So
much for the content of the psyche. Now let's turn to the principles of
its operation. Jung gives us three principles, beginning with the principle
of opposites. Every wish immediately suggests its opposite. If I have
a good thought, for example, I cannot help but have in me somewhere the
opposite bad thought. In fact, it is a very basic point: In order to have
a concept of good, you must have a concept of bad, just like you can't
have up without down or black without white.
This idea came home to me when I was about eleven.
I occasionally tried to help poor innocent woodland creatures who had
been hurt in some way -- often, I'm afraid, killing them in the process.
Once I tried to nurse a baby robin back to health. But when I picked it
up, I was so struck by how light it was that the thought came to me that
I could easily crush it in my hand. Mind you, I didn't like the idea,
but it was undeniably there.
The dynamics of the psyche o much for the content
of the psyche. Now let's turn to the principles of its operation. Jung
gives us three principles, beginning with the principle of opposites.
Every wish immediately suggests its opposite. If I have a good thought,
for example, I cannot help but have in me somewhere the opposite bad thought.
In fact, it is a very basic point: In order to have a concept of good,
you must have a concept of bad, just like you can't have up without down
or black without white. This idea came home to me when I was about eleven.
I occasionally tried to help poor innocent woodland creatures who had
been hurt in some way -- often, I'm afraid, killing them in the process.
Once I tried to nurse a baby robin back to health. But when I picked it
up, I was so struck by how light it was that the thought came to me that
I could easily crush it in my hand. Mind you, I didn't like the idea,
but it was undeniably there.
According to Jung, it is the opposition
that creates the power (or libido) of the psyche. It is like the two poles
of a battery, or the splitting of an atom. It is the contrast that gives
energy, so that a strong contrast gives strong energy, and a weak contrast
gives weak energy.
The second principle is the principle of
equivalence. The energy created from the opposition is "given" to both
sides equally. So, when I held that baby bird in my hand, there was energy
to go ahead and try to help it. But there is an equal amount of energy
to go ahead and crush it. I tried to help the bird, so that energy went
into the various behaviors involved in helping it. But what happens to
the other energy?
Well, that depends on your attitude towards
the wish that you didn't fulfill. If you acknowledge it, face it, keep
it available to the conscious mind, then the energy goes towards a general
improvement of your psyche. You grow, in other words.
But if you pretend that you never had that
evil wish, if you deny and suppress it, the energy will go towards the
development of a complex. A complex is a pattern of suppressed thoughts
and feelings that cluster -- constellate -- around a theme provided by
some archetype. If you deny ever having thought about crushing the little
bird, you might put that idea into the form offered by the shadow (your
"dark side"). Or if a man denies his emotional side, his emotionality
might find its way into the anima archetype. And so on.
Here's where the problem comes: If you pretend
all your life that you are only good, that you don't even have the capacity
to lie and cheat and steal and kill, then all the times when you do good,
that other side of you goes into a complex around the shadow. That complex
will begin to develop a life of its own, and it will haunt you.
If it goes on long enough, the complex may take
over, may "possess" you, and you might wind up with a multiple personality.
In the movie The Three Faces of Eve, Joanne Woodward portrayed a meek,
mild woman who eventually discovered that she went out and partied like
crazy on Saturday nights. She didn't smoke, but found cigarettes in her
purse, didn't drink, but woke up with hangovers, didn't fool around, but
found herself in sexy outfits. Although multiple personality is rare,
it does tend to involve these kinds of black-and-white extremes.
The final principle is the principle of
entropy. This is the tendency for oppositions to come together, and so
for energy to decrease, over a person's lifetime. Jung borrowed the idea
from physics, where entropy refers to the tendency of all physical systems
to "run down," that is, for all energy to become evenly distributed. If
you have, for example, a heat source in one corner of the room, the whole
room will eventually be heated.
When we are young, the opposites will tend
to be extreme, and so we tend to have lots of energy. For example, adolescents
tend to exaggerate male-female differences, with boys trying hard to be
macho and girls trying equally hard to be feminine. And so their sexual
activity is invested with great amounts of energy! Plus, adolescents often
swing from one extreme to another, being wild and crazy one minute and
finding religion the next.
As we get older, most of us come to be
more comfortable with our different facets. We are a bit less naively
idealistic and recognize that we are all mixtures of good and bad. We
are less threatened by the opposite sex within us and become more androgynous.
Even physically, in old age, men and women become more alike. This process
of rising above our opposites, of seeing both sides of who we are, is
called transcendence.
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