"Personally, I think it's a shame a man with ability like yours for putting words together should get mixed up in this Jungian stuff."
The place had been done by a decorator—a decorator who saw a surgeon's waiting room as something soothing in ivories and sepia and faint gold. And putting words together is just a trick, too; it doesn't involve knowledge or sense—just lucky knack.
I cut a smile in my face for him. "Talk it over, sometime," I said.
He smirked interest in himself. "I'm a sort of cross between a Freudian and a semanticist, Wylie. What do you think of semantics?"
"The poets understood it before Korzybski."
"Very good! Very! Still—"
"—a means. A useful insight." I felt a bead of sweat roll from my armpit down my corrugated ribs. "The basic assumption is mistaken, though. It omits instinct. No cortical rearrangement will accomplish much, even with semantics, until it admits instinct—"
"I always wondered whether you understood the subject. Guess you do. But I still don't see Jung's slant."
How cleverly the thumb and finger de-wing the caught fly! And how the fly beats its legs in satisfactory protest! If I had injured his composure in some book or other, some essay, he would avenge it now. I stared at the flaring spectacles of this penny-ante sadist and swore to myself that he could sweat me—and all his full waiting room—till Gabriel put his brass horn to his lips before I'd twitch my foot. And in this outlandish, familiar crisis of our everyday relations, I brought forth with the energies of wrath another formulation.
I blew smoke at the fat little hamster. "You can put it this way. Jung sees the source of the superego as unconscious, too—just as Freud sees the id. To Jung—both are continuums of instinct. That's all. Any culture—even the culture of you physical scientists, which is mostly yet to come—rises from instinct, not from the frontal lobes. If you think of superego as subconscious in source and merely the opposite of id, you can understand Toynbee—and Toynbee's error about a churchly salvation for this day and age. You might actually understand Jesus—and what Christianity was intended to be to people. You can understand a great deal that even most psychologists don't know about."