jungian psychology and the public...

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Jungian Psychology and the Public Self

James W. Heisig

The search for an idea of the "public self" in the psychology of Jung

is doomed from the start. Indeed, it is precisely the absence of such an

idea that secures the distinctive quality of his thought. The reasons for

this are not as complicated as the psychological theory in which they

are encased. Put simply, J ung felt that in order to restore the rightful

place of unconscious mind in psychic health, he had to bracket all

questions of the relation to objective reality, be they natural or social,

of the fantasies, symbols, archetypes, and ideas generated by the

psyche. This is not to say that these "psychological facts" are not

"real," but only that their reality is neither publicly demonstrable nor

publicly verifiable. The subject who experiences this reality of the inner

world may, from another standpoint, be seen as a public person inter·

acting with the outer world of social structures and institutions, but this

is not the concern of psychotherapy.

THE QUEST OF THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL SELF

Jung himself saw this suspension of judgment as a

"phenomenological" strategy. Unlike ordinary philosophical pheno·

men·ology, however, he did not see the bracketing of the question of

existence---the so-called epoche---as the first step in a more com·

prehensive process of coming to the truth. His concern with truth began

and ended with the phenomenon, something that Husser! and those who

followed his lead would have found inimical to the philosophical quest.

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Husser! himself already rejected this approach of empirical psychology

as early as 1911:

Modern psychology no longer wants to be a science of the "soul" but rather of "psychical phenomena." If that is what it wants, then it must be able to describe and determine these phenomena with conceptual rigor. ... We seek for it in vain throughout its vast literature.

The question as to how natural, "confused" experience can become scientific experience, as to how one can arrive at the determination of objectively valid empirical judgments, is the cardinal methodological question of every empirical science .. .. How are things to be determined with objective validity? ... With regard to knowledge of the psyc:.ical, ... this science is still from the most important point of view pre-Galilean.'

Contrast this with Jung's understanding of phenomenological objec

tivity. In the same year, 1911, when Jung was in the throes of separating

himself from what he called the "constricting atmosphere" of Freud's

thought, he sets up a distinction between literal truth that consciously

reflects on common experience from metaphysical truth, which he saw

as trying to stand in a third territory apart from the working of mind

and the objects of the real world, and then distinguishes both of these

from psychological truth that is spontaneous and "turns away from

reality."2 His option for the latter to the exclusion of the former was a

position he maintained throughout his work to the end and earned his

thinking the disdain and then neglect of philosophers that has never

abated. The idea that one form of truth might lead into the other or

1 . Edmund Husser!, "Philosophy as Rigorous Science," in Phenomenology

and the Crisis of Philosophy (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1965), 99-

100.

2 . The Collected Works of C. G. ]ung (New York: Pantheon Books, 1961- ),

5:7-33 (hereafter cited as CW).

Jungian Psychology and the Public Self -365-

form the foundation for another never seemed to occur to him. He had

carved out a standpoint and defended it against all incursions, in the

name, he thought, of psychological science.

I draw this contrast not to measure Jung's work against the views

of the father of phenomenology or to assess the disagreement. On that

enough has been written. My aim is rather to locate the root reason why

there is an absence of concern with the public self in Jung's thought, and

it seems to me to come down to this: the objects of psychology are

thoroughly private events, which ideas, records, artifacts, religious

rites, doctrines, and all manner of philosophies in the public domain can

serve with interpretative tools but cannot "validate" or "disprove."

THE RETREAT FROM THE ETHICAL SELF

What there is in the way of an idea of the public self in Jung's

thought is minimal. Not that he was bent on isolating the psyche from

its social setting. The very therapeutic setting itself and the language

with which it is negotiated constitute social interaction.3 He knew that

social conventions themselves survive as a kind of unconscious infec

tion.4 What is more, the appeal to the arcana of images and symbols in

our collective past preclude any possibility of treating the individual in

3. See CW 5:15; 16:171. Jung gives far less attention to the problem of the

objective truth of patient's accounts than Freud did, assuming--but

not citing--Freud's introduction of the concept of the Imago through

the famous case of Anna 0. His own advice for countering the transfer

ence phenomenon was to insist on the therapist's self-knowledge (see

cw 10:162).

4 . Note for instance the following: "Every Roman was surrounded by

slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every

Roman became inwardly a slave. Living constantly in the atmosphere

of slaves, he became infected with their psychology" (CW 10:121).

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isolation from the community. Still, it was not the public dimension that

was psychology's concern, but the way that dimension is constellated in

the psyche of each individual. The Self, as designating the highest goal

of the psyche or the progress towards its attainment, could never be a

public affair. His category of the persona, which might seem at first

thought to qualify as a public self, merely designated the face that one

wears in public, more often than not disguising the inner reality. Never

did Jung make the persona into a moral subject, since it was the

persona seen from the inside that was his final concern.

There is no question of usurping the rights of therapeutic psychol

ogy to be faithful to its concerns and methods. The question is whether

the totality of the psyche can be spoken of absent attention to individ

ual as the concrete agent of legal, moral, and political existence. At

least in a formal sense, the Self deprived of sufficient awareness of this

public agency would seem incomplete---even in a science whose aims

are aimed at the care of the individual psyche. In other words, whereas

we cannot in principle fault a psychotherapy for not taking up legal and

political issues or even for refusing to pronounce on specific moral

questions, the psychological fact of this ethical dimension of conscious

ness cannot be merely incidental to understanding the totality of

psyche.

J ung's refusal to bring ethical questions to bear on the psyche began

in some rather wild ravings against morality as the bete nair of depth

psychology. At the time, he was lumping morality and religion together,

both of which he identified with ecclesiastical institutions that "crush

the human spirit."5 Later, of course, he was to single out religion as the

5 . "Randbemerkungen zu dem Buch von Fr. Wittels: Die sexuelle Not,"

]ahrbuch fur psychoanalytische und psychopathologische Forschungen 2

(1910), 315. "Referate tiber psychologische Arbeiten schweizerischer

Autoren," ibid ., 380.


soul-mate of depth-psychology, but a religion pared of the church and

moralistic trappings to which he remained adamantly allergic. In time,

due not only to a more balanced regard of religion but also to the

interest shown in his work by professional religionists and pastors, he

tempered his remarks but retained his distance.

Jung's own struggles to liberate religious experience and imagery

from the confines of the Christian institutions that claimed it as part of

their tradition belonged to a larger effort within European culture.

There it was not only religion but the ethical subject that was loosened

from the authority of organized religion and seeking its own roots in

experience and new perceptions of the world and society. In other

words, there was every reason for Jung to take up the question of the

ethical dimensions of the public self. That he did not do so had to be a

deliberate decision, and one that he had to make repeated times. On the

one hand, as I hinted earlier, this decision helped him to concentrate on

his own strengths and not dilute his theories to suit the causes cele

brated in the press or intellectual fads of the day. On the other, it set a

pattern of thought that Jungian psychologists have had a hard time

breaking through.

As a historical individual, of course, Jung had opinions about all

sorts of legal, moral, and political affairs. And such judgments crept

willy-nilly into his writings with far more frequency than his methodo

logical rigors would allow for. Still, taken together these do not amount

to anything like a psychological argument, nor do they lay much of a

ground for a theory of the public self at all. They are the detached

musings of an extraordinarily gifted curator of souls that can cut close

to the bone at times, even as they show how the brightest lights can cast

a twisted shadow. Stringing his comments together, one realizes that

there is not the stuff of a solid idea of a public self. His strengths as a

theoretician lay elsewhere, and he made no consistent pretense other-

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wise.

This brings us to the heart of the question I wish to take up today.

Despite the fact that Jung's work lay in the interpretation of imagery

as keys to the structure and transformations of the psyche, he was

convinced throughout his professional career that a theory ignorant of

scientific method and naive as to its philosophical assumptions was not

to be trusted. He did not feel the same about the social dimension of his

science, but it is clear that our times oblige us to raise questions here

that reach beyond Jung's own body of work to include all psychologies

focused on the care or transcendence of the Self. Does Jungian psychol·

ogy need to come to terms with the public self? Does failing to do so

doom his thought to the esoteric? And if so, does J ung's own thought

give us any clues about how to go about the corrective? To reply to

these question, we must begin with locating the problem on Jung's own

ground.

THE AVERSION TO THE COLLECTIVE

Among the immediate disciples and colleagues who had an influence

on J ung, to the best of my knowledge only one of them seems to have

shaped an ethic that faced the neglect of the public self squarely.6 I refer

to Eric Neumann and his 1949 book Depth-Psychology and a New Ethic.

Jung saw the book prior to its publication and was elated at the results.

Not only did the author rely almost entirely on the Jungian model of the

psyche to make his case, but he turned Jung's concentration on the

individual into a virtue whose exercise would elevate the ethical self to

6. Ira Progoff's "sociological" approach ended up where its initial assump·

tions about sociology were fated to lead: to a concentration on the

psychological individual. I therefore exclude this from consideration

here. See his ]ung's Psychology and its Social Meaning (New York:

Julian Press, 1953).

Jungian Psychology and the Public Self - 369-

new heights.

In his preface to the book, Jung has high praise for Neumann's view,

which perfectly reflects his own, that "the individual must work

through his own basic moral problem before he is in a position to play

a responsible part in the collective."7 A few years later, in the course of

a recondite study on alchemical symbolism, he made his own position of

the psychotherapists role as clear as he ever had:

His duty is always to the individual, and he is persuaded that nothing has happened if the individual has not been helped. He is answerable to the individual in the first place and to society only in the second.

There is no faulting the therapist faced with the individual patient

for concentrating his efforts on his patient. The question is how that

"second duty" is integrated into the practice and theory of psychother·

apy. In Jung's case, it was, to put it simply, set aside as irrelevant.

Theoretically, all that was necessary was to leave it out of the thera·

pist's job description. But Jung's views surpass that necessity.

If he therefore prefers individual treatment to collective ameliora· tions, this accords with the experience that social and collective influences usually produce only a mass intoxication, and that only man's action upon man can bring about a real transformation.•

Elsewhere, he is more forthright:

A hundred intelligent people together make one hydrocephalus .... Man in the group is always unreasonable, irresponsible, emotional, erratic, and unreliable .... The larger an organization, the lower its

7. Erich Neumann, Depth-Psychology and a New Ethic (New York:

Harper Torchbooks, 1973), 93.

8. CW 14:105- 6. In a footnote, Jung mentions this as his reason for resist

ing attempts to deal with individuals by group analysis.

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morality .... Nations being the largest organized groups are from a psychological point of view clumsy, stupid, and amoral monsters like those huge saurians with an incredibly small brain .... They are caught in every swindle, ... they are stupid to an amazing degree, they are greedy, reckless, and blindly violent, like a rhino suddenly aroused from sleep.•

Jung's aversion to the collective runs beneath the surface of his

thought like a steady stream, determining the audience for his ideas and

his giving his critics a foothold for contention. What makes Neumann's

work important is that he brought this distrust of the public sphere to

the surface.

It may seem odd to characterize Jung of all people as having ignored

the dimension of the collective. In deliberately leaving out Freud's idea

of super-ego from his map of the psyche, he preempted the question of

the attempt to improve the structure and function of the super-ego as

part of the health of the individual. But if there is no place for "collec

tive consciousness" in J ung's thought, surely his emphasis on the role of

the collective unconscious and the need to assimilate its contents into

consciousness satisfies the demand for collectivity. I think not.

Jung's collective unconscious does not function as a community but

as a collection of individuals, each with its own role to play, interacting

with each other but ultimately impervious to transformation through

the influence of the others. The archetypes are like colored stones in a

kaleidoscope. The mirrors of mind working in the relative freedom of

dream and fantasy states combine them into a variety of patterns, but

the stones themselves never change. What changes is the conscious

individual's perception of the given, which includes noticing things

previously passed over, reassessing the relative value of the parts that

make up the collectivity, and finally attempting to achieve harmony

9 . cw 18:571.


among all the individuals--suppressing nothing, giving everything

and its opposite the right to be. For the conscious ego to achieve this

state of laissez faire in the encounter with unconscious mind is a task of

immense proportions that requires great effort. But it is also a task that

nature has set us by providing a more or less stable, universal, ar·

chetypal order to things.

Were the contents of unconscious mind a community struggling for

some kind of conviviality, changing itself to adjust to specific condi·

tions, suppressing what is destructive and enhancing what is for the

good of all, it would no longer be the kind of collective commonality

Jung had in mind. It would be somewhere between his own idea of a

personal unconscious and Freud's super-ego. And with that, the whole

idea of the collective unconscious would forfeit its unique interpretative

role. Jung's aversion to the collective is not some kind of covert

solipsism, but only an aversion to entangling psychology in questions of

public responsibility--that is, responsibilities that are shared and

whose consequences affect individuals insofar as they are part of a

community.

The questions here are broader than theoretical problems within

Jung's psychology. It is not as if Jung had one idea of the public domain

when speaking of the therapeutic setting and another when it came to

facing the real social problems about him. Nor is there any evidence in

his writings and letters that he encouraged his patients and disciples to

seek to fulfill their public self by recognizing the limitations of psycho·

logical science. In the same way that his allegedly "methodological"

refusals to pronounce on the metaphysical nature of God and other

religious beliefs were in fact his final word on the matter; so, too, his

conclusion that collective ameliorations are so given to collective

intoxication, that concentration on the individual is the only way to be

a responsible member of a community were more than a remark about

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the confines of therapeutic method. They constitute a philosophical

belief about human society.

OUTER SHADOW, INNER LIGHT

To persons grappling with the gigantic and widely discussed ques

tions of structuralized poverty and enslavement, the threat of nuclear

extermination, the despoiling of nature, and so forth, Jung's individual

ism must appear a kind of elitist luxury, if not an outright endorsement

of the status quo. Still, the neglect of the kinds of questions Jungian

psychology neither asks itself nor prompts its devotees to ask is only

one side of the picture. In modern cultures with media designed to drive

the interests of consumers of information this way and that, to implore

opinions about an ever wider and ever more dimly understand range of

problems, the call for a slow, ascetic attention to the workings of the

individual mind falls quickly out of pace. We must first give Jung his

say as to why the public self should be taken up as an individual

question, and for that Neumann's account is better than anything Jung

himself wrote on the matter.

Depth-Psychology and a New Ethic is a short book, and its central

thesis regarding the public self is clear and can be stated simply,

patching together the author's own phrases: It is a universal character

istic of humans to exploit ideologies of goodness to justify their own

good deeds, while at the same time hiding from themselves more basic

motivations of self-preservation. Evil is not combated because it is

intrinsically evil; rather, it is tolerated and glossed over until it

threatens one's own existence. Mass movements that arise from time to

time to combat evil, for all the apparent nobility of those who partici

pate in them, are an outward projection of self-interests that remain

hidden in the shadows of unconscious mind. The secularization, materi

alism, empiricism, and relativism of the modern world have brought


about a disintegration of trust in the institutions that traditionally

upheld the fa~ade for ideologies of goodness, leaving individuals to face

this pessimistic wisdom about the human condition. In general collec·

tive consciousness is decades behind individuals, which makes it imper·

ative that we encourage a new ethic based on the self-awareness of

great numbers of individuals if we are ever to see a change of habits in

society at large. The object of that self-awareness begins in facing the

shadow cast by our ordinary moral behavior and from that drawing on

the creative energies of our collective unconsciousness to dissolve

projections, to see clearly through our ideologies and moralities to their

underlying ego-centered drives, and to recognize the wider ranger of

ideas and symbols that are built into human nature for its self-guid·

ance.

The individual thus stands poised between two collectivities. On the

one hand, he faces the temporal and cultural specificities of his own

social structures-the super-ego, which is blind and driven by habit,

and whose aims can be served only by the conscious suppression or

unconscious repression of conflicting individual interests. On the other,

there is the pool of autonomous, universal, unconscious contents where

both the good and the evil of specific conscious conventions have a

place, where the criminal and the saint find common ground. The

process of individuation whereby these unconscious contents are as·

similated into consciousness replaces the primacy of the super-ego as

the frame of reference for psychic health, and at the same time it takes

control over changes in the outer world and provide the only solid basis

for human solidarity.

Put so baldly, these ideas read as vintage Jung. Stripped of their

Jungian terminology, they reverberate with Gnostic ideas of self-awar

eness10 and with many varieties of the foundational Buddhist idea of

enlightenment. Those questions aside, the weakest link in the Neumann-

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Jung chain is how to negotiate the leap from what can only be private

insight into the way mind deceives itself and the treasures that it

forfeits in the process, to the activity of a public self to build a social

order where the inhumanity of man to man is kept in check, or to face

the immediate threat of real evil.

Neumann begins his work, it comes as no surprise, with the postwar

sentiments of Germany, insisting that the root causes reach too deeply

into the human soul to be weeded out merely by the decision to distance

itself from every trace of National Socialism, but. Four years earlier

Jung had written an article on the "collective guilt" of Germany for the

deeds of the Nazi regime. In it he attempted to enlarge on the psychical

illness of the Germans as pointing to the wider human tendency to

mastery by its own shadow-side, a tendency that empowered Hitler.

Towards the end he speaks of the need for "inner transformation" as

infinitely more important than political and social reforms which are

all valueless in the hands of people who are not at one with them

selves. This is a truth which we are forever forgetting, because our

eyes are fascinated by the conditions around us and riveted on them

instead of examining our own heart and conscience. Every demagogue exploits this human weakness when he points with the greatest

possible outcry to all the things that are wrong in the outside world.

But the principal and indeed the only thing that is wrong with the

world is man.''

10. In his introduction to the book, Jung claims to have brought down to

earth what the Gnostics had projected in the heavens (18), but this is

based on his own reading of the Gnostic texts. For my part, I cannot see

the "projection" as based purely on the unconscious, since it also seems

to be the expression of a disciplined struggle with conventional ideas

and beliefs and intended to lay the ground work-or more precisely,

the heaven-work--for a new social order.

11. cw 10:216.


There is, no doubt a certain insight to be had in Jung's words or

Neumann's expansion in that they help us see our own face in the face

of those we condemn as monsters. At the same time, they seem to

reassure us that our efforts spent in becoming better, more whole

persons might bear fruit someday in a better world. But the lingering

discomfort is that no matter how many persons make this effort, a

minority equipped with the right tools and institutional backing can rise

up again one day to exterminate, on the basis of their own private

prejudices, what they dislike of public life on earth, leaving the commu

nity of those enlightened to their own shadow-side with no recourse but

to forfeit their own individuation to preserve the public domain. And if

this is the case in extremity, then something must be said about the

more mundane moral responsibilities towards the public domain than

that they are prone to projection and self-deception. The question, I

repeat, is how to break into the closed world of individuation with the

notion of a public self without forfeiting the importance of that world.

MORAL SELF, IMMORAL SOCIETY

Jung's assumption that the level of intelligence of individuals decline

as soon as they begin to act as part of a group, and that the larger the

group, the lower intelligence sinks, hardly qualifies as an argument. A

case could be made that psychological problems that are by their nature

individual can be maltreated if treated at a group level. This is clearly

not true in the case of the pursuit of science, the flourishing of litera

ture, the advance of philosophy, and the accumulation of cultural

achievements in general. It is best to set his comments aside as a

passion aimed at the failures of mass movements, whose fallout he had

to treat.

The more serious is his claim that morality is through and through

a matter of individual consciousness and cannot be attributed to institu-

-376-

tions or to groups. Granted the job of the therapist is treat moral

questions at the level of the individual. Granted, too, that moral respon

sibility is exercised by individuals or it is not exercised at all. But to

conclude that the primary focus of moral responsibility should be the

individual psyche is a monumental leap of logic. Insofar as we can

speak of as justice or injustice being built into laws, social institutions,

customs, or even language, we are not referring to a collection of

individual ego-consciousnesses, but of a morality that is somehow

institutionalized, coded, and transmitted. It is one thing to claim that

institutionalized morality depends on individual consciousness to come

to be and to be sustained; it is another to claim that it does not simply

exist at all. By asking this question and applying conscience and reason

to this institutionalized good and evil, the individual is in effect acting

as a public self. Conversely, to ignore this question is to assume that the

only formative elements of individual consciousness that matter for

morality are the more or less universal ones that transcend specificities

of time, place, culture, and social structures. This seems naive in the

extreme. There is no denying the absence of just this public self as part

of the picture of what it means to be psychologically whole--in order

words, to be a Self.

Theoretically, Jung seems to restrict his interest in such a public self

to the psychology of the ego struggling with the super-ego, which is a

necessary part of the individuation process, one that belongs properly

to what he calls "the first half of life" along with the struggle to

appropriate one's personal "shadow" of wickedness, frustrated desires,

repressions, and so forth. The second half of life, which struggles with

the archetypal dimensions of humanity, assumes that one has already

more or less appropriated the public self into the ego and is ready to

plunge into the world of universal forms and religious symbols. This is

what gave Neumann room to produce his version of a Jungian ethic,


which in effect focuses on the "root cause" of public immorality without

giving any indication of how to act once the roots have been dug up and

examined.

It is not enough simply to claim that once one has come to terms

with one's own shadow and the archetypal instincts that nature has

built into us, one is prepared to be a more moral person in society. As

true as this may be, it places the public self outside the realm of

psychological theory and therefore deprives moral responsibility in the

public realm and the practice of psychotherapy of mutual critique.

If the question were simply how to make the leap from the self

enclosed psyche to the world of the public self, Jung's thought would

hardly be the best place to begin. In the world of psychological theory,

as the philosophical community has long recognized, Freud's super-ego

theory is not a one-sided concentration on the individual in principle.

(Habermas, for instance, tried to show how Freud's later work on social

theory and psychology, gives specific insights into the origins and

functions of social institutions. 12) Jung's work is too wanting in hints to

warrant any such attempt--and to my knowledge, no one has tried to

prove differently. He learned from Freud quite early on the bias that as

far as the deepest, inborn instincts of the True Self are concerned, all

culture is to some extent repressive, and that a relaxing of that repres

sion outside of unconscious fantasy, would bring about a barbarism and

a "catastrophe of culture." And there he pretty much stopped.

Nevertheless, I do believe there is a way to drive a wedge into Jung's

close world of Self- preoccupation, and that is uncovering an internal

alienation in the structure of the Self he sets up as the final ideal of

12. Knowledge and Human Interests (London: Heinemann, 1968). Hork

heimer, Adorno, Benjamin, Marcuse, Fromm, and others associated

with the "Frankfurt School" have shown an interest in Freud for similar

reasons.

-378 -

wholeness, and then to show how this in turn reflects a wider alienation

in the social sphere. The second half of this paper will offer a sketch,

uninflected as it is, of how this might be done.

VARIEITES OF THE HEROIC EGO OF MODERNITY

The subjects whose analysis provided depth-psychology with its

various maps of the psyche were moderns. They no longer belong to the

closed traditional world where individuals, family relations, work, and

social obligation defined each other, and where "I" was simply a

pronoun referring to the point where these elements intersected in a

particular person. The adherence of civil law to divine law, and the

basic reliance on the authority of both had been broken by the critical

spirit of the enlightenment and science's proclamation of autonomy

from religion. The education of children was no longer the primary

trust of the family but was organized into a system that made them

wards of the state. The economics of work had become an ergonomics

optimized to maximize production, with precalculated wages compen

sating for the individual's loss of control over the products of labor. The

basic political unit was the democratic atom with the right of one vote

and with inalienable rights. Faith in the progress of knowledge, technol

ogy, and wealth became common sense, and with it the assumption that

this worldview was universal, irreversible, and free of cultural bias. In

this setting, it was only a matter of time before the personal identity of

individuals became a territorial right to be protected against tres

passers. And with that the stage was set for exploring the mysterious

inner realms of the psyche. The subject could become an object of

study, the "I" a noun. 13

13. See my essay, "The Quest of the True Self: Jung's Rediscovery of a

Modern Invention," journal of Religion 77/2 (1997), 252-67.


In this modern world where individuals were trained to think of

themselves as masters of their own universe of meaning, the variety of

roles one had to play in the public and private spheres were understood

as extensions of a single controlling, skinbound ego. Spiritual health

depended not on observance of regulations or performance of preestab·

lished duties, but on the degree of control and discipline of that ego. For

the psychologist, it was only a short step to see the roles of teacher,

financier, lover, parent, worker, athlete, intellectual, religious believe,

patriot, and so forth as projections into the social sphere of that ego.

The skinbound individual could then be seen as a ruler of desires, to rein

in the various roles like a cormorant fisher trying to keep the lines from

becoming tangled. From the point of view of a traditional, premodern

worldview, this role-performing, more or less controlling, ego can only

appear an alienation of the person from the sum of social connections

that defined its place in the world. To those born into the modern

worldview, however, it represented a higher consciousness. The mobil

ity and ability to discard some roles and take on others is now seen as

among the unquestionable rights that belong to each individual. Where

individuals were once extensions of social institutions, the tables have

now been turned.

This was the context for the neuroses that Freud attempted to deal

with in his psychoanalytic theory and practice. The self fragmented by

divergent and conflicting roles needed to be strengthened into a heroic

ego, and Freud sought the reinforcement by trying to broaden aware

ness to memories, repressed feelings, and anxieties in the realm of the

primary interpersonal relations of the family that debilitate the ego and

inhibit it from carrying out its job of stabilizing identity. While accept

ing the broad definition of the individual psyche of modernity, he

challenged its fundamental bias about the strength of the ego: the idea

of the ego being in control is only a fiction created to keep the strong,

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unconscious currents of untrammeled desire from running amok. The

apparent mastery of the "I" is disclosed as accommodation to the

slavery of consciousness to an "it" (id). The primary support that keeps

this fiction from dissolving is not the heroism of the awakened con·

sciousness but the reality of social conventions set up as a kind of

"over-!" (the super-ego) to keep individuals from pursuing their own

self-interests in a way that would break society down. On this scheme,

the true and final heroism of the ego consists in bringing to conscious

ness the unconscious way of dealing with a conflict that is innate to the

psyche itself. By resigning itself to the fact that much of what appears

to be personal choice is in fact obeisance to the rules of social order, the

modern ego can attain some degree of deliverance from its predica

ment. Given this orientation, it as inevitable that Freud would turn his

attention eventually to the birth of the social institutions that embody

the conventions of repression and support the fiction of individual

freedom in the midst of social necessity.

Jung's own appraisal of Freud's probing of the breakdown in social

conventions and traditional authority is that it was driven by the hope

of substituting a higher, rational consciousness, whereas he himself was

interested in probing to the depths of the human psyche in search of

lasting moral and spiritual values. I cite one telling passage from his

late work. He is speaking of an alchemical text dealing with entry into

a "higher world" and breaks off to comment:

This higher world has an impersonal character and consists on the

one hand of all those traditional, intellectual, and moral values which

educate and cultivate the individual, and, on the other, of the products

of the unconscious, which present themselves to conscious as archetypal ideas. Usually the former predominate. But, when weakened by age or by criticism, they lose their power of conviction, the

archetypal ideas rush in to fill the gap. Freud, correctly recognizing

this situation, called the traditional values the "super-ego," but the

Jungian Psychology and the Public Self - 381 -

archetypal ideas remained unknown to him, as the belief in reason and the positivism of the nineteenth century never relaxed their hold. A materialistic view of the world ill accords with the reality and autonomy of the psyche. 14

Freud's strengthening of the ego through the recovery of repressed

memories and desires was for Jung no more than the business of the

"first half of life," which he soon set aside to concentrate on the more

religious concerns of life's "second half." Where Freud's ego turned

inward to the private self and then outward to public self, Jung's ego

left both these realms behind to become the subject of a new adventure

which he caiied "individuation." The self fragmented into a set of social

roles and struggling to keep them in tow turns to the world of the

unconscious where that fragmentation is replaced with a closed, tradi

tional society inhabited by archetypal desires. In this sense, the frag

mentation and a reification of the Self needed to adjust to life in

modernity is not addressed as a problem but accepted as a model for

the natural state of the human. As in premodern societies, the heroism

of the Jungian ego consists in making a home harmoniously with a

given order of things, whose authority is absolute.

At the level of theory, Jung was, like Freud, a child of the enlighten

ment with its ideas of transcultural, scientificaily reliable patterns. In

his case, though, this was tempered by romanticism's conviction of

truth hidden in the human soul and discoverable by an inner journey.

The true heroism of the ego lie not in dealing with the outer world but

in discovering the inner one. This made it inevitable that at the level of

practice he would belong to the world that Husser! rather cynically

referred to as "pre-Galilean." While his psychotherapeutic goal was to

see ail belief in demons and gods and similar religious entities as

14. cw 14:473.

-382-

projections of unconscious dispositions, he returned to those images as

the only way to come to terms with those dispositions, to wrest from

them their secret, and to unify them into the totality of psyche, which

he called the Self. Here again, while the archetypes of the unconscious,

though they are described theoretically by Jung as predispositions to

think in certain ways and to form certain images in the manner of

Kant's "categories," they function in the therapeutic setting as foreign

entities that have made their home within the confines of a kind of

archaic cave that is located inside of the body. For the modern scientific

mind, overcoming this crude, pre-Galilean mindset is a prerequisite to

psychic health. In Jung's case, however, no such reprieve is sought from

this mindset. Rather, the assumption is that only in the dream and

fantasy life of the unconsciouscan full psychic wholeness, health, be

achieved. 15

Jung's erasure of the public self, then, is not merely an obligation

imposed on the therapist as he insisted, since there is no reason in

principle that attention to the public self should not complement the

therapeutic epoche in the end. Nor can it been as part of a more

comprehensive cure for society, as Neumann argued. It amounts to a

systematic, though perhaps corrigible, one-sidedness grounded in a

neglect of the psychology of modernity.

THE PROBLEM OF THE BODY

Given the nature of Jungian psychology as an interpretative therapy,

we can hardly expect it to tackle the question of the alienation of the

15. Among more creative post-Jungians, Hillman has offered as an alterna

tive by insisting on the importance of learning to "see through" the

"personifying" work of unconscious mind, and to "depersonalize" it in

order to arrive at the level of soul. See his Re- visioning Psychology

(New York: Harper and Row, 1975).

Jungian Psychology and the Public Self - 383 -

self from the social setting which defines its parameters on the merely

philosophical level. We must see it as a disease in need of the kind of

therapy depth-psychology is equipped to bring. The Jungian assumption

that the final roots of all psychic disease lie in a failure to come to

terms with the deepest, collective layers of unconscious mind seems to

preclude that possibility. I am suggesting it does not.

The alienation of the self-individuating ego from the morally

responsibly public self that we see in Jungian psychology is mirrored in

another psychological problem endemic to life in modernity: that of the

alienation of the body. The industrial revolution represents a watershed

in the extension of the human body into machinery. As Marshall

MacLuhan pointed out some thirty-five years ago, the tools which are

extensions of our bodies--the wheel of the foot, the telescope of the

eye, the crane of the arm, etc.--have taken a massive leap forward

with the new media of radio, television, and computers (which he

predicted would be connected someday in a "worldwide web" that

would in effect extend the human central nervous system). 16 In the

process, the body has become reified and fragmented. In its reliance on

ever more and ever more sophisticated tools, the body suffers a fate not

unlike that of the social ego: it comes to be thought of as a collection

of functions. Along with this, it becomes an object made of up parts that

machines--originally extensions of that body--can test, repair,

improve, and dispose of with all the consciousness of the subject

focused on the proper use and maintenance of the tools. At the same

time as ego occupies itself with the heroic effort of trying to stay in one

piece and not fall apart, it tries to keep the skinbound environment that

is its home "in shape" and alive as long as possible. The body as person

16. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: McGraw

Hill, 1964), 358.

-384-

--that is, as one dimension of a broader totality--is driven intoun

consciousness, replaced by the body as an object of ego attentions. 17

Jung's own views on the body are scattered and ambivalent, but for

that reason are still open to development by those who subscribe to his

theory and methods. In his psychological writings proper, his sole

theoretical conviction is a clear rejection of any form of body-mind

duality, as well as of any form of materialism or idealism that would

support it. For the rest, he prefers to suspend judgment: "In my view, we

know practically nothing about this .... Exhaustive discussions of this

question may be all very well for philosophers, but empirical psychol

ogy should confine itself to empirically accessible facts." 18 Where body

and mind are concerned, his principal interest remained in the her

meneutics of images, not in the examination of objective entities in the

publicly observable world that might correspond to these images.

Though aware of the possibility of physical causes for physical illnesses

(and vice versa), 19 from quite early on he abandoned interest in the

treatment of nervous disorders as based in physical causes and advised

others to do the same.20 Any cure of a psychological problem that could

17. This is confirmed in the redefinition of asceticism and bodily repression

as pleasure. On this see my essay, "The Recovery of the Senses: Against

the Asceticisms of the Age," journal of Ecumenical Studies 33/2 (1996),

216-37.

18. CW 8: 17- 18. At one point he appeals to his principle of "synchronicity"

to speak of the body-mind relation, although it is less an explanation

than an admission of the fact that "things happen together somehow

and behave as if they were the same, and yet for us they are not" (CW

18: 34).

19. Even where he admitted the functioning of psychosomatic effects, he

resisted using the pitiable little we know about it as a foundation for

therapy. See CW 8:261; 7:115.


be effected without conscious effort would only strengthen the under

lying malady. Attention to the body as the root of psychological

problems, however firmly believed as common sense, amounts to no

more than a projection.21

The relation of the private ego to its public roles and of the body to

the tools of by which it does its work is, crudely but traditionally put,

one of an inner world to an outer one. The attempt to remedy these

conflicts by accepting responsibility to keep the inner life in order--a

psychological approach typified in Jung but hardly inaugurated by him

--only really works if the public world is in some sense recovered in

the privacy of interiority. His solution, as we saw, was to redefine the

public in the form of universal, innate dispositions with which each

private individual is born. In so doing, he set up a tension between the

private realm of the ego-consciousness and its personal shadow side in

the unconscious against the public domain of a collective unconscious.

Only when both work in harmony, neither of them "inflated" or eclips

ing the other, could, can we speak of a psychic wholeness.

Ironically the body can be brought into the therapeutic scheme only

by being left out of it as body. There is no way to reduce the body to

interiority, because it is by definition something that is not psyche. The

most the can be said is that vestiges of the Freudian notion of the id

remain in the world of the personal unconscious, only to be superseded

by their true ground in collective unconscious archetypes. Obviously

Jung did not mean to deny the objective reality of the body any more

than he denied the objective reality of the public self. It was rather a

question of stressing its inner side and focusing on that. In this way he

20. cw 7:246-7.

21. He compares this to the metaphysically silly side of the alchemists'

writings, CW 14:477.

-386-

could preserve the semblance of a body-mind totality without having to

deal with the body as body.

This lack of interest in working out a theoretical position on the

mind-body question is consistent with his general lack of interest in the

problem of the body faced by life in the modern world. However, in a

1928 essay on "The Spiritual Problem of Modern Man," after conclud

ing that "the crux of the spiritual problem today is to be found in the

fascination which the psyche holds for modern man," Jung ends his

essay by pleading guilty to the charge of one-sidedness:

The fascination of the psyche brings about a new self-appraisal, a reassessment of our fundamental human nature. We can hardly be surprised if this leads to a rediscovery of the body after its long subjection to the spirit--we are even tempted to say that the flesh is getting its own back. ... The body lays claim to equal recognition: it exerts the same fascination as the psyche .... The striving to transcend the present level of consciousness through acceptance of the unconscious must give the body its due .... These claims of physical and psychic life, incomparably stronger than they were in the past, may seem a sign of decadence, but they may also signify a rejuvenation!2

I cite the passage not because it is terribly profound in its percep

tion, but because the admission that the body has suffered neglect at his

own hands reads like a promise to make amends. Jung himself never did

so in his psychological theory, but neither did his theory ever close the

door on the possibility.

That having been said, there are echoes of this preoccupation with

the body scattered throughout his late alchemical work. Ideas that he

could not organize systematically into his psychological theory proper,

and which were not given any clear therapeutic connection, were given

free reign in commentaries on arcane texts that for him were seedbeds

22. cw 10:93- 4.


of suggestiveness. At times, it is difficult to know where the text ends

and Jung begins, but these are the very places that are most interesting

in terms of his alternative approach to the body. What I would like to

do here is draw these scattered comments together and suggest a way

that attention to the problem of the body can serve to open the isolated,

private world of the individuating ego into the public world.

THE UNCONSCIOUS BODY

To appreciate the importance of his later "philosophical" remarks,

we begin with the briefest of resumes of his "empirical psychological"

conclusions about the relation between body and mind. The body, he

writes in a 1926 essay, is basically a "material system ready for life,"

and the psyche "consists essentially of images, a structure that is

throughout full of meaning and purpose."

And just as the material of the body that is ready for life has need of the psyche in order to be capable of life, so the psyche presupposes the living body in order that its images may live. Mind and body are presumably a part of opposites and, as such, the expression of a single entity whose essential nature is not knowable either from its outward, material manifestation, or from inner, direct perception!3

The psyche is not merely made up of ego-consciousness, but also of

an unconscious realm which has its own moral authority and ac

cumulated wisdom. Together, they represent the human "spirit," at

once individual and collective. In comparison, the body is a largely

undeveloped concept in Jungian psychology, a fact reflected in the fact

that its theoretic and therapeutic function is more or less restricted to

enabling images. Corpus ancilla mentis.

The following year, 1927, he published an essay on the structure of

23. See his essay on "Spirit and Life," CW 8:325-6.

- 388 -

the psyche in which he tries to explain the individual and collective

elements of the psyche by comparing it to the body: both have evolved

through time and both are inherited at their latest stage of evolution.

Both mind and body, while individually varied, have underlying univer

sal qualities. Thus, in the same way that the body preserves elements

that connect it with the invertebrates and ultimately the protozoa, so

"theoretically it should be possible to 'peel' the collective unconscious,

layer by layer, until we came to the psychology of the worm, and even

of the amoeba."24 It is not altogether clear from the context of this

remark that he was merely using the body as a metaphor to describe his

view of the psyche (which is most often the case in his theoretical

writings25), or even merely as two parallel systems, perhaps of a

common origin, that somehow, mysteriously, continue to support one

another. There is at least a hint that the body is related to the uncon

scious differently from the way it is related to ego-consciousness, that

there is more here than merely the role of providing images.

That this is not the whole of the body's role in depth-psychology

began to strike Jung the more he grappled with alchemical texts. There

he found he could not avoid the body so easily, since the idea of

discovering spirit in matter, the purification of matter by spirit, and the

union of the two is a central and consistent theme of the alchemical

enterprise. 26

In his strictest definitions of the unconscious, he had referred to it as

a kind of Kantian "negative borderline concept" pointing to something

24. cw 8: 152.

25. Note the following as typical: "Just as the human body shows a com

mon anatomy over and above all racial differences, so, too, the human

psyche possesses a common substratum transcending all differences in

culture and consciousness ... , the psychic expression of the identity of

brain structure." CW 13:11.


itself permanently beyond the reach of ego-consciousness.27 In other

words, it is defined by what it is not--namely, consciousness. But in

actual therapeutic use, the term was described in terms closer to an

entity in the real world of some kind. It is not merely an adjective or

a collective noun for certain kinds of experiences possessed of certain

qualities. It is some thing.

The alchemical commentaries support this. The archetypal images

he associated most commonly with the unconscious in its undifferentiat·

ed form are those of mother, woman, and earth. In the alchemical

studies, it was more often "matter," except in the more explicitly

psychological of the texts, where the body appears as the human

participation in earth and nature. 28 The realm of "spirit" as such is kept

distinct from the body, particularly in the form of human consciousness.

But the realm of the unconsciousness, on the contrary, draws closer to

it than it ever had in his formal psychological writings.

Jung had recognized as an infallible sign of the collectivity of an

unconscious image the fact that the body is altered in its proportions.29

The alchemists led him to take the step that "the idea of man as a

microcosm, representing in all his parts the earth or the universe, is a

remnant of an original psychic identity which reflected a twilight state

of consciousness."30 Now this idea of the emergence of consciousness

from an awareness of the body in which the individual subject mirrors

the whole of reality is precisely is a structural definition of how Jung

26. One particularly useful section, for those with some inclination to

reading the original , appears in chapter 6 of Mysterium Coniunctionis,

which deals with the "conjunctio" of mind and spirit. CW 14:457- 53.

27. cw 13:54.

28. cw 13:197.

29. cw 7:160.

30. cw 131:92

- 390 -

understood the dawn of the individuating ego as it discovers in its own

unconscious a microcosm of all human consciousness.

By the same token, he acknowledges that the alchemical extraction

of the "world soul" from matter which is the basis for the extraction of

individual soul from its material form (the invisible body from the

visible one), leads to an idea of the body as "more a psychic principle

with quasi-material attributes" which "comes closest to the modern

concept of the unconscious."31 Drawing still closer to the idea of the

body as the bridge to the unconscious psyche, he writes that "the

unconscious is something objective in which the ego is included" and as

such "first appears in forms dictated by the experience of biological

life."32 The ego is not the center of the unconscious, which Jung insists

has no center.33 Its "inclusion" is of a sort with the inclusion of mind in

a body which has no center of its own.

When Jung meets with a despising of the body in alchemical texts/4

he is more forgiving than when he meets the same depreciation in

Christianity in general, as for instance in the passage cited above. The

reason is that the former work towards a purification of the body in

this life of its personal, selfish elements so that it can be "glorified" in

its universal dimension. Glimpses of this are to be seen, he says, in

mystical experiences where sensation is purified and detached from

particular sense organs,35 as well as in unhealthy eclipsing of conscious

ness by the unconscious, leading to body-hallucinations take place.36 In

31. The context here is Paracelsus's idea of "clarified matter," in particular

his idea of the Aquaster. See CW 13:114, 129-30, 140, 148.

32. cw 13:52.

33. cw 11:484-5.

34. See CW 13:94, 152.

35. cw 13:28.

36. cw 7:282-3.


cases like this Jung sees the body as more than a mere allegory of the

workings of unconscious psyche: the relationship is one of correlative

dependency such that the experience of the body virtually is the experi

ence of the unconscious.

Along with this goes a heightened sense of the importance of inte

grating awareness of the body into consciousness.37 "Without the soul,

the body is dead, and without the body the soul is unreal."38 The

"rooting" of the soul in the body that he finds in images of the cosmic

tree, which he interprets as a rooting of consciousness in the uncon

scious,39 suggests that it is not merely a matter of grounding the

particular in the universal, but consciously grounding particular mind in

the reality of a particular body. Failure to do so is seen in various forms

of "violent repression of the instincts that poisons our spirituality and

makes it hysterically exaggerated."40 Such spirituality of repression is

not only that of extreme forms of religious asceticism, but also of

attempts to elevate the body to the sole reality, absorbing without

remainder the reality of the psyche.41 For him grounding mind in body

37. In this connection of the encounter with the unconscious as a recovering

of awareness of the body, is interesting to note that his well- known

praise for the papal proclamation of the dogma of Mary's Assumption

was based initially on the introduction of the feminine, earthly element

into the image of God (CW 11:461-9), but it was an alchemical text that

prompted him to associate Mary with the introduction of the physical

body into the godhead. The implication is that incarnate Son is already

too conscious to represent collective human corporeality into the god

head, while Mary can in virtue of her association with the earth and

nature which is the unconscious womb of all consciousness (CW 14:466).

38. cw 13:255.

39. cw 13:239-40.

40. cw 13:47.

-392-

belongs to the task of unloading the contents of the unconscious into

consciousness.42 In place of blind repression, then, what is aimed at is a

kind of "freeing of the soul from the fetters of the body," by which Jung

understands a withdrawal of naive projections so as to get a "realistic

and more or less nonillusory view of the outside world."43

The logical upshot is clear: in addition to serving as the permanent

repository of the unconscious, both personal and impersonal, the body

is also the permanent reminder of the outside world independent of the

individual person. To cut oneself off from the body is to that extent to

cut oneself off from reality. The step to the public self and its responsi

bilities, and from their to an awareness of social institutions that define

the limits of subjectivity would seem, at least in theory, to be a short

one.

CONCLUSION

In the end, alas, Jung's reflections on the body and its near identifica

tion with the unconscious do not lead to an embodiment of conscious

ideals but to a spiritualizing of bodily problems. He takes a clue from

the alchemical process of joining mind to body to argue that in the

process of individuation "insights gained should remain real."44 But he

41. cw 14:543.

42. Jung makes a cryptic remark in this regard that learning to "accept the

body and world of instinct" as part of the individuation process is "not

only a spiritual problem, but is the problem of all life." CW 12:123- 4.

Unfortunately, he does not tell us what he means by "all life" or

whether he really means to dislodge the individuation from its inner

- psychic confines. If the latter, then one can hardly read this other than

as a claim to broaden his own psychology in ways he himself never did.

43. cw 14:519- 20.

44. cw 14:476.

] ungian Psychology and the Public Self - 393-

turns the invitation to transform the outer world into a demand to

externalize the inner world. In the clash with reality (by which he

includes not only the immutable laws of nature but the social structures

of the historical world), he observes, willpower driven by ideals can

only work so long until fatigue sets in. "Then free will becomes a cramp

of the will, and the life that has been suppressed forces its way into the

open through all the cracks. That, unfortunately, is the law of all

merely rational resolutions. "At such times, he proposes" reawakening

the deeper layers of the psyche, which the light of reason and the power

of the will can never reach, and being them back to memory."45 This

reawakening is an expansion of consciousness, but a consciousness that

is aware of the limits of rational ideas and ideals.46

The similarity between alienation from the unconscious and aliena·

tion from the body, for all the hints Jung gives to the contrary, does not

in the end break through the closed circle of the psyche. The epoche he

drew around the phenomenon of the inner world ends up drawing the

body inwards rather than drawing the psyche outwards. But the aliena

tion of the person from the body is not merely a private matter. The

role of public conventions and institutions is at least as strong and

collective vis- a-vis the experiencing subject as that of the urges of

unconscious mind. The sense of permanency that the unconscious gives

to the meaning of life depends on the permanency of belonging to a

larger world of nature. The outer world that envelops the unconscious

today is already too removed from nature to take this as a matter of

course any longer. What is more, for the individual surrounded by a

world of disposable commodities, permanence can no longer be said to

rest in the things in our environment as much as in the institutions that

45. cw 14:522.

46. cw 14:472.

-394-

manufacture the goods and services we use and throw away with

alarming regularity.47 That this should have an effect on values in the

public sphere is obvious; that it also vitiates the encounter with the

unconscious is not yet so obvious, and this gives depth-psychology a

curious aura of disembodied romanticism and otherworldliness that it

does not sufficiently realize how badly it deserves. It lives in a myth far

more of its own making than it seems to realize.

For Jung, the awakening of the mythifying function of the uncon

scious is not an expansion of consciousness in which myth is done away

with, but rather one in which myth is purified to preserve its core of

inexhaustible intelligibility. But to claim that continued growth of

consciousness--the way of individuation--entails a permanent

interaction with the inner mystery of the unconscious does not mean

that this is all there is to the enlargement of our human nature. If the

private inner expansion is not complemented by an outer, public expan

sion--an embodiment of self in history--then the psychological

commitment against splitting body and soul asunder betrays itself in a

most fundamental way. I believe Jungian psychology hovers at the

brink of this betrayal and needs a courageous step back into the public

realm of the embodiment of the psyche in history if it is to fulfill its real

promise.

47. In this connection, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Garden

City: Doubleday, 1959), 83.

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