Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

74 The Heroic Journey
[They] are as a rule the legendary heroes of mankind, the very ones
who are looked up to, loved, and worshipped, the true sons of God
whose names perish not. . . . Their greatness has never lain in their
abject submission to convention, but, on the contrary, in their deliverance
from convention. They towered up like mountain peaks
above the mass that still clung to its collective fears, its beliefs, laws,
and systems, and boldly chose their own way. 63
From the beginning of recorded time, heroes have been endowed
with godlike attributes. Historically, anyone who turned aside from
the beaten path was deemed to be either crazy or possessed by a
demon, or possibly a god. Some were coddled, just in case; the unlucky
ones were hacked to pieces or burned at the stake.
Now we have depth psychology. On a collective level we still
have heroes—athletes, actors, politicians and the like—and some of
these we treat like gods. But we no longer expect of them anything
as elusive and differentiated as personality. Individually, however,
we have raised our sights. Thanks to Jung we now know that personality,
in any substantial use of the term, depends upon a harmonious
mix of ego, persona and shadow, in helpful alliance with anima
or animus, our contrasexual other, plus a working relationship
with something greater, like the Self.
Call it God or the Self, or by any other name, without contact
with an inner center we have to depend on will power, which is not
enough to save us from ourselves, nor to forge a personality out of a
sow’s ear.
63 “The Development of Personality,” The Development of Personality, CW 17,
par. 298.