Chicken Little: The Inside Story (A Jungian ... - Inner City Books

New Dimensions 101
I was afraid I’d missed my cue, but the room was still enveloped
in, well, a balloon of silence.
Adam was gazing at the snow through the French doors. Arnold
was picking his teeth; D. and Rachel were examining the stone. I
caught a whiff of dog-fart, but I wasn’t about to embarrass Sunny
by mentioning it.
When Adam turned to face us he spoke with unusual gravity.
“To the untrained eye,” he said, “that insignificant piece of rock
has no value at all. Yet to me it is alive.”
He began to pace. “Early in life I realized that for a proper appreciation
of my own nature, and for a social perspective I sadly
lacked, it was incumbent upon me to withdraw for a time from the
mainstream of life—to take a step back, both symbolically and in
fact, from the company of others. I learned thereby that the man
who would be different has two battles to fight: one against the
opinions of others, and one against himself.
“Remember Kierkegaard? ‘To battle against princes and popes is
easy compared with struggling against the masses, the tyranny of
equality.’ 105 But the struggle within can be equally as devastating.
It took my all to counter the forces intent on bending me back into
line. And if such pressures were often ‘only’ mental—subtle internal
conflicts rather than flesh-and-blood antagonists—so much the
worse; they were phantoms far more difficult to cope with.
“Never mind, what is done is done and no regrets. What I say to
you now is that the shell I became was filled by Ms. Little, who in
the guise of a stone embodied and summed up all my struggles. Objectively
that was nonsense; subjectively it was so, because I invested
it with elements of myself. More—the best of myself, what I
wanted to be, might have been, never was or could be.
“Initially, as I intimated yesterday, the bond was so close that I
was her; or, at least, she was my soul-mate and I was nobody without
her. Some years of analysis took care of that. And then, having
withdrawn my projection, what was left? Well, at first, nothing; I
was bereft. But finally, a great deal more.
“In the first place, I got a little closer to who I was, myself, with-
105 See above, p. 62.