After this instance of the nascence of new ideas out of the treasury of primordial images, we will resume the further delineation of the process of transference. It was seen that the libido of the patient seizes upon its new object in those apparently preposterous and peculiar phantasies, namely the contents of the absolute unconscious. As I already observed, the unacknowledged projection of primordial images upon the physician constitutes a danger for further treatment which should not be undervalued. The images contain not only every beautiful and great thought and feeling of humanity, but also every deed of shame and devilry of which human beings have ever been capable. Now, if the patient cannot differentiate the physician's personality from these projections, there is an end to mutual understanding, and human relations become impossible. If however the patient avoids this Charybdis, he falls into the Scylla of introjecting these images, that is, he does not ascribe their qualities to the physician but to himself. This peril is just as great. If he projects, he vacillates between an extravagant and morbid deification, and a spiteful contempt of his physician. In the case of introjection, he falls into a ludicrous self-deification or moral self-laceration. The mistake that he makes in both cases consists in attributing the contents of the absolute unconscious to himself personally. Thus he makes himself into both God and devil. This is the psychological reason why human beings have always needed demons, and could not live without gods. There is the exception, of course, of a few specially clever specimens of the homo occidentalis of yesterday and the day before—supermen whose God is dead, wherefore they themselves become gods. There is also the example of Nietzsche, who confessedly required chloral in order to be able to exist. These supermen even become rationalistic petty gods, with thick skulls and cold hearts. The concept of God is simply a necessary psychological function of an irrational nature that has altogether no connection with the question of God's existence. This latter question is one of the most fatuous that can be put. It is indeed sufficiently evident that man cannot conceive a God, much less realise that he actually exists, so little is he able to imagine a process that is not causally conditioned. Theoretically, of course, no accidentality can exist, that is certain, once and for all. On the other hand, in practical life, we are continually stumbling upon accidental happenings. It is similar with the existence of God; it is once and for all an absurd problem. But the consensus gentium has spoken of gods for æons past, and will be speaking of them in æons to come. Beautiful and perfect as man may think his reason, he may nevertheless assure himself that it is only one of the possible mental functions, coinciding merely with the corresponding side of the phenomena of the universe. All around is the irrational, that which is not congruous with reason. And this irrationalism is likewise a psychological function, namely the absolute unconscious; whilst the function of consciousness is essentially rational. Consciousness must have rational relations, first of all in order to discover some order in the chaos of disordered individual phenomena in the universe; and secondly, in order to labour at whatever lies within the area of human possibility. We are laudably and usefully endeavouring to exterminate so far as is practicable the chaos of what is irrational, both in and around us. Apparently we are making considerable progress with this process. A mental patient once said to me, "Last night, doctor, I disinfected the whole heavens with sublimate, and yet did not discover any God." Something of the kind has happened to us. Heraclitus, the ancient, that really very wise man, discovered the most wonderful of all psychological laws, namely, the regulating function of antithesis. He termed this "enantiodromia" (clashing together), by which he meant that at some time everything meets with its opposite. (Here I beg to remind the reader of the case of the American business man, which shows the enantiodromia most distinctly.) The rational attitude of civilisation necessarily terminates in its antithesis, namely in the irrational devastation of civilisation. Man may not identify himself with reason, for he is not wholly a rational being, and never can or ever will become one. That is a fact of which every pedant of civilisation should take note. What is irrational cannot and may not be stamped out. The gods cannot and may not die. Woe betide those men who have disinfected heaven with rationalism; God-Almightiness has entered into them, because they would not admit God as an absolute function. They are identified with their unconscious, and are therefore its sport. (For where God is nearest, there the danger is greatest.) Is the present war supposed to be a war of economics? That is a neutral American "business-like" standpoint, that does not take the blood, tears, unprecedented deeds of infamy and great distress into account, and which completely ignores the fact that this war is really an epidemic of madness. The several parties project their unconscious upon each other, hence the mad confusion of ideas in every head. This is the enantiodromia that occurs in the individual life of man, as well as in that of peoples. The legend of the Tower of Babel turns out to be a tenable truth.
Only he escapes from the cruel law of enantiodromia who knows how to separate himself from the unconscious—not by repressing it, for then it seizes him from behind—but by presenting it visibly to himself as something that is totally different from him.
This gives the solution of the Scylla and Charybdis problem which I described above. The patient must learn to differentiate in his thoughts between what is the ego and what is the non-ego. The latter is the collective psyche or absolute unconscious. By this means he will acquire the material with which henceforward, for a long time, he will have to come to terms. Thereby the energy, that before was invested in unsuitable pathological forms, will have found its appropriate sphere. In order to differentiate the psychological ego from the psychological non-ego, man must necessarily stand upon firm feet in his ego-function; that is, he must fulfil his duty towards life completely, so that he may in every respect be a vitally living member of human society. Anything that he neglects in this respect descends into the unconscious and reinforces its position, so that he is in danger of being swallowed up by it, if his ego-function is not established. Severe penalties are attached to that. As indicated by old Synesius, the "spiritualised soul (pneumatike psyché) becomes god and demon, a state in which it suffers the divine penalties," that is, it suffers being torn asunder by the Zagreus, an experience which Nietzsche also underwent at the beginning of his insanity, where, in "Ecce Homo," the God whom he was despairingly resisting in front assailed him from behind. Enantiodromia is the being torn asunder into the pairs of opposites, which opposites are only proper to "the god," and therefore also to the deified man, who owes likeness to God to his having prevailed over his gods.
VI.—The Synthetic or Constructive Method
We now reach the fifth stage of progressive understanding. The coming to terms with the unconscious is a technical performance to which the name of transcendental function has been given because a new function is produced, which being based upon both real and imaginary, or rational and irrational data, makes a bridge between the rational and irrational functions of the psyche. The basis of the transcendental function is a new method of treating psychological materials such as dreams and phantasies. The theories previously discussed were based upon an exclusively causal-reductive procedure, which reduces the dream or phantasy to its component reminiscences, and the instinctive processes that underlie them. I have already stated the justification as well as the limitations of this proceeding. It reaches the end of its usefulness at the moment when the dream symbols no longer permit of a reduction to personal reminiscences or aspirations; that is when the images of the absolute unconscious begin to be produced. It would be quite inappropriate to reduce these collective ideas to what is personal, and not only inappropriate but even actually pernicious, a fact that has been impressed upon me by disagreeable experiences. The values of the images or symbols of the absolute unconscious are only disclosed if they are subjected to a synthetic (not analytical) treatment. Just as analysis (the causally reductive procedure) disintegrates the symbol into its components, so the synthetic procedure synthesises the symbol into a universal and comprehensible expression. The synthetic procedure is by no means easy; I will therefore give an example, by means of which I can explain the whole process.
A patient had the following dream. She was just at the critical juncture between the analysis of the personal unconscious and the commencement of the production of the absolute unconscious. "I am on the point of crossing a broad and rapid stream. There is no bridge, but I find a ford where I can cross. As I am just on the point of doing so, a big crab that lay hidden in the water seizes my foot and does not let it go." She awoke in fear. Associations with the dream were as follows:—
1. Stream.—It forms a boundary that is difficult to cross. I must surmount an obstacle; I suppose it refers to the fact that I am getting on very slowly; I suppose I ought to reach the other side.
2. Ford.—An opportunity for getting safely across, a possible way; otherwise the stream would be too difficult. The possibility of surmounting the obstacle lies in the analytical treatment.
3. Crab.—The crab lay quite hidden in the water; I did not see it at first. Cancer is a fearful incurable illness. (A series of recollections of Mrs. X., who died of cancer, followed.) I am afraid of this illness. A crab[242] is an animal that walks backwards; obviously it wants to pull me down into the stream. It clutched me in a gruesome way, and I was awfully afraid. What prevents my getting across? Oh yes, I had another great scene with my friend.
It must be explained that there is something special about this friendship. We have here an ardent attachment, bordering on the homosexual. It has been going on for years. The friend is in many respects like the patient, and is also nervous. They have pronounced artistic interests in common. But the patient is the stronger personality of the two. They are both nervous, and their mutual relation being too engrossing, cuts them off too much from other possibilities of life. In spite of an "ideal friendship" they have at times tremendous scenes, owing to their mutual irritability. Evidently the unconscious wishes to put some distance between them, but they refuse to pay attention to it. A "scene" usually begins by one of them finding that she does not yet understand the other well enough, and that they ought to talk more openly together; whereupon both make enthusiastic endeavours to talk things out. Misunderstandings supervene almost directly, provoking fresh scenes, each worse than the last. The quarrel was in its way and faute de mieux a pleasure to both of them, which they were unwilling to relinquish. My patient, especially, was unable for a very long time to renounce the sweet pain of not being understood by her best friend, although, as she said, every scene "tired her to death." She had long since realised that this friendship had become superfluous, and that it was only from mistaken ambition that she clung to the belief that she could yet make something ideal out of it. The patient had formerly had an extravagant, fantastic relation to her mother, and after her mother's death had transferred her feelings to her friend.