Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Small children are guided by instinct, but as they grow, they begin to recognize choices experience doubt. To resolve the doubt, they become “conscious”—they begin to control their doubt by making decisions. Yet these decisions, too, engender doubt, and people resolve that doubt by denying it.

This process begins when the very young child makes connections out of an anarchy of objects. One of these objects is the child, and when she sees that object as herself, “I-ness” arises, and consistent memories begin to form that link other things with the self into a singular, monarchic phase of personality. That self distinguishes itself from its parents during the “psychic revolution” of puberty, when a new set of urges arises in conflict with the settled needs of childhood. This causes a “state of being at variance with oneself” and “an estrangement from oneself” (102), a phase of duality.

Accepting this larger world into one’s life can be difficult. Typically, young adults deal with the resulting problems by yearning for a return to childhood. Some, though, embrace thoroughly the strange and new and deny their pasts. Most compromise by adapting parts of their younger selves to portions of their new lives. Striving to achieve and be useful organizes this process constructively, and an outwardly successful result becomes the new standard of security to which the person clings. Success, though, is bought at the cost of personality since important goals get left behind.

In middle age, success may harden into moral rigidity; in other cases, people suddenly renounce their old lives and adopt entirely new and opposite lifestyles. In both cases, they’re trying to revive the past. Like the sun that rises to the zenith and thereafter begins to set, in middle age many hard-won gains begin to reverse. Also, men use up their masculine power and become more feminine, while women do the reverse. Marriages can become unstable, and “it is not hard to imagine what may happen when the husband discovers his tender feelings, and the wife her sharpness of mind” (110-11).

The later years have their own purpose. Old people are repositories of wisdom and keepers of the culture, but many instead strive to accomplish things of their youth yet unfinished. Usually, it’s better if they find new goals and purposes to pursue in their later years. Though science offers no assurance on this point, it helps also to believe that death is a transition, or, at the very least, “a life-process whose extent and duration escape our knowledge” (115). Those who trust in an afterlife tend not to panic and ruin their later years.

Despite the advances of the intellect, the human mind still thinks in primordial symbols. One of these is the idea of immortality, which science cannot provide but the mind cannot ignore. Ignoring such images presumes that, because we don’t know their purpose, they must be useless. In the healthy psyche, such ancient symbols always have their proper place.

Great ideas spring from a deep source common to all people. Examining that source is still an infant science fraught with problems. Those doing the research are themselves influenced by the same symbols they wish to observe, and their conclusions are highly subjective. Different researchers with different personality types will describe their findings in different ways, some emphasizing one aspect, and others, another.

Thus, Freud’s discoveries about the pleasure principle and its relation to sexuality and the reality principle, while groundbreaking, essentially describe what he discovered within himself. Jung and Adler stress different things they have found among the contents of the unconscious because of their different personalities. Freud and his followers decide wrongly that Jung is therefore an opponent. Granted, they disagree on many points, and Jung sifts through their sometimes-harsh critiques with a view to improving his own work and removing bias from it while retaining his creative enthusiasm.

Freud concludes that the human mind is basically morbid, whereas Jung believes the mind is sound but can get into difficulties. Freud dismisses philosophy and religion, while Jung embraces them, especially religious symbolism and moral traditions that can bring unconscious urges into balance. He admires both the scientific effort to understand the mind from the outside and the religious attempt to grasp the universe from within the mind.

Where Freud thinks of inner drives dominated by sexuality, Jung sees inner energies that vary in intensity, and that sexuality is, though major, one of an ensemble of needs. Freud sees sexual symptoms as signs of the overpowering influence of sexuality, but Jung believes those symptoms represent energies twisted out of shape by dysfunctional family relationships, and that, once those issues are untangled, odd sexual behavior fades away.

Jung states that the flesh bound energies of a distorted life clear up when a person’s spirit takes the upper hand. The search for purpose and meaning, usually in a religious context, puts people on a smoother path; denying the spiritual urge or reasoning it away simply ignores the persistence of the need for spirituality. Freud’s cult of followers treats him as a father figure akin to a god, and his theory of the super-ego—social rules imposed on the ego—wraps the idea of Jehovah in the cloak of psychology.

Instead, therapy should address the age-old ideas of initiation rites and spiritual rebirth, concepts that recur despite being dismissed by modern intellectual trends. In doing so, the energies of spirt and flesh can be rebalanced.

Despite their modern trappings, humans contain the same basic urges as their prehistoric ancestors. Yet “primitive” peoples hold beliefs sharply different from those of European societies. Deaths from disease and old age can be explained scientifically by natural causes, but non-literate societies often believe those endings are due to supernatural forces such as sorcery and magic.

Such conclusions derive not from irrational thought but from differences in basic assumptions. If we shared their founding beliefs, we would see their conclusions as quite logical. Jung writes, however, that a pre-industrial person “is just like ourselves: he does not examine his assumptions” (130). That person may commit acts we consider reprehensible, but those acts receive validation through a different moral code; thus, “primitive” societies are no more or less ethical than ours.

If people who live in ancient cultures seem to have better sensory abilities or a more accurate feel for location, this is because their lifestyles require that they pay more attention to such details than do contemporary peoples. Jung writes, “Nothing goes to show that primitive man thinks, feels, or perceives in a way that differs fundamentally from ours” (131).

Industrialized nations have made great strides in understanding the laws of nature; they don’t like randomness, which they can’t control. Still, if a crocodile kills a human—a rare event—modern people would rather explain it as chance than consider that it might be the work of a demon. Yet “chance” doesn’t really satisfy anyone’s urge to understand why things happen; pre-literate groups resolve this by assuming that crocodiles attack only when compelled by a living force.

To many pre-industrial groups, random events may be portents of trouble ahead; indeed, multiple surprising events in a row sometimes do signal an important change. Thus, they’re alert to oddities and take steps when a series of strange events occurs. They often place their trust in a highly respected community member who’s expected to know the group’s lore, keep track of events, and prescribe solutions for unusual sequences of events.

Modern people regard such behavior as superstitious, yet they, too, engage in magical thinking when extremely unusual things happen to them. Many people dwell in natural surroundings much more dangerous than those of Westernized countries; when a series of odd events or accidents occurs, it’s rational for them to slow down and be cautious.

To “primitive man,” though, internal psychic events appear to be outside events, so that a dark mountain may contain a giant serpent, a spooky cave may house demons, and unexplained sensations may present themselves as ghosts. Many colonized peoples believe that the power of their dreams has shifted from them to their conquerors; some also believe, for example, that crocodiles who kill indigenous people have “gone over” to the colonizers.

By making no distinction between their feelings and the characteristics of important outside people and things, non-industrialized groups reveal that their minds are “undifferentiated.” Yet modernized people essentially do the same thing. “Everything that is unconscious in ourselves we discover in our neighbour, and we treat him accordingly” (145), blaming them for dark motives that we, in fact, also share. Pre-industrial groups at least don’t moralize when they attribute to others the characteristics of a goose or cow or snake: They believe those people contain those animals within their souls.

Pre-industrial people thus don’t think of themselves as individuals separate from their environment in the way that modern people do, especially in the west, where the ritual of baptism makes explicit the idea that each person has a distinct soul and can therefore transcend nature. The result of this difference is that “If we explain our scientific views to an intelligent native he will credit us with a ludicrous superstitiousness and a disgraceful want of logic” (148).

Strangely, both modern and pre-industrial people arrive at a similar conclusion, that humans are mere side-effects of the world. Both hold inconsistent views: To the pre-industrial person, people simply disappear at death, yet ghosts haunt the world; for modern people, the laws of science rule the universe, yet God is still in His Heaven. The Elgonyi of Africa wake up each day, spit on their hands, and point them to the sun; the German householder annually hides eggs at Easter and prepares a Christmas tree in December. Neither group really knows why.

Psychoanalysis can provide insights into works of art and the people who make them. However, knowing a work of art doesn’t explain an artist, and vice versa. No single process within the psyche is sufficient to explain art, and the creative process itself remains elusive to science.

Psychologists aren’t critics. They’re interested in what an artwork says about its creator, not in the worthiness of the art. Psychological novels contain characters whose ambitions and agonies reflect the common struggles of humanity; they’re effectively pre-analyzed by the author, an effort that, in turn, sometimes clouds the real reasons for the writing. It’s more fruitful to psychologically evaluate the visionary novels that describe extraordinary, immense, and primordial events—for example, the novel Moby Dick and its great white whale, Goethe’s Faust who bargains with the Devil, or Wagner’s Ring operas about magic, gods, and super-human warriors.

Such works, in their grotesque imagery, hint at creators torn by their own neuroses in ways that resemble the creatively monstrous imaginings of psychotics. A Freudian analyst would see such artworks as symbolic substitutes for traumas that the artists can’t quite bring themselves to recall directly. This, though, treats the artist’s vision as a mere symptom, something to be tamed rather than experienced. It belittles the great visionary works, which aren’t mere trauma symbols but original experiences of “some living force whose sphere of action lies beyond our world of every day” (166).

These visions, sometimes sublime but often obscure and frightening, have recurred since prehistoric times and been represented with symbols, such as the doubled cross embedded in a circle, which represents a “psychic happening,” or in the myths and rituals of ancient times. Arising from the collective unconscious, the artworks that result can strike a chord in anyone who engages with them. Because every social epoch contains its own misplaced energies, artists of a given time can tap into the “unexpressed desire” of the age and tease out its symbols.

Freud saw that great art often can be sourced in childhood trauma, but in reducing art to neurosis he made it into a mere substitute for the artist’s repressed desires. In this view, artworks boil down to problems looking for a cure. Freud also regarded philosophy and religion in the same way. It’s as if great works and inspired thoughts are mere symptoms. This is true only to the extent that creative works display personal idiosyncrasies.

But the idea of art as neurosis completely ignores the power of human creativity to “rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as man to the spirit and heart of mankind” (172). Great art makes great demands of, and reshapes, its creators; they sometimes must sacrifice much of their well-being to advance their artistic vision.

Art often responds to crises within societies. Artists serve up imagery that reminds people of the vital human essentials they’ve neglected or suppressed. It’s the task of readers or viewers to let an artwork speak to them as it did to its creator. Understanding comes from the art itself, in its universal appeal; the artist’s life is secondary: “His personal career may be inevitable and interesting, but it does not explain the poet” (176).