Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

18
Togetherness vs. Intimacy with Distance
When a person complains that he is always on bad terms with his
wife or the people he loves, and that there are terrible scenes
or resistances between them, you will see when you analyze this
person that he has an attack of hatred. He has been living in
participation mystique with those he loves. He has spread himself
over other people until he has become identical with them, which is
a violation of the principle of individuality. Then they have
resistances naturally, in order to keep themselves apart. 56
One of the greatest single obstacles to a mature relationship is the
ideal of togetherness. It is an ideal based on the archetypal motif of
wholeness. Find your soul-mate, your other half, and you’ll live
happily ever after. This is a very old idea. You find it in Greek philosophy,
for instance in Plato’s Symposium, where Aristophanes
pictures humans as originally whole but arrogant. 57 As punishment,
Zeus cut them in half, and now, it is said, we forever seek to replace
our lost other.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this ideal. The mistake
is in expecting to find our “lost other” in the outside world. In fact,
it is our contrasexual inner other, animus or anima, who is more
properly the object of our search. Outer relationships, already hampered
by personal complexes and a multitude of day-to-day concerns,
cannot bear the extra weight of archetypal expectations. Although
individuation is not possible without relationship, it is not
compatible with togetherness.
After the passage quoted above, Jung continues:
56 The Psychology of Kundalini Yoga: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1932 by C.G.
Jung, p. 7.
57 Symposium, 14-16 (189A-193E).
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