Nature’s Child: Progress vs. Development

“Why hast thou stolen into thyself, thyself?” — Friedrich Nietzsche

It may seem odd in this age of technology that anyone would suggest the idea of regression amid such fast-paced progress as we’ve seen in the last century. But, not only are the two ideas relative, together they form a complementary process in which neither works without the other. Psychological functions are paired in opposites designed to balance each other. Throughout centuries of shifts in conscious development, progress in one area means decline in another. Jung wrote:

“The child motif represents not only something that existed in the distant past but… something that exists now… it is not just a vestige but a system functioning in the present whose purpose is to compensate or correct, in a meaningful manner, the inevitable… extravagances of the conscious mind. It is in the nature of the conscious mind to concentrate on relatively few contents and to raise them to the highest pitch of clarity. A necessary result and precondition is the exclusion of other contents of consciousness…” which is “… bound to bring about a certain one-sidedness.”

Jung saw the child motif as an aspect of the spirit archetype. As a primordial image, it still functions regardless of our views on science and religion — or, in more general terms, rational and irrational — at a given point in history. Science means progress in the spirit of our times, but it also carries with it a dangerous underside. It’s a flattering image for all who identify with it; but if history is any guide, identification with a single function leads to disaster. Despite our most storied achievements, it remain our Achilles’ heel:

“Since the… consciousness of civilized man has been granted an effective instrument for the practical realization of its contents  through the dynamics of the will, there is all the more danger, the more he trains his will, of his getting lost in one-sidedness and deviating further and further from the laws and roots of his being. This means, on the one hand, the possibility of human freedom, but on the other it is a source of endless transgressions against one’s instincts. Accordingly, primitive man, being closer to his instincts, is characterized by a fear of novelty and adherence to tradition.”

But, as progress in one direction means regression in another, a kind of primitive fear still lurks in re-interpreting the religious function as opposed to simply dismissing it as fantasy against the literal truths of science. Obsession with novelty in one sphere compensates the fear of it in another, and though much is admirable in the technical creativity celebrated today, it makes for a perilous illusion of a darker psychic reality.

Erich Neumann’s description of the dissociability of the personality reads like a who’s who of the contemporary individual: “This betrays itself in many ways… as a technologist he may be living in the present, as a philosopher in the period of the Enlightenment, as a man of faith in the Middle Ages and as a fighter of wars in antiquity — all without being in the least aware how, and where, these partial attitudes contradict each other.”

Superstitious beliefs in the unity of conscious multiplied by seven billion subjective ideologies and the ceaseless speculations of experts on cable news are only so many contradictions. Solutions are generally superficial opinions based on immediate causes and effects which have little to do with the wider development of personality suggested by Neumann. The military man may be a man of faith and even a scientist, too — all his knowledge filtered through a subjective philosophy rooted in the pride of personal identification. Jung:

“But our progressiveness, though it may result in a great many delightful wish-fulfilments, piles up an equally gigantic Promethean debt which has to be paid off from time to time in the form of hideous catastrophes.” Nature decrees that the “fore-thinker” owes something back to the unconscious for the fire he stole…

“The symptoms of compensation are described, from the progressive point of view, in scarcely flattering terms. Since, to the superficial eye, it looks like a retarding operation, people speak of inertia, backwardness, skepticism, fault-finding, conservatism, timidity, pettiness… But inasmuch as man has, in high degree, the capacity for cutting himself off from his own roots, he may also be swept uncritically to catastrophe by his dangerous one-sidedness.

“The older view… realized that progress is only possible Deo concedente [granted by God]… The more differentiated consciousness becomes, the greater the danger of severance from the root condition. Complete severance comes when the Deo concedente is forgotten…  it is an axiom of psychology that when a part of the psyche is split off from consciousness, it is only apparently inactivated; in actual fact it brings about a possession of the personality, with the result that the individual’s aims are falsified in the interest of the split-off part. If, then, the childhood state of the collective unconscious is repressed to the point of exclusion, the unconscious content overwhelms the conscious aim and inhibits, falsifies, even destroys its realization. Viable progress only comes from the cooperation of both.”

As I quoted Jung in another post, the narrow door of inner confrontation is enough to frighten most people away — but how on earth could it be more frightening than the world spectacle confronting us today?