The undiscovered self - by C. G. Jung
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| C. G. Jung |
This book was prompted by conversations between Dr Jung and Dr Carleton Smith, director of the National Arts Foundation, which brought it to the attention of the editors of the Atlantic Monthly Press.
Contents:
- The Plight of the Individual in Modern Society
- Religion as the Counterbalance to Mass-Mindedness
- The Position of the West on the Question of Religion
- The Individual’s Understanding of Himself
- The Philosophical and the Psychological Approach to Life
- Self-Knowledge
- The Meaning of Self-Knowledge
Excerpt:
What will the future bring? From time immemo¬ rial this question has occupied men’s minds, though not always to the same degree. Historically, it is chiefly in times of physical, political, economic and spiritual distress that men’s eyes turn with anxious hope to the future, and when anticipations, utopias and apocalyptic visions multiply. One thinks, for instance, of the chiliastic expectations of the Augus¬ tan age at the beginning of the Christian Era, or of the changes in the spirit of the West which accompanied the end of the first millennium.
Today, as the end of the second millennium draws near, we are again living in an age filled with apocalyptic images of universal destruction. What is the significance of that split, symbolized by the “Iron Curtain,” which divides humanity into two halves?
What will become of our civilization, and of the man himself, if the hydrogen bombs begin to go off, or if the spiritual and moral darkness of State absolutism should spread over Europe? We have no reason to take this threat lightly.
Everywhere in the West, there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelli¬ gent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It varies from country to country in accordance with national temperament.
Also, it is regionally dependent on public education and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites as a criterion, one could on an optimistic esti¬ mate put its upper limit at about 40 per cent of the electorate. A rather more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger the political groups are.
The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weak¬ ness. Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective temperature rises above the level, the possibility of reason’s having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and chimeri¬ cal wish-fantasies.
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