Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

24
Personality and Aloneness
The development of personality . . . is at once a charisma and a
curse, because its first fruit is the segregation of the single individual
from the undifferentiated and unconscious herd. This means isolation,
and there is no more comforting word for it. Neither
family nor society nor position can save one from this fate, nor yet
the most successful adaptation to the environment. 83
Being alone is relatively easy for introverts. They may lack a vital,
on-going connection with the outer world but they generally have
an active inner life. Extraverts are used to hustle and bustle and find
it more difficult to live with just themselves. But whatever one’s
typology, the great challenge in the development of personality is to
find a personal center. Elsewhere in this book I have spoken of the
need for a personal container, but they come to the same thing.
Initially one’s center is projected onto the immediate family, a
self-contained unit experienced as wholeness. Without a family,
whether nurturing or repressive, we are apt to feel rootless, at loose
ends. The loss of such a container is clearly at work behind the
emotional distress of orphans or a child whose parents split up, but
that same motif is also constellated in grown-ups when one ascribes
to values other than those sanctioned by the collective, or when any
close relationship breaks up.
Loneliness feels like one has been abandoned. Mythologically,
abandonment is associated with the childhood experience of gods
and divine heroes—Zeus, Dionysus, Poseidon, Moses, Romulus
and Remus, and so on. In fact, the motif is so widespread that Jung
describes abandonment as “a necessary condition and not just a
concomitant symptom,” of the potentially higher consciousness
83 “The Development of Personality,” The Development of Personality, CW 17,
pars. 293f.
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