Digesting Jung: Food for the Journey - Inner City Books

94 Personality and Aloneness
symbolized by images of the child in a person’s dreams. 84
Anyone in the process of becoming independent must detach
from his or her origins: mother, family, society. Sometimes this
transition happens smoothly. If it does not, the result is twofold: the
“poor me” syndrome, characteristic of the regressive longing for
dependence, and a psychic experience of a potentially creative nature—the
positive side of the divine child archetype: new life, exciting
new possibilities. The incompatibility between these two directions
generates a conflict that may precipitate a psychological
crisis. The conflict is the price that has to be paid in order to grow
up. On the one hand, we long to return to the past; on the other, we
are drawn inexorably toward an unknown future.
Initially, this conflict goes hand in hand with the feeling of loneliness,
behind which is the archetypal motif of the abandoned child.
Thus Jung observes, “Higher consciousness . . . is equivalent to being
all alone in the world.” 85 In short, individuation and personality
are gifts that are paid for dearly.
The antidote to the feeling of loneliness, of abandonment, is the
development of personality. But this does not happen unless one
chooses his or her own way consciously and with moral deliberation.
And you can make a commitment to go your own way only if
you believe that way to be better for you than conventional ways of
a moral, social, political or religious nature—any of the well-known
“isms.” Those who adhere to them do not choose their own way;
they develop not themselves but a method and a collective mode of
life at the cost of their own wholeness.
Personality is not the prerogative of genius, nor is mental prowess
a significant factor in individuation. Just as in fairy tales, where
so many psychic patterns are illustrated, the one who finds the
treasure “hard to attain” is as often as not a Dummling, an innocent
fool who simply follows his instincts.
84 “The Psychology of the Child Archetype,” The Archetypes and the Collective
Unconscious, CW 9i, par. 287.
85 Ibid., par. 288.