January 20, 2008 – 3:10 pm
At the Altar of the Unconscious
s13. “The wise Chinese would say in the words of the I Ching: When yang has reached its greatest strength, the dark power of yin is born within its depths, for night begins at midday when yang breaks up and begins to change into yin.”
Carl Jung covers the complex issues of polar opposites in a condensed way in this section but as always his concern is the practical application of these ideas in terms of psychology and therapy.
s14. “The doctor is in a position to see this cycle of changes translated literally into life.” … “But perhaps I look at this with the eyes of a physician who has to mend the ills following in the wake of one-sided cultural achievements.”
And further:
s15. “Be that as it may, the fact remains that a consciousness heightened by an inevitable one-sidedness gets so far out of touch with the primordial images that a breakdown ensues.” … “Quite obviously the Chinese were able to follow this path because they never succeeded in forcing the opposites in man’s nature so far apart that all conscious connection between them was lost.”
This brings us to the obvious question, how can we use this knowledge of polar opposites in the psyche therapeutically? Here Jung presents us with a dilemma:
s18. “Now and then it happened in my practice that a patient grew beyond himself because of unknown potentialities, and this became an experience of prime importance to me. In the meantime, I had learned that all the greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally insoluble. They must be so, for they express the necessary polarity inherent in every self-regulating system. They can never be solved but only outgrown.”
The dilemma is solved at least conceptually when we note the polarities mentioned belong to a living system, a living person. A living person is who they are in virtue of polarities in their personality, thinking, feeling, and acting. They are the person they are at any moment mostly because of relatively one-sided attitudes in their personality makeup. Some of these one-sided views are conscious for the person and some are not. Some are conscious but only in one-sided ways. Others are social or even cultural values the person is never conscious of because they are so taken for granted. By conscious in this context I mean to be cognizant of alternatives which are real for others in other cultures or social circles.
Normally a living person made up of relatively polarized opposites can’t simply change themselves upon hearing some good advice. The idea for change meets the brute realities of habit and history. History all too often invokes mental judgments while habit has an unconscious flavor to it. Potentially, we can conceptually change our mental judgments especially when we later see they were poorly constructed or simply limited in the first place. But habit with its unconscious parts is another matter. Habit doesn’t yield so easily to conceptual arguments, simply because it isn’t conceptual. Habit is something learned and repeated creating a groove running through our lives.
Habit works because we forget it. We painstakingly learn all the facets of an action but in order to do the action we have to forget all the individually learned parts and do it as a whole action. Learning to ride a bicycle is a good example. We try to gain our balance on 2 wheels while simultaneously being bent forward, pedaling, steering, watching for obstacles, and gaining forward momentum. At first we can only focus on one or two items at a time and fall down a lot. But at a certain point we learn how to do all the actions needed and no longer have to focus on all the laboriously learned subtasks. Years later we can get on a bicycle and ride it easily long after we’ve forgotten the individual details first learned. If we actually had to consciously process every subtask in riding a bicycle we would fall!
Like everything else though there’s a downside to habit. We may have developed habits that don’t work very well or are actually counter-productive to some new situation. While we can understand the need to adapt to the new situation changing old habits can be more work than learning new ones, because we have our old ‘programming’ to deal with. Also in discussing individual habits we’re still talking about conscious personality processes we’ve developed, but how about processes that we don’t remember at all? How about character tendencies we recognize but absolutely refuse to believe apply to us? Complete denial can seem to be as effective as forgetting, but is this really true? The answer sadly is no. Complete denial in the face of repeated events of the same character is actually a form of extreme one-sidedness or illness. A poor solution is insisted on because the real solutions are feared or unacceptable.
What’s happened in these cases is we’re locked in the magnetic attraction/repulsion of our character traits and those of others but don’t know how to change habits of personality that no longer work and have even become painful. Naturally, we attempt all sorts of manipulations to change the situation, other people’s responses, and even ourselves, but some things don’t seem to change. If we’re clever we may apply psychological manipulations like positive thinking, etc., but as the same or similar problems continue to manifest we come to realize we’ve come across something we can’t manipulate or effectively deny.
At this point we may recognize we don’t understand the nature of the problem(s) or what we can do to solve them. We may either continue to fight or we can accept something we can’t fight. If the latter and if the unacceptable is seen to be outside of us then we feel we’ve been defeated. If the unacceptable is seen to be inside of us then we feel as if we’ve been abandoned by our god or ruling intuition and our sense of self has been crushed-sometimes seemingly irrevocably.
Its only by undergoing these terrible trials and ordeals that we begin to see the need for a psychology that effectively defines the real processes needed for healing rather than accepting merely conceptual, or mechanical solutions to problems that have become habitual and even physical. Even pharmaceutical solutions will fail where for example a child is being overwhelmed by a parent. The specific type of problem requires specific solutions but real solutions to these hard types of problems according to Jung really arise only from the unconscious.
s20. “We must be able to let things happen in the psyche. For us, this is an art of which most people know nothing. Consciousness is forever interfering, helping, correcting, and negating, never leaving the psychic processes to grow in peace.
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