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

66 Chicken Little: The Inside Story
“Yes, in terms of experiential reality,” agreed Brillig, “but of
course the traditional idea of a Supreme Being places him, or it,
somewhere ‘out there.’ Jung’s Self, as regulating center of the personality,
is inside.”
Norman handed him a book, from which Brillig read:
The Self is not only the centre, but also the whole circumference
which embraces both conscious and unconscious; it is the centre of
this totality, just as the ego is the centre of consciousness. 72
He looked at Arnold and me.
“I won’t presume to know how anyone else has reacted when
they’ve come upon Jung’s views, but to me they were extremely
radical. To accept them meant a major shift in my perspective—
like thinking the earth was the center of the solar system and then
finding out the sun is.”
“To begin with, for I was still tied to my research, I looked up
everything Jung had ever said about my triumvirate. I was surprised,
and more than a little disappointed, to find that they had
hardly caught his attention. The references are few.”
He paused to consult his papers.
“From Jung’s standpoint, ‘Rousseau is deceived,’ 73 while
Kierkegaard (‘that grizzler’) 74 is neurotic, if not actually a psychopath,
75 and furthermore lacks ‘meat.’ 76 D.H. Lawrence, whose
Weltanschauung seemed to me to be close to Jung’s own—for both
had a high regard for personal experience and the ‘instinct for
life’—is never mentioned by Jung at all.
“I don’t mind telling you that this occasioned in me some mental
distress. But that’s to put it mildly. Let us call it by its real name:
conflict. The difference between what I had hitherto believed and
what was presented to me by Jung threw me into a . . . well, a tizzy
is perhaps the appropriate word, and that’s how I came to have a
limp.”
72 Psychology and Alchemy, CW 12, par. 44.
73 Psychological Types, CW 6, par. 123.
74 Letters, vol. 1, p. 331.
75 Ibid., pp. 331-332.
76 Letters, vol. 2, pp. 102, 145.