In 1913 they broke with each other, one immediate cause being Jung's 1912 work Wandlungen und Symbole des Libido ( Transformations and Symbols of the Libido; translated as The Psychology of the Unconscious). 8 In that work Carl Jung went beyond his senior's "unendurably narrow" conceptual framework, as Jung called it in the forward. Casting his gaze well beyond Freudian narrowness, the Swiss disciple fraternized with premodern and antirational themes as well as with the Age of Reason. Images from the volkish and Nietzschean mythological vogues, in all their reaction against the Enlightenment spirit, began to suggest in Jung's Wandlungen that modernity itself was the problem, and that European humanity needed to return to very ancient wells for renewal. Yet at the same time Jung was a man of his time and place, and he was not alone. As we have seen, in the decades before World War I a form of late romantic nationalism—volkish, Wagnerian, Nietzschean, sometimes antiSemitic—was shouldering its way in alongside modernity, battening on modern discontents. It could not easily be argued with, for it conceded little to the canons of rationality. Like Jung, and Freud too in his way, this cause knew that the real king, the psyche, rules by other rules.
Jung was comfortable with much of mythological late romanticism, for he was well aware of modernity's inner demons. He knew how much had been pared off the fullness of a human psyche to make it fit the needs of Enlightenment rationalism and industrial production. He saw all around symptoms of the modern alienation, rootlessness, and spiritual emptiness that the volkish theoreticians talked about. Jung was concerned that modern men and women find ways back to the resources of other times and places where what was missing might be recovered.
The whole massive work of Wandlungen was based on the "Miller Fantasies," the charming journal of dreams, imaginings, and poetry
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left by a young American woman then traveling around the Mediterranean, who wrote as "Miss Miller." We are reminded how much of Jung's interest in universals started as a therapist involved in the psychic processes of individuals. Wandlungen presented psychic process as movement toward "individuation," or rebirth as a new person in whom all unconscious constituents, which appear to deep consciousness as "archetypes" analogous to those of myth and dream, have been balanced off.
His basic task in the study, as he saw it, was to ransack the resources of archaic myth and religion for models by which to conceptualize and understand the many permutations the Freudian libido took in its quest for freedom and full expression. Jung correlated "Miss Miller's" personal images with those of universal myth and dream, and in that light found their meaning. As he excavated mighty archetypes from out of the subject's ephemeral dreams and poetic thoughts, Jung was aware he was dealing with strong medicine, but he left it all on the level of the psyche's inner life. The closest Wandlungen came to political material was in illustrative references to archaic sacred king myths, including the wounded king of the grail legend. But these sovereigns were inevitably turned into individual models for moderns in search of a kingly soul. 9
This seminal book was clearly the foundational work of a mind too teeming with originality to be forever acolyte to another. It put the analytic project on a much more broadly humanistic and less medical footing than the Freudian. The exclusively sexual definition of the libido was presented by Jung as onesided. 10 Still uglier issues than this book had arisen between Freud and Jung as well. By 1915 Freud was claiming that Jung's defection was connected to a crisis involving both religion and antiSemitism. He said in a letter of July 8 of that year to an American supporter, James Jackson Putnam, that he had liked Jung until the latter was taken over "by a religiousethical 'crisis'" which the younger man apparently felt had endowed him with "higher morality, rebirth," and which had led Jung to present "lies, brutality and antiSemitic condescension toward me.'" 11
The rupture was acutely painful and consequential for both. The less wellknown Jung withdrew into semiretreat, exploring inward storms and vistas during times that roughly converged with the terrible years of World War I. Sometimes his dreadful dreams seemed to parallel or prophesy the outer horrors of that bloodletting. The spiritually afflicted
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Swiss doctor pressed the quest for the ultimate nature of the sovereign psyche very far indeed, on occasion veering toward the margins of madness. But he came out of this dark passage with his own life on a firm footing, and with a book, Psychological Types (1921), that gave him a recognized independent place in his profession.
Containing terms that have moved into popular culture, such as extravert and introvert, Psychological Types is widely regarded as Jung's most original contribution to general psychology by those who do not accept the full Jungian system.
Jung's emerging basic position was that the goal, individuation, meant becoming who the person really is inwardly, not the persona fabricated by convention and expectation. The pilgrimage to the real self is long and winding, but may be enlivened by encounters with denizens of the wellpopulated intermediate ranges. The archetypes—the Wise Old Man, the Great Mother, the Hero, the Maiden, the Shadow, the Marvelous Child who is the hopedfor individuated self—are all really facets of the self, fragments one can become or repress, or better configure harmoniously into a mandala, or balanced pattern, out of the center of which the new self arises victorious.
That nativity is aided by the guiding presence of the archetypes in the lore and religions of all peoples as well as in the dreams of the individuating individual. This was, according to one of the most controversial of Jungian propositions, because they are parts of a "collective unconscious" as well as an individual font of forms. Jung thought that levels of the unconscious—family, clan, nation, race, primate, and animal in general—lay like geological strata between the individual and the "central fire"
that energized them all.
By collective unconscious Jung thus meant mental contents shared with others, either the entire human race or a subdivision of it, such as a culture or nationality. Being unconscious, this collectivity obviously did not mean a people's articulated beliefs, ideas, or vocabularies, but rather pointed to the preconscious mental energies that activated them. Being preconscious, those powerful forces could express themselves only in camouflage, usually through emotions bearing symbolic archetypal forms: a culture's particular versions of the Father, the Mother, the Hero, the Shadow. In a traditional society, these images were best found in its religious or folkloric myths and symbols. As Robert A. Segal has pointed out, Jung uses myths and the universality of their themes to establish the existence of the collective unconscious. 12
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Nothing is more important than the collective unconscious idea for a Jungian understanding of politics and history. The collective unconscious, expressed through individuals great and small, is the ultimate and supreme source of historical and political consequences, as various nations and periods exalt particular archetypes and so play their parts on the stage of time. This is of descriptive significance; it may also raise possibilities of historical therapy. Jung wrote: When we look at human history, we see only what happens on the surface, and even this is distorted in the faded mirror of tradition. But what has really been happening eludes the inquiring eye of the historian, for the true historical event lies deeply buried, experienced by all and observed by none. It is the most private and most subjective of psychic experiences. Wars, dynasties, social upheavals, conquests, and religions are but the superficial symptoms of a secret psychic attitude unknown even to the individual himself, and transmitted by no historian; perhaps the founders of religions give us the most information in this regard. The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately springs as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. 13