Collected Papers on Analytical Psychology

by C. G. Jung

If we study attentively the history of any such person coming under our observation, we shall often find that he has been living for a considerable time in a sort of peculiar individual isolation, more or less shut off from the world of reality. This constrained condition of aloofness may be traced back to certain innate or early acquired peculiarities, which show themselves in the events of his life. For instance, in the histories of those suffering from dementia præcox we often hear such a remark as this: "He was always of a pensive disposition, and much shut up in himself. After his mother died he cut himself off still more from the world, shunning his friends and acquaintances." Or again, we may hear, "Even as a child he devised many peculiar inventions; and later, when he became an engineer, he occupied himself with most ambitious schemes."

Without discussing the matter further it must be plain that a counterpoise is produced in the unconscious as a compensation to the one-sidedness of the conscious attitude. In the first case we may expect to find an increasing pressing forward in the unconscious, of a wish for human intercourse, a longing for mother, friends, relatives; while in the second case self-criticism will try to establish a correcting balance. Among normal people a condition never arises so one-sided that the natural corrective tendencies of the unconscious entirely lose their value in the affairs of everyday life; but in the case of abnormal people, it is eminently characteristic that the individual entirely fails to recognise the compensating influences which arise in the unconscious. He even continues to accentuate his one-sidedness; this is in accord with the well-known psychological fact that the worst enemy of the wolf is the wolf-hound, the greatest despiser of the negro is the mulatto, and that the biggest fanatic is the convert; for I should be a fanatic were I to attack a thing outwardly which inwardly I am obliged to concede as right.

The mentally unbalanced man tries to defend himself against his own unconscious, that is to say, he battles against his own compensating influences. The man already dwelling in a sort of atmosphere of isolation, continues to remove himself further and further from the world of reality, and the ambitious engineer strives by increasingly morbid exaggerations of invention to disprove the correctness of his own compensating powers of self-criticism. As a result of this a condition of excitation is produced, from which results a great lack of harmony between the conscious and unconscious attitudes. The pairs of opposites are torn asunder, the resulting division or strife leads to disaster, for the unconscious soon begins to intrude itself violently upon the conscious processes. Then odd and peculiar thoughts and moods supervene, and not infrequently incipient forms of hallucination, which clearly bear the stamp of the internal conflict.

These corrective impulses or compensations which now break through into the conscious mind, should theoretically be the beginning of the healing process, because through them the previously isolated attitude should apparently be relieved. But in reality this does not result, for the reason that the unconscious corrective impulses which thus succeed in making themselves apparent to the conscious mind, do so in a form that is altogether unacceptable to consciousness.

The isolated individual begins to hear strange voices, which accuse him of murder and all sorts of crimes. These voices drive him to desperation and in the resulting agitation he attempts to get into contact with the surrounding milieu, and does what he formerly had anxiously avoided. The compensation, to be sure, is reached, but to the detriment of the individual.

The pathological inventor, who is unable to profit by his previous failures, by refusing to recognise the value of his own self-criticism, becomes the creator of still more preposterous designs. He wishes to accomplish the impossible but falls into the absurd. After a while he notices that people talk about him, make unfavourable remarks about him, and even scoff at him. He believes a far-reaching conspiracy exists to frustrate his discoveries and render them objects of ridicule. By this means his unconscious brings about the same results that his self-criticism could have attained, but again only to the detriment of the individual, because the criticism is projected into his surroundings.

An especially typical form of unconscious compensation—to give a further example—is the paranoia of the alcoholic. The alcoholic loses his love for his wife; the unconscious compensation tries to lead him back again to his duty, but only partially succeeds, for it causes him to become jealous of his wife as if he still loved her. As we know, he may even go so far as to kill both his wife and himself, merely out of jealousy. In other words, his love for his wife has not been entirely lost, it has simply become subliminal; but from the realm of the unconscious it can now only reappear in the form of jealousy.

We see something of a similar nature in the case of religious converts. One who turns from protestantism to catholicism has, as is well known, the tendency to be somewhat fanatical. His protestantism is not entirely relinquished, but has merely disappeared into the unconscious, where it is constantly at work as a counter-argument against the newly acquired catholicism. Therefore the new convert feels himself constrained to defend the faith he has adopted in a more or less fanatical way. It is exactly the same in the case of the paranoiac, who feels himself constantly constrained to defend himself against all external criticism, because his delusional system is too much threatened from within.

The strange manner in which these compensating influences break through into the conscious mind derives its peculiarities from the fact that they have to struggle against the resistances already existing in the conscious mind, and therefore present themselves to the patient's mind in a thoroughly distorted manner. And secondly, these compensating equivalents are obliged necessarily to present themselves in the language of the unconscious—that is, in material of a heterogeneous and subliminal nature. For all the material of the conscious mind which is of no further value, and can find no suitable employment, becomes subliminal, such as all those forgotten infantile and phantastic creations that have ever entered the heads of men, of which only the legends and myths still remain. For certain reasons which I cannot discuss further here, this latter material is frequently found in dementia præcox.

I hope I may have been able to give in this brief contribution, which I feel to be unfortunately incomplete, a glimpse of the situation as it presents itself to me of the importance of the unconscious in psychopathology. It would be impossible in a short discourse to give an adequate idea of all the work that has already been done in this field.