wisdom in this story is resonant with the deepest instruction I have found in Jung's psychology: We are all invited to nothing less than a metanoia, a new mindedness.

In regard to metanoia, Paul wrote to the Corinthians about repentance using two expressions: "I rejoice not that ye were made sorry, but that ye sorrowed unto repentance" (eis metanoian = 'unto repentance', meaning "to the point that you made a change"); in writing, "I do not repent..." he used the word metamelomai, which is equivalent to Latin poenitet me = I am sorry. The two Greek expressions are often translated by exactly the same word, i.e. "repentance" in English. (7)

What was true then is true on this Sunday afternoon in Media, Pennsylvania. The psychological wisdom in this story is resonant with the deepest instruction I have found in Jung's psychology: We are all invited to nothing less than a metanoia, a new mindedness.

References

1. Jung, C.G., Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Vintage Books, New York, 1965. p. 233.

2. Winnicott, D.W., Playing and Reality, Tavistock Publications, New York, 1982. p. xii.

3. Jung, C.G., Collected Works, Princeton University Press, 1956, Vol. 5. p. xxiv.

4. Whitmont, E.G., The Symbolic Quest, Princeton University Press, 1969. p. 48.

5. Durant, W., The Story of Civilization: Vol., Simon and Schuster, New York, 1950. p.

6. Eliot, George, Middlemarch.

7. Nicoll, M., The Mark, Shambhala, 1981, pp. 89-112. I have found Nicoll's treatment of the psychological dimension of this and other New Testament episodes to be extremely valuable. The information here is taken from his account.

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