Edward

Edinger: Individuation: A Myth for Modern Man

January 20, 1988 – Presented by the San Diego Friends of Jung
The audio version of this talk is here: https://youtu.be/e1OrL4A_b5M

Collective Unconscious = Objective Psyche = Archetypal Psyche

In all patients over 35, they did not achieve a real cure unless they found a
religious attitude to life. This has nothing to allegiance to a creed:

Religion: “The attitude peculiar to a consciousness which has been changed by
the experience of the numenosum. Religion is a consequence of an experience.
Numenosum is the religion creating archetype in the psyche; the god image. If
you have an experience of it, it generates a religious attitude, just by the experience.
You don’t have to have faith. You don’t have to strain to sacrifice your intellect or
your doubts. If you have the experience, that’s the demonstration.

Modern man is obliged to seek this experience just because he’s lost the orientation
provided by traditional religion. Because he’s lost his containment in these old
myths, he’s in urgent need for a new one. [Containment seems to equal
psychological orientation.] The Myth for Modern Man.

*****

What is Modern Man? ¶¶149-150 of Volume 10 of the Collected Works. [Partially
quoted here: http://archetypeinaction.com/index.php/en/more-tools-to-change-
society/55-jungian-topics/4565-the-modern-man]

“To be unhistorical is the Promethean Sin. In this sense the Modern Man is sinful.
The higher level of consciousness is like a burden of guilt.” Must be proficient to
gain the next higher levels of consciousness.

“Unhistorical”—No longer contained in a tradition; his individual identity is no
longer propped up in by unconscious containment in a religious, cultural, or
ethnic identification. He’s alone and when this happens to a large number of
people it creates a problem for society as a whole.

The Christian Myth has presaged this. Has the Enantiodromia built into it. A turning
into its opposites. Revelation 12:12. It predicts the figure of Christ will be followed
by Satan, the Antichrist. Aion ¶68. The Apocalypse is filled with expectations of
terrible things that will happen at the end of time.

“The Christian Soul has the sure knowledge not only of the existence of an adversary
[Satan; Devil], but also of his future usurpation of power.”

The spirit of antichrist enters history about 1500 A.D. The legend of Faust arose.
The same symbolism of antichrist. Dr. Faustus, a very learned physician became
bored with his empty life, and he communicates with the Devil, sells his Soul to the
Devil in return for magical knowledge, pleasure and power. He’s granted the
power to evoke the powers of Greek Mythology. Devil allows him to have Helen of
Troy as his paramour. When time passes, he has to pay the Piper, and he’s dragged
into Hell.

During the past 500 years that story has been told again and again and again. One
scholar identified 50 different versions in detail. Christopher Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus
of 1592, Goethe’s Faust of 1832, and Thomas Mann’s novel Dr. Faustus, based on the
life of Nietzsche.

Behind the Christian Myth stands the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth. Behind
the Faust Myth stands Dr. John Faustus, a real personality. Lived 1480 to 1540.
Died in a demo of flying. Legendary material obscured his actual life.

Contemporary of: Martin Luther; Leonardo da Vinci; Paracelsus (Alchemist),
Columbus, Erasmus, Copernicus, Vesalius (anatomist), and Machiavelli (pioneer of
objective statecraft). All of them partake of the Faust legend.

Looking back we can see that the god-image fell out of Heaven and into the
human psyche. In the course of that fall out of metaphysical status, God-image
undergoes an Enantiodromia. It turns from Christ to the antichrist. Was
predicted in Revelation 12:12. From standpoint of Jungian Psychology, this is what
happened in the 16th Century.

Of course, all of the artists and scientists though they were in “The
Enlightenment”. They didn’t consider their experience as devilish or deriving
from antichrist. Certainly not! They all thought of themselves as good
Christians. They were excited by the expansion of human knowledge and
energy. They thought that was perfectly compatible with containment in the
Christian religion. But they were wrong.

History looks different from the standpoint of the unconscious. Because what the
unconscious does at this time is throw up the compensating dream—the Faust
legend. Informs us that what’s going on is dealings with the Devil--dealings
with antichrist.

However, no one noticed until about the 19th century, when a few sensitive souls
understood there was something wrong in the psyche of man. Wordsworth
confesses to a feeling of forlornness, and regresses to pagan nature worship.
Matthew Arnold, 1851, “Dover Beach”. Classic 19th Century lament for our lost
religious myth.

Many young lovers of Edinger’s generation recited it to one another in seriousness.
But this solution to the problem won’t work.



And we are here as though on a darkling plain,
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

A Love relationship cannot stand up to the pressures.

That’s a dramatic image of the activated opposites. It is the problem of the man who
has lost his containing myth. The activated god-image appears as a pair of
opposites. Mephistopheles opened the problem of opposites; Adam and Eve get it
by eating the apple.

Nietzsche announced unequivocally, “God is dead.” Jung said, “When Nietzsche
said ‘God is Dead,’ he uttered a truth that is valid for the greater part of
Europe. People were influenced by it not because he said so, but because it
stated a widespread psychological fact, and the consequences were not long
delayed. After the fog of isms, the catastrophe.”

In the 20th Century, it’s a terrifying psychic fact for an increasing number of
individuals.

Summary:

1. About 1500, the God-image fell out of Heaven and into the human psyche. It
was withdrawn from metaphysical projection, and became available for conscious
experience. This event had a two-fold effect. On one hand it greatly increased
available energy to the individual ego, promoting investigation of previously
forbidden areas. On the other hand, it had the delayed effect of alienating the ego
from its transpersonal connection…from its sense of having divine guidance. It
led to the progressive realization that man is an orphan in a meaningless
universe.

2. This revelation: Increased power and energy for the ego together with a lost
relation to God constitutes a psychological state of inflation and/or despair.

3. The collective view is that the last 500 years has been a time of great progress
and advancement, and so it has. But the unconscious as indicated by myth and
legend, characterizes this time as a time of the antichrist. The realization of
man’s desperate condition began to emerge in the 19th Century, and reached major
proportions in the 20th century.

4. It is in this context that Jung and his discovery of individuation emerges.
What had been going on in the collective psyche since 1500, the descent of the god-
image into empirical man, came into full consciousness in C.G. Jung. And that
happened specifically during his “confrontation with the unconscious” beginning
December 12, 1912 to 1918. [The Red Book period.] This period enabled Jung to
discover the collective unconscious. It followed his realization that he had no
myth. This experience was his first step in his discovery of his new myth. [He
needed a new psychic container.]

5. We can now say that what happened to Jung is typical. The discovery of a new
myth or the revitalization of an old one requires that the individual have a direct
experience of the collective unconscious. That’s what will do the job. [Therefore
President Trump is being tried out as a god-image by Americans, though most see
him the other way around.]

6. There is a hitch. It’s dangerous. It can destroy as well as heal. It opens up the
opposites and the individual can be torn apart by the opposites, unless the imagery
emerges that unites them. The symbols of the Self. Individuation—encounters the
Self and establishes an inner relationship with it. The lost god-image is
rediscovered within. The word Jung uses is Self. … Highly ambiguous endeavor
individuation is. Self reminds us of selfishness, reminds us of self-centered
narcissim, solipsistic megalomania. Very ambiguous. Not a good odor in
contemporary useage.

7. Jung—Individuation is the continuing incarnation of God. Jesus said, “I said
you are gods.” In 10th Chapter of John. Sounds like pretty dangerous doctrine.
Sounds very similar to Faust’s experiment with the Devil. Initially a good man;
exposed himself to Evil (opposites); and starts himself on the dangerous journey of
Individuation. “What we do when we take the unconscious seriously.” Jung
puts it in very stark terms in ¶41 of Psychology and Alchemy, Volume 12.

“There have always been people who, not satisfied with the dominants of
conscious life, set forth—under cover and by devious paths, to their destruction
or salvation—to seek direct experience of the eternal roots, and, following
the lure of the restless unconscious psyche, find themselves in the
wilderness where, like Jesus, they come up against the son of darkness.”

The obvious danger in this operation is that the ego will identify with the Self and
succumb to an atheistic inflation. In fact, that’s a very grave danger of Modern
Man.

The contrary danger is that of alienation, a state of disconnection from the Self,
causing despair.

They’re really two sides of the same phenomenon. Between this Scylla and Charybdis
[i.e. having to choose between two evils; “on the horns of a dilemma”; rock and a
hard place] between the two lies the possibility of Individuation, in which the Ego
consciously connects with the Self, but does not identify with it.

It leads to immediately to the problem of the opposites, which expose one to severe
inner conflict. If one can endure the conflict of these activated opposites, usually
the unconscious will generate symbols of what we call “the coniunctio”, namely
symbols of reconciliation; symbols of marriage between the opposites. [i.e. The
Woman’s March of 1/21/17 in which people of all perspectives participated.]

This is what happened in the Faust legend, because the central theme of the Faust
story in its developed form [Goethe’s version] the coniunctio theme is the central
theme of the legend. Part I the union of Faust and Gretchen; Part II Faust and Helen
of Troy—an archetypal figure.

“Goethe’s Faust is an opus alchemicum in the best sense. As in alchemy the
mystery of the coniunctio runs through the whole of Faust. I have devoted a
special work to this problem, Mysterium Coniunctionis. It contains
everything which forms the historical background, insofar as this is alchemical.
These roots go very deep and explain much of the numinous affect that
emanates from Goethe’s main work.”

Jung’s work, Mysterium Coniunctionis, can be considered as the culmination of the
Faust legend, and Jung himself can be considered the ultimate Faustian man.
The book … is an exhaustive discussion of the symbolism of the coniunctio in
alchemy and other material. He saw that as the crucial one which is able to
provide the healing for modern man. The mystery of the coniunctio is the
mystery of Individuation itself.

It poses the terrible question, “How can the individual consciously experience
the opposites without being torn apart by them?” It answers this question by the
symbolic imagery of the coniunctio. The Self in its capacity as reconciler of the
opposites.

On the level of individual psychology:

The most crucial and terrifying opposites are good and evil. The very survival of
the Ego depends on how it relates to this matter. In order to survive, the Ego
must experience itself as more good than bad. This explains the creation of the
Shadow in childhood. The young Ego can tolerate very little experience of its own
badness without succumbing to demoralization. This accounts for the universal
phenomenon we see all around us; the phenomenon which obliges us to locate Evil.

Whenever something Evil happens, its cause or blame, the responsibility for it, if at
all possible must be located. Somebody must carry the burden of that Evil.

With maturation of Ego in the process of Individuation this changes somewhat. The
individual becomes able, a little bit anyway, to take on himself the task of being
the carrier of Evil, rather than locating it outside of himself for his own
survival. He becomes capable of carrying the opposites. To the extent he is capable
of carrying the opposites, he is thereby promoting the coniunctio in the collective
psyche.

In an early phase of the recognition of the opposites is the “pendulum phase.” The
individual is cast back and forth between different moods; moods of guilty
inferiority and unworthiness on the one hand and on the other a sense of
competence and personal worth. It’s as though he experiences darkness and
lightness one after the other.

¶206 of MC: The one-after-another is a bearable prelude to the deeper
knowledge of the side-by-side, for this is an incomparably more difficult
problem. Again, the view that good and evil are spiritual forces outside us, and
that man is caught in the conflict between them, is more bearable by far than
the insight that the opposites are the ineradicable and indispensable
preconditions of all psychic life, so much so that life itself is guilt.

May help you understand why Mysterium Coniunctionis is not a very popular book.
But it might give you some understanding what a grave matter it is to really
understand seriously the problem of the opposites.

I think it can be fairly stated that an understanding of the problem of the opposites
is a key to the psyche. Once you become familiar with the phenomenon of the
opposites, you’ll see it everywhere. The operation of the conflict of the opposites
in the collective psyche is exposed everywhere.

Every war; every contest between groups; every dispute between political factions;
even every game is an expression of the opposites striving toward a coniunctio.
Whenever an individual falls to an identification of one side of a pair of warring
groups or factions, he loses the possibility of being a carrier of the opposites.

At such times, he locates the enemy, the opposite, the Evil, he locates it on the
outside, and in the course of the exteriorization of one half of himself, he becomes a
mass man.

Jung puts it this way, ¶425 of Volume 8,

“If the subjective consciousness prefers the ideas and opinions of collective
consciousness and identifies with them, then the contents of the collective
unconscious are repressed. The repression has typical consequences: the
energy-charge of the repressed contents adds itself, in some measure, to that of
the repressing factor, whose effectiveness is increased accordingly. The higher
its charge mounts, the more repressive the attitude acquires a fanatical
character and the nearer it comes to conversion into its opposite, i.e. an
Enantiodromia. And the more highly charged the collective consciousness, the
more the ego forfeits its practical importance. It is, as it were, absorbed by
the opinions and tendencies of collective consciousness, and the result of
 that is a mass man, the ever-ready victim of some wretched “ism.” The
ego keeps its integrity only if it does not identify with one of the opposites,
and if it understands how to hold the balance between them. This is
possible only if it remains conscious of both at once. However, the
necessary insight is made exceedingly difficult not by one’s social and
political leaders alone, but also by one’s religious mentors. They all want
decision in favor of one thing, and therefore the utter identification of the
individual with a necessarily one-sided ‘truth’. Even if it were a question of
some great truth, identification with it would still be a catastrophe, as it arrests
all further spiritual development. Instead of knowledge one then has only
belief, and sometimes that is more convenient and therefore more attractive.”

Let’s carry it a step further. How can one become conscious of the opposites?
Assuming that you aren’t to start with. I can make a very explicit suggestion.

You will find the opposites by examining carefully whatever you LOVE or
HATE. Socrates long ago said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” That’s a
great motto for the process of Individuation.

You find the opposites by carefully examining whatever you love or hate. This is an
exceedingly difficult procedure because the inclination to examine does not usually
accompany the passions of love and hate. But, it is in our loves and our hates that
the opposites reside.

The very first sentence of Mysterium Coniunctionis reads this way, and it is the
essence of the whole book:

“The factors which come together in the coniunctio are conceived as
opposites, either confronting one another in enmity or attracting one
another in love.”

So the coniunctio as an archetype is operating as much in fights as well as in loves--
by hatreds or by attractions. Whenever we take too concretely the urge to love or
hate, the coniunctio is exteriorized, and the possibility of a conscious experience of
the coniunctio is destroyed.

If we are gripped by a strong attraction to a person or a thing, we should reflect on
it.

Jung says,

“Unless we prefer to be made fools of by our illusions, we shall by
carefully analyzing every fascination; extract from it a portion of our
own personality, like a quintessence; and slowly come to recognize that
we meet ourselves time and again, in a thousand disguises, on the path
of life.

“And similarly with our antipathies, they must be subjected to full
analytic scrutiny. We must ask ourselves, “What persons do I hate? What
groups or factions do I fight against? Whatever they are they are a part of
me. I am bound to that which I hate as surely as I am bound to that which I
love.

“Psychologically, the important thing is where one’s libido is lodged, and not
whether he is for or against a given thing.”

If you pursue such reflections diligently, you will gradually collect your
scattered psyche from the outer world, and it this kind of work, which is the
work of Individuation, which creates the coniunctio and in the process
promotes a net increase in consciousness in the world.

To conclude:

The world is torn asunder by the strife between the opposites; a state of
affairs that’s grown progressively worse in the last 500 years. This strife
between the opposites, what Jung calls “the wretched isms.” Emerson says, “All
men plume themselves on the improvement of society and no man improves.”

As Jung puts it, “If the individual is not truly regenerated in spirit, society cannot be
either, for society is the sum total of individuals in need of redemption.”

Jung: “If only a worldwide consciousness could arise that all division and all
fission are due to the splitting of opposites in the psyche, then we should know
where to begin. What does lie within our reach is the change of individuals who
have or create for themselves an opportunity to influence others of like mind. I do
not mean by persuading or preaching. I’m thinking rather of the well-known fact
that anyone who has insight into his own actions, and has thus found access to the
unconscious, involuntarily exercises an influence on his environment.” ¶583 of
Volume 10.

These are the ones who have experienced the coniunctio; who are aware of the fact
that the opposites go to make up the psyche itself, and therefore go to make up one’s
own psyche, and therefore they become carriers of the opposites rather than
exteriorizers of the opposites.

If society is to be redeemed, it will be done by the cumulative effect of such
individuals. When enough individuals can carry the consciousness of
wholeness, the world itself will become whole.


Questions (inaudible) and Answer Period:

1. Guilt is specifically associated with the opposites of good and evil. The
question: understood that anxiety is aroused when one attempts to contain the
opposites, but why is guilt aroused? Guilt is associated with the experience of
oneself as Evil. Inevitably there is going to be a sense of guilt when good and evil are
carried, and not deposited in the other person.

2. Sword of Islam program—comment on the growth of Islamic fundamentalism
and what affect it may have psychologically: I consider it a very interesting and
profoundly significant phenomenon—Islamic fundamentalism and the terrorism
that it breeds. We very badly need a psychological understanding of that
phenomenon. [He was saying this in 1988.]

It’s a religious phenomenon, even though it is manifesting in the political arena.
That means then that the individuals who are living out the terrorism of
Islamic fundamentalism are truly living out with identification with the god-
image. They are sacrificial martyrs for their vision of God. This has a long
history to it in Islam. You can go back many centuries to the Assassins, who would
offer themselves for suicide missions to serve as agents of Allah--Personifications of
the avenging angel of Yahweh, offering themselves as a religious sacrifice. It’s as
though the god-image lost by western civilization re-emerges in the opponents of
western civilization. Then the West becomes identified with Satan.

It’s one more example of how the whole world is constellating into the
opposites that are crying out for the coniunctio. American-Russian; Arab-Israeli;
Muslim-West is still another. All of those derive from the opposition within the
god-image. The agony of the unconscious deity is living itself out in world
history.

3. When the Self unifies the opposites, how does it do it? It’s very difficult to
describe abstractly what constitutes the experience itself. It happens in different
ways in different people under different circumstances. Our psychological data
demonstrates that when an individual falls into a grave conflict, if you pay attention
to the unconscious responses—dreams and fantasies—very often symbols of
wholeness and reconciliation emerge. If they’re recognized and taken hold of and
given attention to one finds they have the effect of shifting one to another level of
understanding and takes them beyond a conflict that was unendurable beforehand.
This is just a matter of empirical experience. This is what happens in those
circumstances.

It’s necessary for the Ego to play a role in this process. If the unconscious
throw up a compensating image, but if the Ego doesn’t take hold of it and
recognize what it is it can go by unrealized. That’s why understanding of this
symbolism can be so important. As one pays attention to those emerging images,
the very attention has the effect of bringing it into reality, so the Ego and the
Unconscious become mutual partners in the enterprise. The Ego has to work on
it and assimilate it. It’s a mutual effort.

4. What’s the distinction between God and god-image? I suppose by God you
mean the God of the theologians; the metaphysical God. I don’t know anything
about that God. They only thing I know anything at all about is the god-image, which
we have access to by psychological empiricism. [experience]

5. If one is carrying Evil, what keeps us from murder; or from acting out the Evil
propensity? Consciousness is what does it.

6. What about the capacity to forgive oneself? We also need to be able to forgive
ourselves. Yes!

You see it’s a very grave matter. It’s easy to talk about abstractly, but to be
conscious of participating in Evil is very dangerous psychologically, because if it’s
overbalanced, one has an inclination to rid the world of this despicable
worthlessness.

That’s what’s behind a lot of suicide. There was a very apt image of the
Individuation process, which I often have occasion to recall. It’s the image of a
fisherman out in his boat fishing. He catches fish, contents from the unconscious,
pulls them up out of the depths, and he carries them consciously. But, what if he
hooks a fish heavier than his boat. If he tries to pull that up into his boat the whole
thing can be pulled down. That can happen psychologically. Moby Dick. You can
hook a fish in the unconscious that’s bigger than you are, and when that happens
you have to cut that line pretty quick and let that fish get away.

That great fish that swims in the sea is the god-image. That’s what happened to
Captain Ahab in Moby Dick. That’s the way it can work psychologically.

7. Good and bad are just as good words as good and evil.

8. Norse mythology had built into it its own destruction—the twilight of the gods.
There may very well be others. [Inaudible talking about Revelation.] Jung goes into
considerable detail in Aion in talking about the fact that the advent of Christ had
the effect of splitting Yahweh into his two irreconcilable sides—his good son
Christ, and his bad son Satan.

The Jewish symbolism could very easily incorporate those two sides of
Yahweh in the single image--his right hand of mercy and his left hand of
justice. The advent of Christ split those two sides apart. For those contained in the
Christian myth, they identified with the good spiritual side, and repressed the
opposite. But then, as we know psychologically the repressed always returns
sooner or later, and the repressed started returning about 1500 A.D.

9. Prognosis as to our secular civilization. I’m no profit but I don’t mind speculating.
I have a definite sense that is no more than my individual sense. The long-range
prognosis is very good. The degree of latent consciousness that has now become
possible for the human race to experience is an absolutely magnificent prospect for
the future. But the short-range prospects are very bad indeed.

10. How does the matriarchal psyche contribute to Individuation? Masculine-
feminine are examples of same polarity. Western civilization on a conscious level
has a distinctly patriarchal emphasis during the present eon. .. Recording ends.