The North/South Conference: "Me and My Shadow" - Carmel, California March 1, 2003

A MORE PERFECT UNION

Perfection and Wholeness as Developmental Paths

James Yandell

Everything, by an impulse of its own nature, tends toward its perfection. - Dante

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light . . . He who works for sweetness and light united, works to make reason and the will of God prevail. -- Matthew Arnold

Suffering is the fastest horse that carries you to perfection. –Meister Eckhart

My strength is made perfect in weakness. – St. Paul

We must leave exactly on time. . . . From now on everything must function to perfection. – Benito Mussolini, to stationmaster

The perfect is the enemy of the good. – Anon.

So much perfection argues rottenness somewhere. -- Beatrice Webb

It is only imperfection that complains of what is imperfect. The more perfect we are, the more gentle and quiet we become towards the defects of others. – Francois Fenelon

Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null,

Dead perfection, no more. – Tennyson

On the earth the broken arcs; in the heaven, a perfect round. – Robert Browning

If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be. – Yogi Berra

I. Perfect at the Vatican

     In April 2002, as the scandal over sexual molestation by Catholic priests gathered momentum in the United States, the Vatican called a two-day summit meeting with twelve American cardinals and several bishops to consider the problem. The San Francisco Chronicle front-page story began:

     ROME – After months of criticism for its slow response to the pedophile priest scandal, the Vatican now faces an unprecedented week, its cloistered traditions beset by a state of emergency, and once-taboo subjects of gays in the clergy and an end to celibacy to be openly debated.

     Shortly before the summit there took place at the Vatican an ordination ceremony where Pope John Paul II addressed twenty new priests from various countries. None of them was from the United States, but the Pope’s remarks – only the second time he had publicly referred to the scandal – were understood to apply to the problem for which the forthcoming summit had been called. This event was described on an inside page of the same issue of the Chronicle in which the announcement of the summit appeared on page one. Under the head, "Pope tells new priests they must be ‘perfect’", the AP reported:

     As the new priests gathered in St. Peter’s Basilica, John Paul told them Jesus expects a "higher loyalty" from priests, a more rigorous poverty and humility.

     "He asks of you to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect," he said. "In a word, the Lord wants you to be holy."

     Jungians may be familiar with the view that this use of "perfect" in the English version of the New Testament is a mistranslation. The Greek word teleios, we have been told, would have been more accurately rendered as "whole" or "complete." It is related to telos, end or goal. Since wholeness of development is a prime Jungian value, along with skepticism about persona-level purity, we have been receptive toward the mistranslation idea. And perhaps a bit smug over our Jungian ability to appreciate it. The stress on wholeness is psychologically inclusive, especially of the shadow as part of the whole. The emphasis on purity or faultlessness, which is how we have come to understand "perfect," seems superficial and illusory, trying to attain some ideal fantasy of all-goodness by exclusion of the negative through suppression or repression. The English musical about World War I, Oh What a Lovely War, puts it well: "I shall be whiter than the whitewash on the wall!" Jung called the shadow "the part of us that we don’t want to be part of us." It can be owned and somewhat integrated into wholeness through painful consciousness, or it can be denied and disowned to enhance self-esteem, at the price of letting it run loose in the unconscious and in the world.

Contemporary dictionaries typically offer two sorts of definitions of "perfect," in this order:

1. Lacking nothing essential to the whole; complete of its nature or kind.

2. Being without defect or blemish. (American Heritage Dictionary)

So the word can legitimately be used in either sense, which we might designate as perfect 1 and perfect 2. The first emphasizes the presence of positive qualities; the second, absence of the negative. But this is too neat. We shall see later that perhaps the most important feature of "perfect" as "complete" is the acceptance and inclusion of the negative as part of the whole. Preference in current popular usage seems to be for perfect 2, without defect or blemish. A representative derivation suggests that perfect 1 is more authentic, more true to linguistic sources:

Middle English perfit, parfit, from Old French parfit, from Latin perfectus, finished, complete, excellent, from the past participle of perficere, to complete : per-, completely + facere, to do (The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of the English Language)

     Regarding the supposed mistranslation, if the translators of the New Testament had used "perfect" to mean perfect 1, complete, we would have no complaint; if perfect 2, there is an argument. But if the historically core meaning is perfect 1, then the translation of teleios as "perfect" was correct in its time, and the problem is not translation but that over time the meaning of "perfect" has shifted from the first to the second, from complete to without fault. Might we add: from substance to image?

     How did the Pope mean it? Considering the context of mushrooming publicity about priestly predation and hierarchical coverup, the impending damage-control summit, and the fact that he was addressing new priests just beginning their clerical careers, it is unlikely that he was exhorting the young men to become whole, to own all of their biological and psychological nature. The larger context must include the anti-sexual evolution of Roman Catholic Christianity over the past two millennia and its identification with an all-good, all-light, shadowless god-image. In this development, the exclusion of shadow, personified as the adversary Satan, became the highest value. The Pope must rather have been urging the new priests to be pure and without fault, by working consciously and zealously against their devil-inspired impulses.

     In urging perfection the Pope invoked the model of a heavenly Father who is perfect, and to be emulated. The source of the Pope’s admonition is Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount as reported in the gospel of Matthew. The "be perfect" quote is the last line of a statement on loving one’s enemies. Here is the paragraph from The Jerusalem Bible, Matthew 5:43-48:

You have learned how it was said: You must love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say this to you: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you; in this way you will be sons of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on bad men as well as good, and his rain to fall on honest and dishonest men alike. For if you love those who love you, what right have you to claim any credit? Even the tax collectors do as much, do they not? And if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything exceptional? Even the pagans do as much, do they not? You must therefore be perfect just as your heavenly Father is perfect.

     The central theme of this startling passage, and the implied meaning of "perfect," is even-handed inclusion of the negative, on the model of God. As the Father, with his all-inclusive sun and rain, is prior to our dichotomy of good and bad, above excluding the negative, so should his worshipers transcend such a split. The teaching "love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you" psychologically, internally, is: embrace your shadow, the enemy within. This principle is in fact the opposite of the practice of cultivating a sense of virtue and purity by disowning the shadow. "Perfect" in Matthew’s sense seems to mean the converse of the way in which the Pope employs the word and the way in which we have come to use it.

     We might find the second part of the Pope’s admonition more congenial: "In a word, the Lord wants you to be holy." The most general definition of "holy" is:

Belonging to, derived from, or associated with a divine power; sacred. (American Heritage Dictionary)

The derivation is from Middle English holy, holi, hali, Old English halig. Further back is an Indo-European root "kailo-" meaning whole, uninjured, of good omen. English derivatives of this root, other than holy, include whole, wholesome, hale, health, heal, and hallow. We seem to be back with the primal meaning of "perfect." Is the Pope saying, "The Lord wants you to be whole"? It seems more likely that he uses both "perfect" and "holy" in the sense of conventional propriety, attaining virtue by excluding the negative (and creating shadow). The underlying message is, perhaps, "The Lord wants you to be partial."

II. Perfect in the Constitution

Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle. – Michelangelo

     Let’s return to "perfect." Aside from the Sermon on the Mount, our most familiar quotation containing the word is from the Constitution, written a bit over two hundred years ago. Historian Garry Wills, in A Necessary Evil: A History of American Distrust of Government, disagrees with the common idea that our Constitutional arrangement of checks and balances was created to generate inefficiency as a preventive against a return of the despotism that had produced our Revolution.

     Actually, we do not have to go further than the Constitution’s first words to see that it was not set up to attain inefficiency: "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union. . . ." In the eighteenth century, "perfect" still had its root sense of "completed." A perfect law was one whose enactment had run the full authorizing course (which was referred to as "perfecting the bill"). A perfect baby had all its parts. A perfect man had completed his maturing. A perfect report covered all of its subject. (Wills, 1999, p. 71f.)

     A perfect state had, from the time of Aristotle, been one that had all its necessary parts and could be self-sustaining. The task the drafters of the Constitution took up was the addition of necessary parts that had been lacking, especially a separate executive branch. (Ibid., p. 72)

Wills summarizes:

We have been taught that the separation of powers was meant to provide mutual checks, with consequent inefficiency in operation. But the primary need, for those observing the Confederation’s feebleness, was for a separation in order to achieve efficiency. That is why the executive was recommended for its "energy," as a tool for getting things done. Madison described the separated powers as complementary, not conflicting, "to unite a proper energy in the executive with a proper stability in the legislative departments". (Ibid., p. 73)

     An ideal government, then, would be one with all necessary parts and functions able to balance, interact, and collaborate with one another for the common good. Even with its branches structured to be "complementary, not conflicting," no one – certainly not the Founders, who were well acquainted with the power shadow – would expect collaboration to proceed in harmony, sweetness, and light. The emergence of the general welfare out of dissent and conflict was to be the product of the apparatus designed as the "more perfect union."

     Wills, by the way, labels as an "extraordinary misperception" the idea that our three branches of government are co-equal. Congress is the center and foundation. The executive exists to carry out its legislation, and the judiciary to see that its laws are compatible with the Constitution and are properly enforced.

     Lawmaking is a society’s highest function; it sets the rules by which all things are to be done or judged. It precedes in time and dignity the execution or adjudication of the laws. Without prior legislation, there is nothing to be executed or adjudicated. The other two functions necessarily serve the first. That fact is implied or asserted in every part of the Constitution. (Ibid., p. 85)

     No matter what the sequence of action among the three departments, if the process is played out to the end, Congress always gets the last say (if it wants it). It may not want to exercise that right, for any number of reasons – ignorance, indifference, division in its members, the unpopularity of the move. But that does not deprive it of the right, or deposit it elsewhere, in the order of the law. (Ibid., p. 86)

     This bit of Constitutional history is a valuable reminder, especially for those who favor an imperial presidency exercising the war power. Psychologically, the imperial presidency is the equivalent of ego tyranny in the individual psyche, and of ego-centeredness and ego-inflation as values of the culture.

III. Perfect in Politics and Entertainment

He has not a single redeeming defect. – Benjamin Disraeli

     In early October 2002, a month before the California gubernatorial election, Bill Simon sought to revive his flagging campaign against Governor Gray Davis with a new television commercial intended to counter Davis’ attack ads, aimed at some embarrassing revelations from Simon’s background. The Chronicle head was: "Simon changes tack with ‘I’m not perfect’ commercials: GOP candidate seeks to change negative image." Simon’s key statement in the television ad was, "I’m not a politician and I’m not perfect, but I will clean up Sacramento." Overall, the statement claims the virtue of an idealistic amateur running against corrupt professionals, as presidential candidates often run against Washington. For our purposes "I’m not perfect" as an appeal to voters is more interesting. Since its content is not remarkable – what else is new? – its importance is in its utterance. Called an "admission" by reporters, the statement offers an image of humility, honesty, self-realism, and readiness to learn from experience. Since candidates typically claim to have the answer to everything, any acknowledgment of inadequacy has a welcome freshness and puts the opponent in the position of a false claimant to perfection. It is what Stephen Potter of "gamesmanship" would call getting one-up by going one-down. The ploy may well have been effective; Simon lost to Gray Davis by only a few percent. Its novelty raises the possibility of future competitions based on being "more imperfect than thou."

     Also in October, a new television sitcom opened under the title, "Less Than Perfect." The imperfection in question is indicated in the New York Times head, "Prime Time Gets Real With a Plump Heroine." The show is hailed as a possible television milestone; it "marks the first time that a network cast as a nubile lead a relatively unknown actress because she was zaftig, and not despite it." The star, Sara Rue, is described as "pretty, perky, and plump;" she complains that she has always had to play the "best friend." The "getting real" aspect relates to the incongruity that "as the ideal feminine form keeps getting thinner, real Americans keep growing larger," so the appearance of the show expresses a possible shift from fantasy toward actuality. Reality television moves on?

IV. Neumann’s Old and New Ethic

To live outside the law, you must be honest. – Bob Dylan

     My favorite Jungian book, next to Memories, Dreams, Reflections, is Erich Neumann’s Depth Psychology and a New Ethic. It was published in German in 1949, the first of his books to appear. Jung predicted in a letter to Neumann, "Your book will be a petra scandali, but also the most powerful impulse for future developments" (Gerhard Adler’s foreword), and it was indeed controversial. (Petra scandali means a stumbling stone, something that trips one up, more broadly something that gives offense.) Perhaps for this reason there was not a published English translation until 1969, twenty years later, while his other, better known works made their appearance through the 1950s. By the 1980s, to my distress, the English version was out of print and unavailable, as was also The Child, Lou Stewart’s favorite Neumann book. With some agitation from San Francisco and collaboration from the C.G. Jung Foundation in New York, both books were re-published by Shambhala in 1990. As reward for our efforts, Lou and I were invited to contribute forewords to the respective books. This is why the title page of New Ethic states, "Forewords by C.G. Jung, Gerhard Adler & James Yandell." Not only am I on the marquee in eminent company, but my foreword opens the book, an undeserved but satisfying state of affairs.

     The "old ethic," as Neumann describes it, derives from Judeo-Christian, Greek, and other sources. It is based on the absolute value of the good, whatever cultural content that might have, and is to be achieved by "the elimination of those qualities which are incompatible with this perfection." (P. 33) This "denial of the negative" is accomplished either by conscious suppression, as in self-discipline and asceticism, with accompanying sacrifice and suffering, or by unconscious repression. With suppression, the rejected psychic contents retain a conscious connection to the ego. With repression, they are disowned into unconsciousness and typically projected onto scapegoat figures, who are then despised, hated, banished, and if possible destroyed.

     These techniques produce a splitting of the psyche with an adversarial relationship between ego consciousness and the unconscious shadow:

The natural result of this attempt is the formation of two psychic systems in the personality, one of which usually remains completely unconscious, while the other develops into an essential organ of the psyche, with the active support of the ego and the conscious mind. The system which generally remains unconscious is the shadow; the other system is the "facade personality" or persona. (P. 37)

     These statements apply both to the individual and to groups and cultures. The facade personality carries the collective values and moral imperatives of the culture, and the ego is encouraged to identify with it. With this identification comes a "good conscience" and also a dangerous inflation. The ego "feels itself to be the bearer no longer simply of the conscious light of human understanding but also of the moral light of the world of values." (P. 41)

     Repression of the shadow and identification with the positive values are two sides of one and the same process. It is the identification of the ego with the facade personality which makes this repression possible, and the repression in its turn is the basis of the ego’s identification with the collective values by means of the persona. (P. 41)

This "pseudo-solution," this organization of the personality by splitting negative from positive implies that the old ethic is, basically, dualistic. It envisages a contrasted world of light and darkness, divides existence into two hemispheres of pure and impure, good and evil, God and the devil, and assigns man his proper task in the context of this dualistically riven universe.

  The ego’s function is to be the representative of the light side. . . .

  The dualism of the old ethic . . . divides both man, the world, and Godhead into two tiers – an upper and a lower man, an upper and a lower world, a God and a Devil.

  The old ethic is based on the principle of opposites in conflict. The fight between good and evil, light and darkness is its basic problem. . . . The ideal figure of this ethic is always the hero, whether he takes the form of a saint who is considered to be identical with the principle of light. . . or whether, as St. George, he subdues the dragon. The other side is always either completely exterminated or decisively defeated and excluded from life. And yet the battle of the opposites is eternal. It corresponds to the basic Iranian concept of the battle between light and darkness, since the repressed, suppressed and conquered darkness invariably rises again; the heads cut from the Hydra are invariably replaced.

  Mankind is confronted with the strange and, for the old ethic, paradoxical problem that the world, nature and the human soul are the scene of a perpetual and inexhaustible rebirth of evil. (P. 44f)

     Psychic contents repressed from consciousness are not inert; they "become ‘regressive’ and subject to negative reinforcement." (P. 48)

  It is a matter of common experience . . . that contents which are capable of becoming conscious but whose access to consciousness has been blocked become evil and destructive. . . . The content . . . becomes regressive and contaminated with other primitive, negative contents in the unconscious. . . . (P. 49)

     The usual fate of such contents is to be projected onto the alien other, who becomes the evil other as a result of the projection, with personal conflict, scapegoating, group prejudices, and holy wars against evil as the outcome. This is the chief way in which repression is destructive.

     Neumann states, "The old ethic liberated man from his primary condition of unconsciousness and made the individual the bearer of the drive towards consciousness; so long as it did this, it remained constructive." (P.64) But it is breaking down partly by its own pathological byproducts and partly through growing individualization in Western culture, manifested by secularization, materialism, empiricism, and relativism.

     This individualization leads to an "ethic of individuation," the "new ethic." This is based on a different psychological organization in which the shadow – individual and collective – is not repressed and projected but known, accepted, and to some extent integrated, or at least made part of the whole. The highest value in the new ethic is not perfection based on illusory ego-inflation at the price of shadow repression, but wholeness and completeness based on conscious self-knowledge and acceptance. ("Accept" means consent to receive, and derives from the Latin accipere, to take something to oneself. Here I use it to mean acknowledge the fact of, not necessarily to approve and endorse.)

  The new ethic rejects the hegemony of a partial structure of the personality, and postulates the total personality as the basis of ethical conduct. . . . Responsibility now has to be carried by the totality of the personality, not simply by the ego as the centre of consciousness. (P. 92f)

     This new ethic is made possible by depth psychology, with its discoveries about the nature and functioning of the whole psyche. The highest authority, in Neumann’s view, is no longer the collective or even the individual "conscience," which is usually the internalized equivalent of the collective, but the inner Voice of the self. This does not mean anarchy and chaos -- every man for himself -- but rather disengagement from outer values and doctrines and taking seriously, if critically, the inner voice. Founders of religions and other ethical movements begin with idiosyncratic inner illuminations and are therefore initially heretics and enemies of the state. They and their disciples are aware of the possible outer consequences of their deviation, and are willing to pay the costs for their spiritual freedom.

     It is obvious that in his writing Neumann is addressing not the man in the street, but an individuated and psychologically sophisticated elite who have already relativized conventional prescriptions.

  The revelation of the Voice to a single person presupposes an individual whose individuality is so strong that he can make himself independent of the collective and its values. All founders of ethics are heretics, since they oppose the revelation of the Voice to the deliverances of conscience as the representative of the old ethic. (P. 67)

     Under the new ethic, the individual must carry his individual evil; it cannot be dealt with by conventional collective measures. The individuation of evil makes impossible the former pursuit of illusory perfection and identification with the collective.

  The differentiation of "my" evil from the general evil is an essential item of self-knowledge from which no-one who undertakes the journey of individuation is allowed to escape. But as the process of individuation unfolds, the ego’s former drive toward perfection simultaneously disintegrates. The inflationary exaltation of the ego has to be sacrificed, and it becomes necessary for the ego to enter into some kind of gentleman’s agreement with the shadow – a development which is diametrically opposed to the old ethic’s ideal of absolutism and perfection. . . . The ego is obliged to step down from its pedestal and realise the state of individual, constitutional and historical imperfection which is its appointed fate. . . . The acceptance of one’s own imperfection is an exceedingly difficult task. (P. 80f)

But this process has major rewards:

  The self-experience involved in the journey of depth psychology (the first stage of which is the encounter with the shadow) makes man poorer in illusions but richer in insight and understanding; the enlargement of the personality brought about by contact with the shadow opens up a new channel of communication, not only with one’s inner depths but also with the dark side of the human race as a whole. The acceptance of the shadow involves a growth in depth into the ground of one’s own being, and with the loss of the airy illusion of an ego-ideal, a new depth and rootedness and stability is born. (P. 96)

In a chapter entitled "The Aims and Values of the New Ethic," Neumann says:

  The main function of the new ethic is to bring about a process of integration . . . . The juxtaposition of opposites . . . can no longer be resolved by the victory of one side and the repression of the other, but only a synthesis of these opposites.

  The ultimate aspiration of the old ethic was partition, differentiation and dichotomy, as formulated in the mythological projection of the Last Judgement under the image of the separation of the sheep from the goats, the good from the evil; the ideal of the new ethic, on the other hand, is the combination of the opposites in a unitary structure. (P. 101)

     At one point Neumann introduces an intriguing political metaphor for the new organization of the psyche, a democracy of the mind:

  The aim of the new ethic is the achievement of wholeness, of the totality of the personality. . . . In the new ethical situation, ego-consciousness becomes the locus of responsibility for a psychological League of Nations, to which various groups of states belong, primitive and pre-human as well as differentiated and modern, and in which aesthetic and religious, instinctive and spiritual, destructive and constructive elements are represented in varying degrees and coexist with each other. (P. 102)

     A parallel is made between the necessary symbolic "murder of the primal parents" in the course of normal development toward independence, and separation from the collective guide to conscience in achieving individual consciousness. Both these actions, from a collective standpoint, are "evil."

  The psychological analysis of any normal development will make it clear that, if he is to grow up, it is not merely unavoidable but actually essential that the individual should do and assimilate a certain amount of evil, and that he should be able to overcome the conflicts involved in this process. The achievement of independence involves the capacity of the ego not only to adopt the values of the collective but often also to secure the fulfilment of those needs of the individual which run counter to collective values – and this entails doing evil. (P. 105)

     It is not difficult to see how Neumann’s book was provocative and controversial, and why it might have been suppressed by non-translation for twenty years. His extreme emphasis on the Voice of the self as the ultimate ethical arbiter certainly devalues community and collective wisdom. A careless reading might lead to the misunderstanding that he proposes an anarchic and unreflective acting out of individual impulses. He is explicit about this:

  The courage to make an individual appraisal of values which declares its independence of the values of the collective in matters of good and evil is one of the most difficult demands made on the individual by the new ethic. In most cases this results in a severe psychic conflict; the values of the collective possess their own inner representative in the shape of the individual’s super-ego. Acceptance of the Voice does not involve indiscriminate approval of everything which comes from inside – any more than acceptance of the negative side involves acting out the negative without any resistance.

  What is implied by the fulfilment of the new ethical demand is that the share of evil "allotted" to an individual by his constitution or personal fate should be worked through and deliberately endured by him. In the process, to an extent which varies with the individual, part of the negative side must be consciously lived. And it is no small part of the task of depth psychology to enable the individual to become capable of living in this world by acquiring the moral courage not to want to be either worse or better than he actually is. (P. 110f)

     Neumann is implicitly critical of the one-sided Christian god-image; this perhaps also caused him trouble in Zurich.

  The new ethic is in agreement with the original conception of Judaism, according to which the Deity created light and darkness, good and evil, and in which God and Satan were not separated from one another, but were interrelated aspects of the numinous. This apparently primitive trait in the Jewish conception of God implies that, side by side with the image of God the Father, God’s irrational power aspect was explicitly retained, as a matter of living experience. . . . For this Godhead was itself not simply all-good and all-wise, but righteousness and grace met wrath and jealousy, the intelligible coexisted with the incomprehensible, and light and darkness were at work together in its unfathomable depths at the self-same time. (P. 132f)

     This sample of Neumann’s thought is probably sufficient to intrigue those who might like to read him and partially inform those who won’t. Let me offer a concluding quote:

  The emergence of the new ethic, and of the new ethical demand that man should take responsibility for himself as a total unit, carries the implication that the time has now come for the principle of perfection to be sacrificed on the altar of wholeness. The total ethic corresponds to an actual state of imperfection which embraces man, the world and the Godhead, since the Godhead itself is also imperfect because . . . it contains within itself the principle of the opposites. (P. 133f)

     "The time has now come for the principle of perfection to be sacrificed on the altar of wholeness." We have come a long way from "Be perfect, even as your heavenly Father is perfect." An adaptation might be, "Be whole, even as the world is whole."

IV. Jung and Teleiosis

Psychoanalysis cannot be considered a method of education if by education we mean the topiary art of clipping a tree into a beautiful artificial shape. But those who have a higher conception of education will prize more the method of cultivating a tree so that it fulfils to perfection its own natural conditions of growth. -- C.G. Jung

     In his essay "Christ, a Symbol of the Self," in Aion, Jung considers the relation between the Christ image as it has developed in Christianity and the archetype of the self that he has found from his psychological researches. In his discussion Jung or his translator seems to use "perfect" in our contemporary sense of perfect2, without fault, in contrast with wholeness or completeness, although I have not researched the German original. He finds that the Christ figure has evolved to exemplify perfection, but attains completeness only by inclusion of its opposite, Satan or the Antichrist. This dualism is embodied in Neumann’s "old ethic."

There can be no doubt that the original Christian conception of the imago dei embodied in Christ meant an all-embracing totality that even includes the animal side of man. Nevertheless the Christ-symbol lacks wholeness in the modern psychological sense, since it does not include the dark side of things but specifically excludes it in the form of a Luciferian opponent. (CW 9.11, par. 74)

If we see the traditional figure of Christ as a parallel to the psychic manifestation of the self, then the Antichrist would correspond to the shadow of the self, namely the dark half of the human totality. . . . The psychological concept of the self . . . cannot omit the shadow that belongs to the light figure, for without it this figure lacks body and humanity. In the empirical self, light and shadow form a paradoxical unity. In the Christian concept, on the other hand, the archetype is hopelessly split into two irreconcilable halves, leading ultimately to a metaphysical dualism – the final separation of the kingdom of heaven from the fiery world of the damned. (Ibid., par. 76)

     You will remember that in the Book of Job, Job is a perfect God-fearing man, richly rewarded for his virtue, while Satan still is a member of the heavenly council and serves as God’s eyes in the world. Satan reacts cynically – perhaps jealously – to God’s extravagant praise of Job, and proposes a series of tests of Job’s faith to which God agrees:

  One day the Sons of God came to attend on Yahweh, and among them was Satan. So Yahweh said to Satan, "Where have you been?" "Around the earth," he answered, "roaming about." So Yahweh asked him, "Did you notice my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth: a sound and honest man who fears God and shuns evil." "Yes," Satan said, "but Job is not God-fearing for nothing, is he? Have you not put a wall around him and his house and all his domain? You have blessed all he undertakes, and his flocks throng the countryside. But stretch out your hand and lay a finger on his possessions: I warrant you, he will curse you to your face." "Very well," Yahweh said to Satan, "all he has is in your power. But keep your hands off his person." So Satan left the presence of Yahweh. (Jerusalem Bible, Job 1:6-12)

     The destruction of Job’s property, servants, and family is not sufficient to break his faith, and the next time they meet Yahweh says to Satan, "His life continues blameless as ever; in vain you provoked me to ruin him." Satan requests permission to attack Job’s body. This is granted with the limitation, "but spare his life." Job is reduced to a mass of malignant ulcers sitting in the ashpit. His wife urges him, "Do you now still mean to persist in your blamelessness? Curse God, and die." Job responds, "If we take happiness from God’s hand, must we not take sorrow too?" "And in all this misfortune Job uttered no sinful word."

     This passage reveals Job’s pious perfection, Satan’s emerging destructive trickster nature, and Yahweh’s two-sidedness, and his amorality and indifference to justice. Satan, though malevolent, is far from the god of evil he later becomes in Christianity. Jung comments:

. . . the devil attains his true stature as the adversary of Christ, and hence of God, only after the rise of Christianity, while as late as the Book of Job he was still one of God’s sons and on familiar terms with Yahweh. Psychologically the case is clear, since the dogmatic figure of Christ is so sublime and spotless that everything else turns dark beside it. It is, in fact, so one-sidedly perfect that it demands a psychic complement to restore the balance. . . . The coming of the Antichrist is not just a prophetic prediction [in The Book of Revelation] – it is an inexorable psychological law. . . . (Ibid., par. 77)

Yet, although the attributes of Christ . . . undoubtedly mark him out as an embodiment of the self, looked at from the psychological angle he corresponds to only one half of the archetype. The other half appears in the Antichrist. The latter is just as much a manifestation of the self, except that he consists of its dark aspect. (Ibid., par. 79)

     Jung uses the term teleiosis to include both the ego-based quest for perfection and the self-based drive toward wholeness. He does not disparage perfection as Neumann does, but sees it as deeply grounded and of great cultural value. But it pales in power compared with the drive toward wholeness, when that is activated from a deep level. Because completeness includes, while perfection excludes the shadow, the two kinds of development come in conflict. What we aspire to as perfection is incomplete, while the self is complete but imperfect. Jung deals with this problem in considering the Christ figure, concluding with Paul’s recognition that he cannot separate himself from evil no matter how pure his conscious intentions.

Modern psychology is therefore confronted with a question very like the one that faced the alchemists: Is the self a symbol of Christ, or is Christ a symbol of the self? . . . In the present study I have affirmed the latter alternative. . . . If one inclines to regard the archetype of the self as the real agent and hence takes Christ as a symbol of the self, one must bear in mind that there is a considerable difference between perfection and completeness. The Christ-image is as good as perfect . . . while the archetype [of the self] . . . denotes completeness but is far from being perfect. It is a paradox, a statement about something indescribable and transcendental. Accordingly the realization of the self, which would logically follow from a recognition of its supremacy, leads to a fundamental conflict, to a real suspension between opposites . . . and to an approximate state of wholeness that lacks perfection. To strive after teleiosis in the sense of perfection is not only legitimate but is inborn in man as a peculiarity which provides civilization with one of its strongest roots. . . . Natural as it is to seek perfection in one way or another, the archetype fulfils itself in completeness, and this is a teleiosis [in Greek characters] of quite another kind. Where the archetype predominates, completeness is forced upon us against all our conscious strivings, in accordance with the archaic nature of the archetype. The individual may strive after perfection ("Be you therefore perfect – teleios [Greek characters] – as also your heavenly Father is perfect.") but must suffer from the opposite of his intentions for the sake of his completeness. "I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me." [Rom. 7:21] (Ibid., par. 122f)

     An elaboration by Jung in Answer to Job on the two kinds of teleiosis touches on gender differences. We are reminded of left-brain and right-brain processes, and of the report that female brains make use of the larger corpus callosum connecting the two cortical hemispheres for more synergistic functioning. Here also Jung is even-handed, unlike Neumann, and does not cast a vote for one over the other. His comment is congruent with the French saying, "Il a les défautes de ses qualités," he has the faults of his virtues, or the liabilities of his assets.

 

Perfection is a masculine desideratum, while woman inclines by nature to completeness. And it is a fact that even today, a man can stand a relative state of perfection much better and for a longer period than a woman, while as a rule it does not agree with women and may even be dangerous for them. If a woman strives for perfection she forgets the complementary role of completeness, which, though imperfect by itself, forms the necessary counterpart to perfection. For, just as completeness is always imperfect, so perfection is always incomplete, and therefore represents a final state which is hopelessly sterile. "Ex perfecto nihil fit," say the old masters, whereas the imperfectum carries within it the seeds of its own improvement. Perfectionism always ends in a blind alley, while completeness by itself lacks selective values. (Answer to Job, CW 11, par. 620)

     In the chapter "Adam and Eve" in Mysterium Coniunctionis Jung offers another view on perfection and human progress. The context is alchemy.

In the Middle Ages "philosophy" prevailed over fact to such an extent that the base metal lead was credited with the power to turn into gold under certain conditions, and the dark, "psychic" man with the capacity to turn himself into the higher "pneumatic" man. But just as lead, which theoretically could become gold, never did so in practice, so the sober-minded man of our own day looks round in vain for the possibility of final perfection. Therefore, on an objective view of the facts, which alone is worthy of the name of science, he sees himself obliged to lower his pretensions a little, and instead of striving after the ideal of perfection to content himself with the more accessible goal of approximate completeness. The progress thereby made possible does not lead to an exalted state of spiritualization, but rather to a wise self-limitation and modesty, thus balancing the disadvantages of the lesser good with the advantage of the lesser evil. (CW 14, par. 616)

V. Conclusion

     Historically, we might view the sequence of ideas presented here as a dialectic progression. Depth Psychology and a New Ethic was published first in 1949, Aion in 1951, Answer to Job in 1952, and Mysterium Coniunctionis in 1955-1956. If the traditional old ethic, with its polarizing, dichotomizing splitting and projection, is the thesis, then Neumann’s revolutionary assertion of the new ethic is the antithesis, and Jung’s more moderate and comprehensive treatment the synthesis or transcendent third. Neumann proclaimed, "The time has now come for the principle of perfection to be sacrificed on the altar of wholeness," and Jung predicted, "Your book will be a petra scandali, but also the most powerful impulse for future developments." His own appreciative synthesis is one of those developments.

     Our theme for this conference has been "Me and My Shadow." The contrast between perfection and wholeness as developmental paths is essentially a comparison of different ego attitudes toward the negative, toward the shadow. The reclamation and reintegration of "the part of us that we don’t want to be part of us" was a central element in Jung’s work, from the level of the individual psyche and personal shadow to national and cultural issues, to religious and philosophical belief systems, all the way to the dark side of the self and the God-image. Jung wanted to see evil taken seriously as something in itself, not merely the absence of the good. At the same time he wanted to see Satan redeemed, perhaps restored to the position on the heavenly council he occupied in the Book of Job, where he served Yahweh’s consciousness of the human world. Conscious wholeness and self-knowledge on the part of humans requires such an inclusion. A separate god of evil to carry the disowned dark side of human nature, with its attendant projection of evil onto enemy others, is ultimately untenable.

 

     Several years ago I had a dream of Jung in which he and I were seated in straight chairs facing each other, jointly regarding something – an object, a written text? – that rested on a knee-high table between us. After a few minutes of contemplation, getting up to leave, Jung said something like, "I’ll have to study it and reach my own judgment." I understood this to mean that he was going to give the object of our attention appropriate private time and scrutiny and give himself the same, in order to see what needed to be seen. This sounded to me like a good idea, the right way to proceed, and I awoke intending to do the same. Jung did not indicate whether he would share his conclusions, but by his example he referred me to myself.

Copyright James Yandell 2003.

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Finality is death. Perfection is finality.

Nothing is perfect. There are lumps in it.

– James Stephens

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