Daimon Publishers
Maria Luisa Spinoglio
Milan, Italy
Centro Italiano di Psicologia Analitica
One of Jung's most fruitful perceptions, which is tied to the dynamic of opposites, reminds us that the best is an enemy of the good and that every positive attitude, when pushed to the extreme, does not improve but tends to turn into its opposite. This is the law of enantiodromia. If I am climbing a mountain I step up to the peak but, if I think I will go higher - only one step higher - I fall into the void. In order to avoid a catastrophe I need simply to know the nature of the terrain and sacrifice the desire of the ego to climb further. I need to stop and begin the descent, thereby consciously and willingly inverting direction to avoid falling into the abyss.
Beyond the metaphor, matters become more complicated. Often, a necessary change is blocked by inertia and blindness or by the arrogance of the ego, which assumes itself to be limitlessly capable of continuing on the road that, until now, has shown itself to be advantageous - giving an unambiguous meaning to progress and growth. Just as knowledge is not equivalent to wisdom, unlimited growth is not synonymous with true progress. Life relies on change. The dynamic of opposites is the secret of perennial renewal and the possibility of a length that is not sclerosis and sterility. The I Ching (the Chinese book of wisdom) teaches us that the yang, after having reached its culmination, retreats in favor of the yin and vice versa.
The signs that our generation is passing through a crisis are obvious. Yet it is still difficult to be optimistic about humanity's capacity to benefit from these possibilities for a viable renewal. There are many indications that something is moving. But the process is still open and the danger is great. I hope for this work, and for the entire Congress whose topics converge on the value of transformation through crisis, that all of humanity might support natural change in the direction that the times require. Capra (1975) addressed the problem of freedom and competence in various fields, from physics to biology, medicine, psychology and economics. He pointed out the limits and the consequences of the "Newtonian-Cartesian" model that, for several centuries, has dominated in the Western world and is based on the presumed superiority of scientific, rational and linear thought. Linear thought is founded on mathematical, measurable and verifiable measurements that are held as "objective" criteria. The step from rationalism to mechanization brings us to a universe reduced to a machine with an enormous increase of scientific/technological baggage. From these applications we have enjoyed undeniable advantages and comforts. We are beginning to see, however reluctantly, the other side of the coin, with all its negative consequences on the ecological level as well as in the mental and psychic attitude. If we extend this reflection to other pertinent fields, such as great religious and philosophical systems, we realize that the dominant spirit of the times has conditioned even them. We find again the tendency toward control, toward rationalism and toward the undisputed faith in "Values" (capital V). This faith implies a generalization and acceptance that absolute good exists along with absolute truth, infallible science, and unbounded salvation. The spiritual has been set up against the material. Reduced to the experimental, nature has lost its very soul and the spirit has lost its roots.
How could this have happened, given the sincere desire for knowledge and the love of impassioned and disinterested research that we find in great scientists, philosophers and inventors? We need only think of Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon and Newton.
Instead of devaluing or demonizing the standards that have dictated guidelines and have also determined the development - both good and bad - of society, the crucial problem, according to Jungian thought, consists in the one-sidedness that always has informed the conscious and unconscious view of the world. This one-sidedness has existed since the time humans wearily came out of the clouds of undifferentiated oneness: an inevitable partiality in a system of rational thought based on Aristotelian principles of causality and non-contradiction. These universally-accepted principles force an unshakable dualism while splitting the internal and external worlds so that A cannot be B nor can white be black. Truth cannot be error nor can irrationality exist where there is reason. Where there is life there is no death and where there is consciousness there is no unconscious.
In the Middle Ages the spirit of the times was more inclined toward introversion and religious sentiment in a world view that was not based on external observation but rather divine Word of sacred scriptures. This required that both experience and life itself had meaning. No matter how much suffering there might be, one could never doubt the final judgment. Also darkness, ignorance, misery and above all injustice and unhappiness for a person who was unable to adhere to the dominant religious model because of nature or conviction.
Following the dualistic model in which one chooses A or B, excluding one or the other, it seems that we have jumped from the frying pan into the fire. From the obscurantism and fanaticism of the medieval religion that ended with witches at the stake and Galileo's imprisonment in chains, we have fallen into the arrogance of reason's reign in the modern era. It is sinking in heaps of garbage which technological wealth has produced. We have fallen also into moral aberrations which the two World Wars of the twentieth century have put forth, and into a cynical superficialism of mass culture.
In order to move out of dramatic and relentless narrowness, a broadening of consciousness is needed. This is the true objective of many groups, schools, religious or mystic centers which have continued to sprout up since the sixties in a somewhat serious and committed fashion. These groups undeniably converge in pointing out that something is moving away from the ashes of the old religions and systems of thinking. There is a tendency to move beyond the dualistic view of contrasting material-spiritual, body-mind, nature-culture, male-female, rational-irrational: to a reconciled and broader model in which one can resolve the duality in a complementary way without violence, conflicts or repression. It is the holistic vision of which, according to Capra, Jung was a precursor: complementarity as the key to the relationship between conscious and unconscious, and all opposites. Jung's introduction of Eastern and mystical thought, for which he was initially criticized, is now hailed - another sign of the change of times. This introduction is the most evident proof of the mastery of the limits of Western culture. The change is witness to the profound need for expansion, which does not deny the scientific patrimony and cultural achievements. Western culture is enriched by the wisdom and intuition of the East. Jung came to the unified view of the Mysterium Coniunctionis (CW14) after a profound experience which lasted more than 50 years. This experience consisted of psychological work on himself and on his patients where in he immersed himself continuously in the unconscious and looked for a way to cure the apparent absurdities of hallucinatory language and madness. He had to draw on images and symbols of alchemy - by then forgotten in current culture - in order to find the key to the individuation process. In addition, he re-read fairy tales, myths and other symbolic material that was considered marginal or appropriate only for children, to find the archetypal models which may be used for understanding the most important psychic processes.
The scientist Capra (1975) arrived with great amazement at a holistic view of the universe through the physical study of particles and recognized the great agreement with the intuitive vision of the mystics, especially in the East. In his second work (1982), he delved into and developed his research with the hope of clearing the path for researchers from other disciplines:
In the twentieth century, physics has gone through many conceptual revolutions which clearly reveal the limits of the mechanistic world view and which lead to an organic and ecological conception of the world which is not dissimilar, from certain aspects, to the conceptions of mystics from every time and tradition. The universe is no longer seen as a machine, composed of the multitude of separate parts, but rather it is a harmonious and indivisible whole. This whole is a net of dynamic relationships comprising in an essential way even the human observer, male or female, and his/her consciousness. The fact that modern physics, the manifestation of an extreme specialization of the rational mind, is making contact with mysticism, which is also the essence of religion and the manifestation of an extreme intuitive mind, shows very well the unity and complementarity of rational and intuitive modes of consciousness of yin and yang. Therefore, the physicists can furnish the scientific background for the behavioral and value changes of which our society has an urgent need. In a culture dominated by science, it will be much easier to convince our social institutions of the need for fundamental changes if we are able to give a scientific base to our discussions. This can be furnished today by the physicists. Modern physics can show other sciences that scientific thought does not necessarily have to be reductionist and mechanical and, that other holistic and ecological conceptions are scientifically correct. (pp. 42-43)
Jung also used scientific method in a coherent and serious fashion: the observation of symptoms and behavior of the patient. He also formulated hypotheses that are accepted only if they are useful to the understanding of the case and can be extended to analogous cases. With regard to proceeding, as a doctor, in an empirical and experimental fashion, Jung never had any doubt. Only through such a method could he decipher the most absurd paradoxes of the symbolic language. From 1911, the year of The Psychology of the Unconscious (later CW5, Symbols of Transformation), which goes beyond the mechanistic psychology of Freud, to 1956 (CW14), Jung sought to cure the split between the two forms of thinking that had been identified as the basis of human thinking: the intuitive and imagistic, symbolic on the one hand and the spoken, rational and scientific on the other. The right and left brain are no longer seen as contrasting nor do they surpass each other insofar as one is more archaic and primitive, but they are both valid support to the conscious and complementary forms to be integrated. In order to reach the objective of completeness, the person sees the Self as principal regulator and introduces, not by repression and one-sidedness, but by the recovery and integration of both aspects: conscious and unconscious, masculine and feminine, light and shadow.
The emergence of Capra's (1982) holistic view of the universe and the tendency toward the psychic totality by way of Jung's coniunctio oppositorum (union of opposites) highlight the recovery of a harmonious and revitalized vision of the earth. It is a single great living organism at the base of our very selves. It is the first material of alchemists and endowed with an intimate and innate sense, the tendency toward an order that is not only mechanistic but, as Teilhard de Chardin (1993) has said, a path toward a "guided evolution."
To feel the world in its vibrant unfolding and in the fullness of its beauty and vulnerability means to save it from within the soul. Because the difference between a robot, a machine, and a living being consists in this ineffable and inexplicable word "soul," which sets the beginning human as the seal of life. In arrogance and blindness, however, humans mistakenly have often attributed the soul as belonging only to ourselves. Thereby we break the harmony with other living beings - animals, plants and earth - the foundation and condition of our very existence. Thus, we fall into the trap of hubris: damaging the very source of life. It is not a matter of returning to the pantheism of the primitives and the original confusion of the participation mystique, but rather to broaden consciousness without sacrificing anything in the development and differentiation acquired in thousands of years of evolutive effort. One recognizes that which modern physics acknowledged at the subatomic level: the fundamental and unitary dynamism of matter in its perennial dance of life, a dynamism that Capra saw in the image of the dancing Shiva.
For Western humans it is difficult to revive harmony with the earth and acknowledge the anima mundi. For nearly 2000 years we have been accustomed, with the complicity of the church, to consider the material world to be the source of sin or something to exploit. Even though similar ideas are circulating increasingly, we are a long way from what the American Indian sages say, "We all have to learn to see ourselves as part of this earth, not as an enemy who comes from outside and seeks to impose his will. We, who know the secret of the Pipe, know also that, as a living part of this earth, we cannot do violence without hurting ourselves too" (Cervo Zoppo, quoted in Reicheis & Bydlinski 1994, p.15).
To understand the fundamental and urgent need, we must take responsibility consciously for recovering and integrating the world vision which is a living unity. I have chosen a case that seems emblematic because of the extreme good faith and innocence of the person. "Giovanni," a man who came to analysis at age 50, with obsessive symptoms and phobias about getting sick and fainting in public during official ceremonies. If the symptoms could have remained hidden, and primarily connected to private situations such as dressing and writing, the fear of a person who is often confined to public roles could have been contained without great conscious resistance. In fact, considering his age, he had a childish trust in analysis, a trust that was both moving and irritating. It was comprised of assumptions that had never been questioned and had caged him in a continuous fear of both failing and breaches of etiquette.
Giovanni was the first of three males, born at close intervals. He always sought the mother's favor and surpassed his brothers in unconditional and non-conflictual devotion to the values of the maternal world. From what his mother told him, only in his earliest years - during a precocious phase - did Giovanni allow himself to be vivacious, capricious and even aggressive. It was then that he was once discovered with a shoe in hand standing near his newborn brother's crib with the apparent intent of hitting him. From the time he was three years old he became a sweet and obedient child, an adolescent without any sexual curiosity - or any curiosity that would be considered even a minimal transgression within the cultural and sociological world of the mother who was an elementary teacher and held rigid Catholic principles. The level of his mother's expectations and their symbolic equivalent, Mother Church, constructed the supporting axle of Giovanni's entire development, determining the way he would face every situation and choice.
As the first, he was forced to remain the example, the straight, the just, the chaste - not because of personal pride but rather to placate that internal persecutor, an archaic super-ego inherited from the relentless maternal animus. The persecutor raised its finger, saying: "I do not transgress!" and pointed the way, moving it always further and higher. This was done with the complicity of his father, a state functionary and a very proper man in his irreproachable public life. He was ineffective and delegated Giovanni's entire education to his teacher-wife. Each evening, Giovanni's mother required from her children a recap of the entire day: a true confession that Giovanni never tried to avoid for he saw it not only as legitimate but also a precious opportunity to demonstrate his goodness.
Giovanni had a chair which was his only private space free from invasion and maternal judgment. The chair was where everything was under control and had to be in the utmost order and from which he received necessary reassurance. From that he went ahead, blindly believing in black and white, good and evil, correct and faulty, clean and dirty. All these were rigorously separated without possible confusion or doubts. The dirty, par excellence, was obviously sexuality which Giovanni held at bay in his greatest exercise of virtue. He conformed to his religious choice, which imposed on him formal chastity and was a refuge for Giovanni from possible transgression against the maternal world. The lack of a conscious conflict and the full adherence to the values of his mother and of the Church brought Giovanni to a brilliant and peaceful ecclesiastical career. The repression of his shadow was apparently possible and the ego believed to be at the service of higher Values in life: Goodness, Truth, Spirit, God. Only the symptoms that got progressively worse disturbed his serenity and forced him to come to analysis, opening the possibility to recover; above all, the strange vertigo that struck while he was in the presence of high prelates and in the great cathedrals from whose heights he could have had a catastrophic fall.
My intent is to go beyond the account of Giovanni's seven years of analysis. I want to show the key passage and the symbol of the turning point: how the unconscious guides the rediscovery and recovery of the immanent part of the archetype of Life in order to reestablish the psychic well-being that is founded on fullness and not on one-sidedness. In the first years of analysis, Giovanni's dreams were often about problems of the shadow: dirty cages, blockages, cynical characters, Nazis, slippery terrains and un-navigable seas. In other dreams, hungry and hostile animals recurred - often a black dog. Slowly, over five years, the atmosphere of the dreams changed. After having explored the most personal component of the neurosis, tied to the work on the shadow, we arrived at two dreams that can be used on a collective level as testimony of the need to widen the consciousness of the modern person, replanting roots in the earth. First dream:
I am on my knees (in prayer?) and I have on my right a type of bush or hedge beyond a metal grate. I hear a whistle. I think can there could be a snake and therefore I get up to look better. There is a big lizard. This becomes a rare bird, big as a sparrow yet more slight, a clear color (white-gray). Then in the bush a sign appears on which is written, more or less: Who sees the bird "so and so" very rare, communicates it. Emotion. Then I see the bird fly. I would like it to rest on my finger. I put out my finger and he lands there.
After two days this dream:
I am biking with my mother. She is old but is riding. I am in front of her. We arrive at a narrowing of the road (between two strips) and some cows come to us. I am afraid that my mother will fall. Then I stop and pet one cow on the nose. Affectionate cow.
The two dreams were brought up at the same session; they furnished guiding images for consolidating the most valuable work and provided encouragement in moments of stagnation. I see them as parallel, given that the unconscious produced them. Both of them deal with recovering, with love, the instinctual side which is represented by animals: the lizard-bird in the first dream and the cow in the second. These figures have two fundamental applications: the spiritual-paternal and the earth-mother. Jung often confirmed that the broadening of the conscious happens both on high and down low. Just as the extension of the bright spectrum expands toward the infra-red and ultraviolet area, an instinctual root of the spirit exists, as well as a spiritual valence of the instinct. To detach too much from the instinct, as happened to Giovanni, brings a breaking off from one's roots and an asphyxial and sterile wandering in both an abstract and pale pseudo-spirituality and on ephemeral and vertiginous heights. One is always on the brink of falling, not horizontally nor as a participant in the joy of sharing. The attainment of Values is illusionary as these are mere ideological strategies that substitute for true feelings. Where there is no incarnation there can be no passion. At best there can be exasperation and ideological tenacity.
Fanaticism and non-commitment are opposite expressions of the break between thought and feeling. These phenomena are common and thrive on the weakness of an ego that is indoctrinated precociously, detached from the wisdom of the instinct and left to risk everything in the maze of mass-media lures. Many tragedies of terrorism are understandable if we consider the narcissistic feature of the majority of ideological persons devoted to what they decide must be good for all. Strangely, however, they are not in touch with real needs, but are taken with the ideological certainty of their abstract Values; they are ready to sacrifice everything for incarnate ideals. The tension toward the spirit is not sustained nor guaranteed by the axis Ego-Other and, therefore, inflation which is the identification of the Ego with the Other impedes the pending catastrophe. Often the symptom of vertigo and the fear of falling from up high are present in narcissist personalities. It is the fear: the fascination of the puer regarding heights and the extreme attempt by the unconscious to warn of the danger of uprooting. Asthma, too - remembering Che Guevara's symptom - may indicate that one has pushed too high, in rarefied areas.
The appearance of the lizard in Giovanni's dream finally marks the reconfiguring of the missing element: the base animal from which he can set out again so that prayer is not a pure sterile exercise of pharasaical self-fulfillment but an efficacious and salvatory event for all. "Whoever sees the so and so bird, communicate it." The reptile, the most archaic animal in the evolutive chain, rapidly becomes a bird which is the animal symbol of the spirit because it belongs to the air and can fly high. One need only think of Zeus' hawk and the dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit.
When the idealizations fall, the way opens to the recovery of immanence which is not an enemy of transcendence, just as the earth is not an enemy of heaven and yin is not an enemy of yang, but each pair is complementary. The pleasure of the here and now is rediscovered and a love is born for life and its small and great joys. There is also a love for each creature: the emotion in Giovanni's dream regarding the bird and his joy at feeling the small claws on his finger. The feeling of belonging to the whole earth and the pleasure of feeling at one with the entire universe as a single great organism is discovered. This signifies precisely to find again the anima mundi and to feel its presence: to vibrate on the same wavelength of life and to feel alive in the world. If the meaning of life is no longer "beyond," in the hereafter, in the eternal and transcendental Values which have transformed the most generous youth into martyrs and others into exploiters of the Earth, then the responsibility for this poor and precious world increases and with it the care not to let it further deteriorate.
To go beyond the idealization does not mean the loss of values and a fall into emptiness - a danger always present in the absence of psychological work - but rather it means a healing of the tearing and a recovering of that the material heart" (see Teilhard De Chardin 1976) and the anima mundi. Both of these guarantee meaning - toward evolution and life.
The other dream begins with the presence of the real mother, though transformed from the rigid guardian of historical reality. The dream ends with a caress on the cow's nose. The cow is the animal root of the archetype of the mother-nurturer; the sacred cow - as Isida, Era, Demetra - which is now found in the East as a sacred and untouchable animal. The personal mother complex is surpassed, opening to the archetypal component. At the same time the relationship is recovered, which can be loving only because the archetype of relationship is Eros with the earth and its creatures as in a new canticle of the creatures. The abstraction and dryness are surpassed, broadening consciousness, with further effort toward a circle rather than toward perfectionism. In this circle a holistic view is recovered in which microcosm and macrocosm mean the same thing. The dizziness too disappears because one no longer leans on emptiness; the ground is solid and is welcoming and nurturing.
A final note regarding the new meaning that the concept of development is assuming. It is no longer unlimited growth nor hypertrophic and monstrous: a concept already criticized by Hillman (1975). It is a recovery and integration which is also in accordance with recent neurophysiological and cerebral studies (see Liverio 1997). Some scholars have discovered a crucial relationship between nerve cells and vascularization by which it would no longer be possible to nourish the brain if it assigned its evolution to the increase in volume and to the progressive development of the cerebral cortex. In this latter process nerve functions are carried out by superior cerebral structures that are phylogenetically younger and dominate the functions of the structures and of the older centers. The only path of change could consist in a profound restructuring and internal reorganization and, therefore, a departure from the hierarchy, according to which newer is better: toward a synthesis and integration of old and new. It would be the scientific confirmation of the profound, mystical and religious perceptions. According to these perceptions, the future is entrusted to the wisdom of the past and to the importance of the psychological work of integrating and broadening the consciousness into an archetypal key. It is not a simple return to the past, which is an impossible operation as with all nostalgic utopias, but it is a renewal and revitalization in accordance with the evolution of life.
"Destroy the types of the past," the Indian philosopher Sri Aurobindo would say, "but keep their achievements and spirit intact, otherwise there will be no future."
Translated from the original Italian by Mara Teefy
References
Capra, F. (1975). Il Tao della Fisica. Milano: Adelphi.
Capra, F. (1982). The Turning Point. New York: Simon & Schuster.
Hillman, J. (1975). Loose Ends. Zurich: Spring Publications.
Liverio, A. (1997). Cervello ai limiti del possibile. Corriere della Sera, February 2.
Teilhard de Chardin, P. (1976). Le Coeur de la Matiere. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
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