The Undiscovered Self
In 1957, Carl Jung wrote an essay titled The Undiscovered Self which addresses “the plight of the individual in modern society.” It is a powerful and important work that, in many ways, incorporates and outlines many of the main insights of his whole life’s work.
The heart of Jung’s thesis is that the dignity of the individual and, consequently, his or her capacity to experience meaning in life, are becoming buried in what he calls “mass-mindedness.”
The most obvious example of this mass-mindedness was the rise of the totalitarian states, which, at the time Jung was writing, had many people concerned that they would spread across the whole of Europe.
Statistical vs. Individual Truth
Equally concerning to Jung, though, was the unbalanced spread of the scientific and technological approach to and control of life. Jung identified himself as a scientist and was in no way anti-scientific. But, he believed that the rational needed to be balanced by the non-rational, that intellect should be balanced by feeling, factual knowledge by creative intuition, and technological progress by an understanding of the human soul.
Without this balance, the individual gets replaced by a statistical representation:
“The more a theory lays claim to universal validity, the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual facts. Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical; it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an abstract mean. This mean is quite valid, though it need not necessarily occur in reality. Despite this it figures in the theory as an unassailable fundamental fact. The exceptions at either extreme, though equally factual, do not appear in the final result at all, since they cancel each other out.”
What Jung is saying here is that the unique, the specific, the idiosyncratic, the unusual all get lost in the “abstract statistical ideal.” As helpful as it can be to understand the average experience of people, the actual living experience of individuals is equally, if not more, important, as that is what leads to the experience of individual meaning.
In his own way, Jung is pointing to the same view that Zen talks about with its notion of “original mind,” seeing things as they are and not in terms of our thoughts, concepts, and categories. Jung goes on to say:
“One could say that the real picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the character of irregularity.”
This has implications for the therapeutic treatment of patients:
“If I want to understand an individual human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a completely new and unprejudiced attitude.”
Technology and Meaning
There is no doubt that technology can be a wonderful thing. I make use of technology to publish this blog and communicate with thousands of people that I would not be able to reach otherwise. Technology allows me to work via video with people across the country and even across the Atlantic. The internet has made it possible for people around the world to find their way to my consulting office.
And there is no denying the benefit to health care and life expectancy that our technological advancements have enabled in our era.
But there are disadvantages to our technology as well. Despite the proliferation of communication technologies — smartphones, computers, email, video conferencing — people are feeling more and more isolated and cut off from each other.
As Nicholas Carr, in his book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, writes:
“Sometimes our tools do what we tell them to. Other times, we adapt ourselves to our tools’ requirements.”
The Human Machine
To my mind, the greatest danger of a world so steeped in technology is that it becomes the primary metaphor for how we understand our own human nature. In other words, we begin to see ourselves as machines. The result is an increased focus on productivity and a simultaneous loss of meaning.
It is common these days to talk about the brain, for instance, as though it were a computer. Things are “hardwired” in our neural connections. We get our “wires crossed” when there is a communication failure. We “interface” and exchange “data points” and our interpersonal skills are thought of as so many “tools in our toolbox.”
When the machine is the guiding metaphor, beings become things, nature becomes a repository of “resources” for human consumption, and even human beings are measured in terms of efficiency and productivity — “human resources” whose value is essential an economic one. As Marshall McLuhan once provocatively stated, human beings become little more than “the sex organs of the machine world.”
The experience of living a life of meaning is, itself, stripped of all meaning.
Healing and the Restoration of Meaning
For Jung, lack of meaning is the primary illness of our modern, technological era:
“Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable — perhaps everything.”
The aims of Jungian Psychology have the potential to be a powerful counter-force against the dehumanizing, soul-destroying aspects of modern life. Its goal is a restoration of meaning.
It’s focus on the unconscious, on dreams, on imagination and, mostly, on the individual, is a focus on the soul aspects of the individual as they are expressed in a particular human life.
As a therapeutic approach it is not merely a technical method that can be applied by anyone to anyone in the abstract. It is a human relationship in which two unique individuals are engaged in the mutual discovery of meaning.
For Jung, this combination of meaning and relationship is the key to healing:
“The psychic situation of the individual is so menaced nowadays by advertising, propaganda, and other more or less well-meant advice and suggestions that for once in his life the patient might be offered a relationship that does not repeat the nauseating ‘you should,’ ‘you must’ and similar confessions of impotence.”
The following poem by D.H. Lawrence expresses beautifully this understanding of therapy as a restoration of meaning and not simply the more common, mechanistic intention of a “return to functioning”:
Healing
I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.
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