In these lines, as clearly as anywhere, is the foundation of Jung's theory of history and politics. If history is au fond a play of projections of consciousness from out of the multitudinous psyches of humanity, it would be surprising if history were not really psychohistory and archetypal history. Jungian history, like the Trojan War, is a tale of gods as well as heroes.
If we make our own historical epoch by projecting history out of our collective psyches, can we make it what we want, or are we only at the mercy of the hidden gods?
This allimportant question was, I think, long on the margins of Jung's mind, and was one with which he halfconsciously wrestled. But, having seen too many disastrous attempts to awaken and harness those gods—or demons—deliberately, and to make history into triumphs of the will, caution generally prevailed. In the end, he thought,
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it would probably be better to keep the gods tame and balanced off against each other, so that ordinary everyday life could proceed, and persons ravaged by modernity could find what they needed of the gods within.
But for that story, we must start at the beginning of human consciousness.
Primitive Childhood and Modern Maturity
From out of the psyche, by way of the archetypes, then, one "projects" the contents of the psyche onto the world, seeing its objects in terms significant to the sovereign psyche. In Jung's view, primitive man lived in a state of almost total projection; he sent out his inner emotions onto external objects and persons, seeing them there more than in himself—his anger becoming a carved jaguargod, his fear an accursed witch, and so forth—and consequently he lived in a condition of minimal analytic selfconsciousness or selfknowledge. How vividly is that state described in "The Role of the Unconscious": The country he [primitive man] inhabits is at the same time the topography of his unconscious. In that stately tree dwells the thundergod; this spring is haunted by the Old Woman; in that wood the legendary king is buried; near that rock no one may light a fire because it is the abode of a demon; in yonder pile of stones dwell the ancestral spirits, and when any woman passes it she must quickly utter an apotropaic formula lest she become pregnant, for one of the sprits could easily enter her body. All kinds of objects and signs mark these places, and pious awe surrounds the marked spot. Thus does primitive man dwell in his land and at the same time in the land of his unconscious. Everywhere his unconscious jumps out at him, alive and real. 14
That is indeed another world. Just as "primitive man" could hardly have understood the modern "Western" way of being in the world, so do we find it hard to recover what it meant to our remote ancestors.
How different is our relation to the land we dwell in! Feelings totally strange to us accompany the primitive at every step. Who knows what the cry of a bird means to him, or the sight of that old tree! A whole world of feeling is closed to us and is replaced by a pale aestheticism. 15
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But the former immediacy of projected unconscious contents was at the expense of critical distance, rational analysis, and the individuality which inevitably accompanied these developments of thought. "The further we go back in history," he wrote, following Lucien LévyBruhl's nowdiscredited idea of primitive
"participation mystique," "the more we see personality disappearing beneath the wrappings of collectivity, and if we go right back to primitive psychology, we find absolutely no trace of the concept of an individual." 16
But if individual consciousness in the modern sense was not shared by our primitive ancestors, dreams were. For Jung as for Freud and Nietzsche, dreams appear as the royal road to recovery of the archaic way of thinking. In Wandlungen he wrote, "infantilethinking and dreamthinking are simply a recapitulation of earlier evolutionary stages." He quoted Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human to the effect that, "In sleep and in dreams we pass through the whole thought of earlier humanity . . . " and Freud from "Creative Writings and DayDreaming": " . . . it is extremely probable that myths, for instance, are distorted vestiges of the wishful phantasies of whole nations, the agelong dreams of youthful humanity." Otto Rank is cited as regarding myth the collective dreams of a whole people. 17 Such statements with their lateromantic sweep and their feel of indefinable profundity, may or may not ring true, but they epitomize the perspective psychoanalysis sought to bring to history and, by extension, to current affairs.
The emergence of modern consciousness came about when, as history moved ahead, changing circumstances brought the gradual withdrawal of projections and a consequent increase in individual awareness, together with enhanced knowledge of both self and world in the West. Physical science caused the withdrawal of "the most distant" projections, reducing moon, sun, and stars to rocks and gasses. Echoing Max Weber's concept of disenchantment, Jung referred to this as the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. 18 The libido that had flowed out to all those natural or social objects now had to the stifled—or transferred to other, perhaps more dubious, attachments.
It is worth noting that Jung considered Eastern civilizations, such as India, to represent a different sort of movement, in which a complex and subtle culture was constructed on the basis of much greater continuity with the primordial way of thinking. India was far more on the unconscious level than the West: " . . . the Indian . . .
does not think, at least not what we call 'think.' He rather perceives the thought. He
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resembles the primitive in this respect. I do not say he is primitive, but that the process of his thinking reminds me of the primitive way of thoughtproduction. The primitive's reasoning is mainly an unconscious function, and he perceives its results. We should expect such a peculiarity in any civilization which has enjoyed an almost unbroken continuity from primitive times"—in great contrast to the West, which must suffer both the bane and blessing of the abrupt "invasion" of a "higher" level of psychology for which it was not yet truly ready. That intellectual forced march could only be made at the cost of "dissociation between the conscious part of the mind and the unconscious." 19
Again, that consciousness leap was by no means wholly beneficial. Much could be said for the view that the earlier natural, easy flow of the libido out and back was the way it ought to be, and that when it is constricted the cost will in the end outweigh the gain. In another writing on India, Jung mused, "It is quite possible that India is the real world, and that the white man lives in a madhouse of abstractions." India is "perhaps the real life, life as it was meant to be, the life of the earth. Life in India has not yet withdrawn into the capsule of the head." 20 And that headcapsule could be full of snakes, for the world of primitive feelings—which Jung did not idealize either—lives on, hissing just beneath the surface, in the modern unconscious. Because it is repressed, it has all the more pathological power: "This lost bit of nature seeks revenge and returns in faked, distorted form," in the "crazes and crudities" of the modern age, above all in the reversion to tribalism on a monstrous scale in the mad devastation of modern war. For this there is no anodyne except on the level from which the horror comes. In the last analysis modern madness derives from snakepits deep within the psychologies of individuals, and can only be healed through individual therapy. ''Our rationalistic attitude," he wrote in 1918, "leads us to believe that we can work wonders with international organizations, legislation, and other wellmeant devices. But in reality only a change in the attitude of the individual can bring about a renewal in the spirit of the nations. Everything begins with the individual." 21