CG JUNG - Countryside Anarchist

19 OCTOBER 1932
Dr. Jung: Quite so—there we have a connection.
Dr. Bertine: Is it not a capacity for living more fully? A greater intensity
of conscious living?
Dr. Jung: We think we are living quite consciously and with great intensity.
What is the next effect when you become acquainted with the unconscious
and take it seriously? You see you are inclined not to take it
seriously and to invent an apotropaic theory that is “nothing but”—nothing
but infantile memories or inhibited wishes, for instance. Why do you
accept such a theory? In reality it is something quite different.
Mrs. Crowley: It is becoming acquainted with the shadow part.
Dr. Jung: That is also conveniently put, but what does it mean?
Mrs. Sigg: Isolation.
Dr. Jung: That might be the consequence of it, but first of all it is just
the horrible thing that leads into isolation, just the opposite.
Mrs. Crowley: Desirousness, all that shadow part of yourself.
Dr. Jung: Yes, desire, passions, the whole emotional world breaks loose.
Sex, power, and every devil in our nature gets loose when we become
acquainted with the unconscious. Then you will suddenly see a new picture
of yourself. That is why people are afraid and say there is no unconscious,
like children playing hide-and-seek. A child goes behind a door
and says, “Nobody is behind this door; don’t look here!” And so we have
two marvelous psychological theories that nothing is behind this door,
don’t look here, this is nothing important. 7 Those are apotropaic theories.
But you will see that there is something, you must admit that there
are such powers. Then you make an abstraction, you make marvelous
abstract signs of it, and talk of it with only a sort of shy hinting. You speak
euphemistically. As sailors never dared to say, “This damned hell of a sea,
this black sea that is always so stormy and smashes our ships!” They said,
“The welcoming benevolent sea . . .”—in order not to arouse those
alarming impressions, or to irritate those dark wind demons. Instead of
saying the archbishop of Canterbury, you say His Grace. You don’t say
the pope has issued a very foolish encyclica, you say the Vatican. Or instead
of speaking of those hellish liars, you say Wilhelmstraße, or Downing
Street, or the Quai d’Orsay. That is the euphemistic abstract way of
putting things. Our science has the same purpose in using Latin or
Greek words. It is a marvelous shield against the demons—the demons
are afraid of Greek because they do not understand it. And therefore we
talk, as you have just demonstrated, in such an abstract way.
So it is just that—you get into the world of fire, where things become
red-hot. After baptism you get right into hell—that is the enantiodromia.
7 The reference is to Freud’s psychoanalysis and Adler’s individual psychology.
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