I haven’t been blogging much recently because being a full-time student really is a full-time job. I only go to class every three weeks but I’m busy all the time.

I haven’t had assigned reading for decades, and it’s really fascinating. Some of it I’m shaking my head No all the way through. I struggled, for instance, with the anarcho-primitivists. Anarchy is one thing; I’m in favor of it when humankind is sufficiently conscious. But primitivism leaves me cold. I don’t think hunting and gathering would be that great, even now that I know they were only spending three or four hours a day gathering food.

I admired some parts of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, but emerged with the impression that his local market must have run out of fresh clues that day. He begins with the assumption that the religious impulse — what his friend called the oceanic feeling that the friend considered universal — is a leftover infantile response, while stating up front that he can find no trace of it in himself. He seems to have considered that the normal state to which well-adjusted people would tend.

I connected strongly, on the other hand, to the autobiographical Camus novel The First Man. Wow, that guy could write! Imagine being the first person in your family to learn to read, then winning the Nobel Prize for Literature. He says that when he was sent home with notes to his family, he had to read the notes to them. Rather than detail his shame he would simply summarize the note as “Punishment”. So there was an up side to an illiterate family.

What’s moved me most is a book I’ll have to read at least once more. Perhaps it was my antipathy to many of Freud’s ideas, but I found his prose somewhat denser than Jung. Freud, in my view, wanted recognition as a scientist; Jung saw himself as an explorer on a mythical journey, and enjoyed telling the tale. Which one’s more fun to read?

Memories, Dreams, Reflections is too crammed with juicy quotes and deep ideas to be representable in any sort of sample. But a couple of quotes I’m trying to work into the paper I’m writing seem worthy of presentation nevertheless. The first brought to mind images of true believers of various religious and political stripes, not that any of those have been in evidence recently or anything.

The secret society is an intermediary stage on the way to individuation. The individual is still relying on a collective organization to effect his differentiation for him; that is, he has not yet recognized that it is really the individual’s task to differentiate himself from all the others and stand on his own feet. All collective identities, such as membership in organizations, support of “isms,” and so on, interfere with the fulfillment of this task. Such collective identities are crutches for the lame, shields for the timid, beds for the lazy, nurseries for the irresponsible; but they are equally shelters for the poor and weak, a home port for the shipwrecked, the bosom of a family for orphans, a land of promise for disillusioned vagrants and weary pilgrims, a herd and a safe fold for lost sheep, and a mother providing nourishment and growth. It would therefore be wrong to regard this intermediary stage as a trap; on the contrary, for a long time to come it will represent the only possible form of existence for the individual, who nowadays seems more than ever threatened by anonymity. Collective organization is still so essential today that many consider it, with some justification, to be the final goal; whereas to call for further steps along the road to autonomy appears like arrogance or hubris, fantasticality, or simply folly.

Nevertheless it may be that for sufficient reasons a man feels he must set out on his own feet along the road to wider realms. It may be that in all the garbs, shapes, forms, modes, and manners of life offered to him he does not find what is peculiarly necessary for him. He will go alone and be his own company. He will serve as his own group, consisting of a variety of opinions and tendencies — which need not necessarily be marching in the same direction. In fact, he will be at odds with himself, and will find great difficulty in uniting his own multiplicity for purposes of common action. Even if he is outwardly protected by the social forms of the intermediary stage, he will have no defense against his inner multiplicity. The disunion within himself may cause him to give up, to lapse into identity with his surroundings.

This is one of the trials on the road to individuation. Another confronts us as we emerge from the fog of unconsciousness, and gradually become aware that our conscious minds are not the whole shebang.

A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. They then dwell in the house next door, and at any moment a flame may dart out and set fire to his own house. Whenever we give up, leave behind, and forget too much, there is always the danger that the things we have neglected will return with added force.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at November 09, 2008 09:21 PM

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