Chapter 8 - 20th Century Psychoanalysts - Different Paths and Different Insights

Thus far in our exploration of the creative irrational we have focused on human expressions of the irrational in pre-literate and literate forms. But, being biological organisms/animals, we can’t deny the operation of the rational in a large portion of our functioning. The challenge for us as humans is to appreciate both the rational and the irrational in our lives. One of the key developments in examining this balance comes from the work of the field of psychoanalysis where the world of the human unconscious needs to be uncovered and appreciated. What the psychoanalysts found is that the denial of our unseen, irrational unconscious can result in serious mental illness for some individuals. We see that ignorance of our unconscious also can have implications for people with “normal” personalities.

As we have seen, for much of human development there were strong motivations for action and behaviours that were once considered to be primitive irrational and spiritual. These motivations led to some of the greatest works of human creation in construction and thought such as we have presented in the previous chapters. But such practices were generally lost in the evolution of the Western World in the age of Enlightenment, circa 18th Century. The re-dawning of the role of rationality as an effective worldview left behind many important aspects of our human growth and development. In this chapter we focus on relatively recent explorations of the late 19th and 20th Century that brought back into our view the need to recognize and bring into our active awareness the role of our unconscious. In this time frame, six philosopher-psychologists explored our inner psyche and captured what they saw in terms of different motivating factors that can be identified in both our inner and outer lives: Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)[1], Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)[2], Alfred Adler (1870-1937)[3], Theodor Reik (1888-1969)[4], Carl Jung (1875-1961)[5] and Viktor Frankl (1905-1997)[6]. We focus our interest in the creative irrational through the most influential of the field: Nietzsche and Jung (Figure 29).

Figure 29. Friedrich Nietzsche (left) [7] and C.G. Jung (right)[8].

It was Nietzsche who began investigations into the more-than-merely personal aspects of human psychology with his most insightful and meticulous observations of human nature, based largely on his personal observations of his own nature. He was not medically trained.  He began his professional career as a philologist, and undertook intense early studies of Greek and Roman Literature at Bonne and Leipzig, Germany. At the remarkably young age of 24, he was appointed in 1869 to Chairmanship of the Department of Ancient Philology at the University of Basel.  His health was never strong, and in 1879 after only 10 years at Basel he was forced by a combination of nervous disorders and poor eyesight to resign from his University post, and shortly after returned home to live with his mother at her home near the Swiss Alps. After her death, in 1884, he was “looked after” by his sister. By 1889 he had become hopelessly insane, a condition that lasted until his death in 1900. In his last years he was dependent on the forces represented by an ambitious sister who tried to bend his inclinations to her own selfish desire for control.  

The passing on of his work and ideas was later also coloured and distorted by National Socialism in Germany at the time. The Nazis used their misinterpretations of his writings to support their own later vituperative views of European political anthropology and history.  This most deliberate misinterpretation was magnified and manipulated in support of Nazi propaganda leading to serious political upheavals that eventually triggered the Second World War. These incredible circumstances so coloured the views of European and North American Society, that even the study of Nietzsche was actively discouraged for many years. The effect still seems to condition the modern day reader’s approach to his insights. Despite the efforts of the Nazis, as well as Nietzsche’s sister, to manipulate the memory of his original thought, the published works of Nietzsche subsequently prevailed and demonstrate to us even today, his remarkable passion of soul and mind. His deeply personal psychological inquiries, developed in many directions, are illustrated vividly in his published works.[9].

During his entire sane life Nietzsche had written and published passionately, voluminously and obstinately on what eventually became a vast collection of literary works. He wrote prose and poetic works beginning with his “Birth of Tragedy”[10]. His most well-known, extensive major work is “Thus Spake Zarathustra”, published in 1889-91[11]. He held a contemptuous opinion of the morality of Western bourgeois society, which he strongly rejected as a “slave morality” in favour of a new heroic morality that would lead to what he called in his native German language the new “Übermensch” - widely mistranslated as “superman”. 

Nietzsche and the concept of the “Übermensch”

By the age of 39 in 1888 Nietzsche wrote one of his earliest and best-known books “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”[12]. This is a story of the journeys, work and teachings of its main character Zarathustra who is clearly derived from some interest Nietzsche had in the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism, although he never explicitly makes direct reference to it. Throughout his book he clearly rejects established church and societal practices, recognizing them as often being shallow and inadequate to give expression to the hard-to-perceive spiritual level. By his Übermensch concept he intended to identify a person who consciously attempted to raise himself to a higher level of being: a creator of a new heroic morality; one that consciously affirms life, to live at a level beyond good and evil.  It is a concept that we are much inclined to include in our discussion of our capacity to experience the creative irrational. According to Nietzsche, a conscious Being, an Übermensch, would have to have an instinctive impulse: one that would be required in order to set that person apart from “the herd” and lift him/her to a more appropriate level of being.  The whole of his writings comprises an extensive and enlighteningly objective, even if sometimes dramatic, even vituperative, style, presented in a compelling framework of allusion, passionate imagery, and metaphor.  There can hardly be a match for such a range of prose and poetic works (some he even set to music!) in any other later literary works in the Western World.

Zarathustra is a prince who finds himself on a mountaintop with an urge to travel through the world to “be man again”. He travels the world and has numerous experiences and encounters with others before returning to the mountain. The final section of his book involves his interaction with a number of “Higher Men”. In his native German they are “höheren Menschen”[13]. These Higher Men are listed as the King, the old sorcerer, the pope, the voluntary beggar, the shadow, the conscientious man of the spirit, the sorrowful prophet and the ass. This concept of höheren Menschencontrasts sharply with the concept of the Übermensch.  This later concept is better appreciated as beyond-human, over-human, an existence that exists at a level above our ordinary, unthinking, collection of appetites and reactions to our external world.

While there are many well-known themes and archetypes buried in this story, the most strikingly and well known is the concept of the Übermensch. It designates Nietzsche’s particular concept of real human nature. As there is no consensus by modern scholars on what he actually meant specifically by the word it is here more properly kept in its original German form: Übermensch. We introduce it here in our effort to bring his thoughts to our exploration of the various levels of human consciousness involved in our creative irrational side. He sees the need to get beyond the level of existence that we generally occupy. He recognizes the many different distractions that pervade our ordinary lives. The Übermensch is the part of our being that needs to be developed in order to get beyond these low level preoccupations. It is along the “right” lines of thought that some authors have translated the word as “superman”. The difficulty is that this is almost always interpreted in the physical sense instead of as something essentially internal and individual; it deals not with external super villains but with the much more threatening distractions that we harbour inside us.  In our view, Übermensch development should be a concern for all humans trying to follow their own wish toward a “Higher” sense of Being[14].

The term “Übermensch” draws our attention to this central idea of Nietzsche, that “man” as we usually find ourselves is actually many different kinds of beings, no one of whom lasts for more than a few moments at a time before another, virtually new one replaces the first, and so on “ad infinitum”. As we work on trying to be present to a central sense of ourselves by examining our more ordinary states of being we can find many examples of these many different selves that come and go in our daily lives. Earlier in this book in Chapter 1 we recounted personal examples of this process from the efforts of the authors, as well as quoting from the dramatic perceptions of Philo although in general the seeing of the multiple I’s is neither easy nor frequent. 

This human of “so many faces” but with not one that has any particular outstanding identity must be recognized in all its variations and fluctuations if we are to see the need to “transcend” this usual “asleepness” of multiple identities.  We can come to know this if we actually learn to work towards a state that more correctly expresses our potentially higher, proper and rightful state of consciousness. We need to develop our Übermensch to get over our lower-selves and bring them together into a more unified whole. Nietzsche’s use of the Übermensch concept is totally consistent with other aspects of the spectrum of awareness that we present in Table 2 in this Book. We see it as an excellent description of this difficult work towards an awakening of an objective state of “Consciousness” in ourselves. 

A second important theme that we see in Nietzsche’s Zarathustra is the explicit need for the individual to awaken to see the levels of being. The following quote explicitly lays out Nietzsche’s concept of a need to awaken and shows that this awakening results in joy. He writes:

 “O man, take care!

What does the deep midnight declare?

‘I was asleep – 

From a deep dream I woke and swear:

The world is deep,

Deeper than day had been aware.

Deep is its woe – 

Joy – deeper yet than agony:

Woe implores: Go!

But all joy wants eternity –

Wants deep, wants deep eternity.”[15]

It is obvious from this passage that there is a joy to be found in the deep of eternity. This thought is repeated twice in Nietzsche’s book reflecting its importance to the author. And what kind of awakening is he referring to? It is an awakening that is tied to a death. Nietzsche deals with the need to die in the Chapter of Zarathustra entitled “Of Voluntary Death” that states:

“Many die too late and some die too early. Still the doctrine sounds strange: ‘Die at the right time.”

We would be greatly mistaken to take these processes of death and awakening as an ordinary biological function instead of being a powerful metaphor consistent with all that we have presented so far in this book. Shamanic concepts of death and rebirth can be found in many different belief systems[16] dating back to the earliest civilizations as we described in our earlier book on the Ancient Egyptian stories of Osiris[17]. It can be argued that this idea of death and rebirth is the most universal archetype of human societies. Of course Nietzsche most likely got his concepts from the Christian doctrine that one must die to be reborn[18]. Here we note that Zarathustra is dealing with the necessary concomitant changes in our Being.

But Nietzsche doesn’t stop at the idea of the death of the individual, he continues his thought to the need for “the death of God”. This is the most quoted of all Nietzsche’s phrases. On face value the “death of God” could be seen as a continuation of his simple rebellious statement against all established religion and the false belief that our achievement of higher life could come from a passive participation in external religious structure. But at a higher level of understanding he is pointing to the need to stop seeing God as something external that will save our soul. There is no God sitting external to our being. 

We have the responsibility and ability to move towards this higher awareness and Being. Nietzsche seems to be pointing out the danger of getting lost in an external belief in an almighty God as represented in religion. For those of us who take solace in “an old man sitting on a cloud” this death of this God is an essential and difficult task. It is required that we develop an internal spirituality based in our own direct experience of being.

Nietzsche clearly illustrates the need to give attention to the paradoxes in our state of being by a number of references throughout his works. In “The Birth of Tragedy”[19] he explored this in the need to balance Apollonian and Dionysian aspects of our being.  In “Thus Spoke Zarathustra”[20] he seems to be contrasting the concept of the Übermensch with what he finds in the many people he encounters in his travels. 

C.G. Jung

Nietzsche’s insights initiated a line of early 20th Century psychoanalytic studies that includes the work of Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung[21].  We focus on C.G. Jung’s work as it has provided many tools for use in personal self-study or as he calls it “the process of individuation”[22]. We greatly appreciate the result of Jung’s work and theories that provide tools for exploring the creative irrational in the form of the more-than-merely personal. Specifically he has written extensively on previously unrecognized aspects of the human psyche: 

1)    archetypes as expressions of our collective unconscious;

2)    archetypes in our personal lives; and,

3)    psychological types as generalized patterns of human behavior.

While Jung’s theories and concepts don’t fit easily into the spirituality spectrum presented above, we make an attempt to represent his concepts in Row 6 of Table 2.

Jung, writing in the mid-20th century, described ways in which we operate as collections of observable psychological patterns and habits. In his career he worked to address the advantages that might accrue to us, were we able to develop these further possibilities in ourselves. The powerful effects of Jung’s perception of psychological types has been documented by many authors who regard them as tools for “awakening” an awareness of previously unknown - but still seen as mysterious – behaviours in oneself and others. Row 6 in Table 2 presents the concepts of Jung in the context of the spirituality spectrum. As we shall see in later chapters, his work in the field of psychology dealt initially with individuals who were considered to have medical problems, but subsequently became a much broader study of humankind and ourselves as individuals in the setting of the total potential human experience. His introduction to the understanding of our individual natures and potential development starts with the classification of personality that he called psychological types. With a relatively small number of categories or classes he was able to capture the bulk of variation in the individuals he observed – including himself. As he and many others have shown, individuals can be led to observe and recognize their own psychological types with relatively little effort or background. 

Beyond the personal awareness of one’s habits, Jung further developed an understanding of the “more than personal” that he called the “collective unconscious”. That is, in these more-than-personal archetypes in our behaviour he found images and patterns that reflect societal memories shared amongst all members of the culture.  These images seemed to arise in recurring dreams and memories that are incomprehensible from any one individual’s life experiences. As a result, Jung deduced that he had to include in his model of psychology, the existence of psychic material that is beyond the strictly personal. Ultimately, however, Jung captured in his analyses the idea of the development of the whole of an individual that he distinguished with the word “Individuation”[23] within which lies the challenge of seeing and encouraging our individual creative irrational. As his work was grounded in the more concrete aspects and challenges of our lower levels of awareness it is not surprising that, although he alludes to the higher levels, he doesn’t specifically deal with the levels as more clearly recognized by religious and philosophical practices.

Important to this presentation are Jung’s thoughts concerning influences that exist beyond the life and history of us as individuals. He sees the human psyche as including components of our individual lives, but also components that extend beyond personal history to include broader aspects common to humankind. Jung was on the track of a more normal if superior development of human possibilities beyond repression of bad experiences and emotions.  Rather than restrict himself to mental illness, as Freud had done, Jung, influenced by Nietzsche, proposed that we must consider the whole of life as the period over which psychological influences will be determined, including influences that are not readily identified within one’s life. That is, there is a need to include concepts of the “collective unconscious” to explain some of our motivations and reactions. His development of psychological types helps us to see that we are not entirely unique individuals that result from unique lives. We share general traits with others that can be perceived through a limited number of our behavioural patterns. Such an expansion of our understanding of ourselves, beyond our totally personal, is critical to our “proper” development.

Even in the early stages of his studies, Jung perceived that problems in psychological development required a more general theory than just personal history, experience and memory.  He held it to be related not only to early life factors, but that most patients displayed reactions that continued to be developed throughout their entire lives. That is, their behaviour could not be characterized only by events that were the proximate cause of their infirmities, but required insights into the whole of their life. As we have already indicated, he found incontrovertible evidence that not only what we call our consciousness but additional relatively unknown elements of our unconscious are involved. In what follows we need to weigh these theories and the evidence supporting them in more careful detail.

Jung’s approach was one of exploring broad patterns in individual and personal as well as group behaviour.  It led his studies toward the more comprehensive view of a psychology that became a philosophy of the whole person.  It was ultimately based on many years of observations of patients, and was also coupled with his personal, especially widely-based, studies of the whole cultural environment in which psychological factors arise.  Coupled with his own personal breadth of experience, it led Jung to an appreciation of the innate need we have to direct our intellectual and practical efforts towards what emerges as most satisfying to us individually as apparently personal configurations of our life’s many facets. They are factors that can only be understood and developed from within our whole cultural context.  His studies and the lectures he gave about them took him through the entire lives of his subjects and into studies conducted over many different environments.  They arose in the course of his extensive travels and lectures in both America and Europe in a way that the other researchers had not considered necessary or even possible.  We shall in later Chapters direct our efforts towards a study of the many ramifications of this understanding.  It was only later in his own life that he characterized his researches into the long courses of psychological development of individuals with their different life histories as what he called a process of “individuation”.

It was only after Nietzsche’s death that this work came to the attention of Jung. In his last, summary book entitled “Memories, Dreams and Reflections”[24], Jung says, “The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me that is a supra-personal task, which I accompany only by effort and with difficulty. Perhaps it is a question that preoccupied my ancestors, and which they could not answer? Could that be why I am so impressed by the problem on which Nietzsche foundered, the Dionysian, to which the Christian seems to have lost the way?”  Nietzsche was thus seen to have formulated the question concerning the hidden role of the unconscious in our worldview. Although he wasn’t able to fully clarify an answer, he left a vivid trail for others to follow. 

The common thread amongst their interests was the previously unappreciated but now known to be most important role of the unconscious in how we live our lives. Over time their research resulted in medical practices and techniques for dealing with the personal psychological concerns raised by the clinical practices initiated at the turn of the 20th century. Characteristics that had been generally unseen or unnoticed by the medical profession became of key importance in treatment of patients with neurosis.

            It is through the personal searches undertaken by these great investigators that at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century, the Western world has been able to turn attention towards concepts and experiences of our unconscious selves that were formerly unnoticed and thus start to better appreciate the role of the unconscious in our actions.  A balanced combination of our thoughts, our bodily experiences and our emotions can, together, enable us to appreciate the value that is to be found in what has become our eternal search for a sense of the significant in ourselves in terms that are usually referred to as our “Being”. It is to this appreciation that we now turn our attentions, directing it toward that part of our psychological nature and development that many of us initially perceive in our heads, but necessarily expand it here to a closer study of the development of our emotional attitudes and of a necessary but hard to perceive need to nurture and develop our capacity for receiving and recognizing direct impressions in both our conscious and unconscious selves. 

 

The Creative Irrational in the Human Psyche

According to Jung, Nietzsche’s character was intensely connected with the need for balance between strong positive and negative forces. This is best shown in Nietzsche’s scarcely controlled contempt for his polar opposite in the world; the musical genius, Richard Wagner, of whom Nietzsche wrote, “Everything about him is false. What is genuine is hidden or decorated.  He is an actor, in every good and bad sense of the word.” Nietzsche found expression of the extremes of human psychology in the opposition of the Greek Apollonian versus Dionysian tendencies. We delve deeper into these tendencies in terms of our rational and irrational sides and the need for their recognition and reconciliation later in this chapter. 

Nietzsche captured the need to balance the forces in his image of what he termed “the blonde beast” to be represented as a lion[25].  His metaphorical presentation of “the lion”, as just a beast of prey doing what it is meant to do in life without judgment of being good or bad, was intended to illustrate his interest in seeing our life at the correct level of operation. In his works Nietzsche dwelt at length with his concept of the “higher” in human consciousness, a concept that attracted Jung to the need to balance what is higher with what is lower in ourselves[26]. That is, while Nietzsche himself recognized the need for balance, in the end his contributions show how difficult this is to maintain, to the point where in his passionate evaluation of values he broke out into extremes that showed that he was overcome by his own unrecognized opposites, and so falling under the power of the uncontrollable Dionysian or “Lion-nature” in himself. 

The writer/poet Nietzsche and the five other researchers introduced above were, of course, bound within the confines of the mores of the society or societies of which they were a part.  The initiator, Nietzsche in particular, railed against the morality aspects of his surroundings.  The others worked to make it clear that unconscious processes needed to be included in the understanding of both normal and troubled humans. Work continues today on understanding the extent to which our irrational unconscious sides control our judgment, actions and decisions[27] and we will revisit this again in Chapter 9. The combined efforts of this field of scientific study enable us to make the necessary distinction between what may be regarded as conscious behaviours and the scarcely recognized but powerful unconscious, primarily irrational elements that together with the more rational conscious parts constitute our total behavioural system. It takes us a rather long time to even recognize let alone assimilate all of these combined influences. In particular, one must become familiar with the intellectual constructs and concepts as well as detailed direct observations of one’s own behaviours to begin to appreciate the power that the conjunction of conscious and unconscious elements has on us. In such a case, Gurdjieff’s “three-brained beings” phrase becomes less of a metaphor and more of a clear simple description of our state. 

The signs do, however, with effort appear and eventually become guides to the role of the “unconscious” elements of our psyche on the whole, that had been especially neglected in explicit terms in studies of patients, perhaps because of the difficulty of perceiving and assigning causes.  Concern with this problem virtually requires the researcher to regard himself as becoming “one” with his patient, yet reserving the distance that is necessary for an objective view. The difficulties became especially evident through Nietzsche’s work, but need to become more apparent for us personally if we should wish to be able to join the beings concerned with the impediments to the sense of our unity of “being”. 

These concepts deal with understanding ourselves as more-than-merely personal. The idea that there exist aspects of our unconscious that extend beyond our own individual life histories allows us to connect with a broader world of forces that predates and surrounds us as humans. The psychological types concept provides an understanding of the limited number of general “types” of individuals that develop in the modern Western world. For many, this may be the first encounter with their type that opens the door to observing themselves as non-unique. These examples or tools all pertain to a personal sense of the creative irrational.

 

Building on Opposites  - From Übermensch to Enantiodromia

 In the past several chapters we have been presenting examples of the creative irrational in human worldview that are useful for those who wish to initiate and continue with work of self-study. The seeing of our collective unconscious in archetypes and experiencing aspects of our psychological makeup are all useful approaches to our work especially when we accept that these motivations are shared with the multitudes of humanity. We share much with our fellow occupants on this Earth. In this section we look towards Nietzsche and Jung who help us explore the changes in attitude necessary to incorporate the opposing sides of ourselves in order to rise above them to a higher level of perception to exercise the ultimate need for the experience of the creative irrational in our personal lives. As we shall see this points us conclusively to the fact of our need for a deeply personal work. 

This work is firmly rooted in our “direct experience” of ourselves in the greater world.[28] It requires a special degree of “alertness” in the present moment to what is taking place in our own inner parts. We need to be aware that under appropriate circumstances we can actively participate in a distinct process of momentary transformation by which our understanding is raised from one level to another higher one.  With sufficient accustoming of ourselves free of imagination to an experience of this idea we will already have to sense that there are certain vectors in the direction that our study needs to take. To fully appreciate the meaning and value of any event in our life we can scarcely do better than to refer back once again to the work of Nietzsche and the expansion of his work by Jung (Figure 29) into concepts of “enantiodromia” and “individuation” in support of the general need for the recognition and reconciliation of opposites. They may often appear to require almost a superhuman effort to raise us to the new level of understanding that can come only as a result of the creative irrational in ourselves.

A particularly important insight into this effort is found in the broader studies of human nature expressed in the line of study initiated by Nietzsche[29]. He dramatically expressed his understanding of our nature through his notable evocation of the stories of the two Greek gods Dionysius and Apollo, whose characters were used as metaphors for our conflicting internal tendencies. He recognized the unmistakable struggle within us that occurs as the result of interactions between our two opposing tendencies.  He held that they underlie our internal struggle to be more aware of our irrational unconscious sides and their power to direct our thoughts and actions continues to be a living force. Nietzsche’s work, based on his own philological background[30], lives on in the many doctors and researchers directly involved as psychologists.  He initiated a line of questioning concerning the need to pay attention to, if not fully understand, our underlying conscious and unconscious motivations and continue to drive us in daily life today. 

Nietzsche’s main line of thought and writing revolved around the need for individuals to awaken to their own higher selves. We see this as an expression of the requirement to bring oneself into a state where “work” to raise ourselves to the full potential of our being. As Nietzsche put it:

 “…. life itself told me this secret: ‘Behold,’ it said, ‘ I am that which must overcome itself again and again.”[31]

We believe that such a work is a lifelong effort that is essential to development of Being towards “Higher Consciousness”. We see this as our innate but necessarily individual creative human will towards a larger sense of our Being, one that leads us on towards what is Spiritual.

Nietzsche, having been raised in the home of his father who was a Lutheran pastor, developed strong attitudes towards established religions.  He wrote of the need to “inquire”, reflecting his early, objective scrutiny of a strict religious following. Contained within his questions about spirituality was the appropriate application of logic and reason. In one of his first writings he moves beyond his criticism of established religions into a critique of, on the one hand, the hyper-rational and logical thinking and its opposite relating to the irrational creative aspects of human character. In his book “The Birth of Tragedy”[32], among other publications, he uses the Greek gods Apollo and Dionysius to characterize these two paradoxical aspects of the rational and irrational.

This division of particular behaviours into their component opposing aspects has also been recognized by writers of all ages. For example, in ancient Sumerian the differences in the behaviour of the two principle gods Enlil and Enki are outstanding and clear illustrations[33]. Egyptian stories of Osiris and Seth capture it as well. In the Christian and Muslim teachings there is God and Satan operating in opposition to one another. There are many other cultural and religious examples of the importance of such oppositions.

In Nietzsche’s use of Apollo and Dionysus he saw an inherent opposition between the two sides that represent our rational and irrational sides respectively.  The modern Western World sees in itself the overwhelming image of an innocent, pure, beautiful and ultimately rational Apollo. This superficial attitude towards this specific god-image is to completely misunderstand and neglect both his origin and his nature. Apollo found in Homer’s stories from Ancient Greece, circa 850 BCE, was a god of the Trojans working against the Greeks. Coming from Anatolia, Apollo was a terrible god who brought death and disease[34]. In these beginnings it seems that it was difficult to discern whether he brought the trouble or helped to alleviate it. Centers dedicated to Apollo could be found in Delphi and Delos in the 8thcentury BCE. These were sites where oracles could be addressed with questions concerning the future. This Greek view of Apollo offers quite a contrast to the logical, rational aspects that are captured in today’s view of the god. While Apollo is conventionally credited with the development of rationality in modern philosophy, as we shall see later in Chapter 10, Kingsley[35] questions this simplistic interpretation of our attributions of character to him in a strong and original manner. In his interpretation, Apollo is recognized as the god who is the source of our ability to probe the literal understanding of our 20th century morality.

Nevertheless, Nietzsche used the Apollonian type to represent the ideal balanced, intellectual, even aloof, orderly approach to life.  Such an individual is very much in control of events, correctly interpreting and acting on their importance.  Apollo’s reasonable and responsible approach conveys a sense of a balanced, hence superior judgmental capacity that is unmistakably conveyed to surrounding associates. In all respects he assumes a dominant position in the world.  

The Apollonian individual presents a marked contrast to what Nietzsche presented as it’s opposite: the Dionysian nature. All Greek gods reflected multiple aspects of life. Dionysus was originally conceived as a bearded old man dressed in robes. Later he took the form of a young, naked, sensuous, often androgynous, male. Although widely associated with wine and drunkenness, Dionysus also expressed the conditions of ecstasy, fertility and religiosity[36].

For Nietzsche the Dionysian as an individual is found in an intuitive and sensual life on the irrational axis of Jung’s functional types that were described in Chapter 1. This manifestation is often expressed in Nietzsche’s writings in dramatic social terms.  It may show up as an impulsive, obstinate, pleasure-seeking, uncontrolled being, whose very aim in life seems to be the cultivation of the irrational.  But the approach may also display a distinctly refreshing quality in the very originality and freedom of expression from the norms of the conventional society that it plays upon.   But it should be noted that its unpredictability may also present family and associates with the uncomfortable consequences of the very volatility and unexpectedness that they would be expected to cope with. To the well-controlled, overly rational Apollonian type, such Dionysian behaviour reflects weak and vacillating impulses, resulting from the influences of a shameful unconscious that is a result of our failure to have been faithful to this same logical morality.  In the average Western World situation of the early 20th Century, these Dionysian impulses were seen as motivations that clearly needed to be brought into line in accordance with established morality.  That is, they should be” rooted out” so that the result would be in accord with the opinions of those admirable beings who aspire to and espouse “right” behaviour. As many psychoanalysts found in the treatment of their patients, if these popular efforts of both individuals and society toward self-improvement were not found sufficient, the erring subjects would then have to seek the aid of the psychiatric profession. It was confidently believed that psychiatric analysis would be able to mediate the obvious and needed cures, to which the ministers of religion who once had been expected to carry out this function had been unable to rise. 

A somewhat superficial knowledge of the different characteristics represented by Apollo and Dionysus may have already have been gleaned in part from our own early upbringing. For example, at the height of ascendancy of the various “temperance” movements in North America during the prohibition of the 1920’s, the character of Dionysus was portrayed and remembered as the depths of debauchery shown by the habitual drunkard. By appropriate contrast, then, the upright, clear-minded and handsome Apollo could be seen as a model of an easily comprehended and attractive opposite, an ideal to be followed. Such cultural motivations continue to rise throughout history. In more recent times such moralistic dichotomies results in the continued restriction and suppression of groups of humans who are not upstanding enough, too weak to benefit the masses, overly lazy, or truly mentally ill and/or addicted to substances. Extreme conservatives, financial protectionists, and in politics and human interactions, positions are often justified by discussions of right and wrong. But as we shall see the dominance of the “logical might” may not be sufficiently “right” in the context of our own personal will towards a sense of Being. We make the case here for a necessary balance.

Greater exposure to stories involving the two gods helps us to realize that these initial and facile understandings and distinctions between Dionysius and his fellow god, Apollo, are not so quickly and simply understood and interpreted. In fact, our appreciations of them have been changing over time. Now it is more generally understood that Dionysius reflects the hidden, more sensitive, emotional parts of one’s psyche.  While this is not inconsistent with circumstances of unruly orgiastic behaviour, his role can be seen within a much broader emotionally sensitive, creative individual that is additional to the logical aspects of Apollo. The two supporting sides can be seen more clearly in music, with its strong mathematical basis that can bring audiences to tears or laughter. These two sides of every individual, the rational Apollonian and the irrational Dionysian, are the basis of our individual work to reconcile opposites within us by the work of finding a higher level of consciousness, to which Gurdjieff also made reference. But what did Nietzsche see as the way to a productive and useful resolution?

By all accounts it is the Dionysian quality of Nietzsche’s personal behaviour,  reflected in his writings, that posed both its attraction and repulsion for Jung.  Jung was seemingly fascinated by Nietzsche’s writings, although Nietzsche the man had actually died before Jung was well into his professional career.  However Jung was certainly fully aware of both his writing and his ideas, and explicitly recognized this influence in his book “Memories, Dreams, Reflections”, which we quote as follows:

“The meaning of my existence is that life has addressed a question to me. That is a supra-personal task, which I accompany only by effort and with difficulty. Perhaps it is a question which preoccupied my ancestors, and which they could not answer? Could that be why I am so impressed by the problem on which Nietzsche foundered: the Dionysian side of life, to which the Christian seems to have lost the way?”[37]

Jung’s continuation of Nietzsche’s exploration appears particularly with Jung’s apparent respect for the “compensatory” aspects of the Nietzschean style that shows up so clearly in his own appreciation of the actions of the “collective unconscious” and the “compensatory” modes of its operation in the “conscious” behaviour of both himself and his patients. Jung believed that these “compensatory” modes were the basis for Nietzsche’s principal books[38].  Such appreciation depends on an understanding of the importance of this compensatory mechanism, and on how consciously, if with difficulty, we must be able to perceive the results of our own unconscious motivations in relation to our everyday life.  It is well understood by scholars of psychology that Nietzsche was aware of this part of his nature and willingly displayed it in his writings.  His closer associates, of whom there were but few, knew that he was not always in control of his manifestations during his ordinary life. While he himself recognized the many I’s that are within us, he was no more able than we are to keep his attention focused on any one of them. In the end, Nietzsche’s own neurotic nature eventually got the better of him and eleven years before his death he became hopelessly insane.

            It is through this sense of meaning, conveyed to us so strongly through Nietzsche’s publications that we are enabled to attempt to understand our own natures, prospects and preferences. The observable contrasts and their reconciliation, such as captured by Jung’s later concept of “enantiodromia”, were certainly the springboards from which Nietzsche’s understanding of our unconscious need for compensation arose. 

We are familiar with the image of the eastern Yin and Yang graphically showing a possible balancing and the working together of opposites (Figure 30).

Figure 30. The Yin and Yang symbol[39].

 Jung introduced the term “individuation” as the synthetic process of “integrating the unconscious opposites”[40].   Elsewhere he defines it more specifically as a “syzygy of energies” that is usually the anima/animus pair, but also reflects other "opposites," as we have seen in his treatment of our rational and irrational types. He uses it in the sense that it must be a “completing” process.  It brings the elements composing it together into a new form of “wholeness”, an integration of opposites [41]. That is, it is an illustration of the process of bringing the wholeness of “the one” into a state of consciousness in a single “fell swoop”. Jung calls these actions a process of “natural transformation”; that is, they comprise a form that accomplishes the aim of “the union of opposites” into a completely new level of human being.

In Jungian psychoanalysis, individuation is treated in the therapeutic, medical context of patient care. According to Stein[42], therapy is fundamentally geared toward promoting and facilitating, or toward unblocking and restarting, the individuation process. He lays out three main stages of the individuation process and two major crisis periods. The three stages of individuation are: 

“a)    the containment/nurturance (i.e., the maternal, or in Neumann’s terminology the ‘matriarchal’) stage;

b)    the adapting/adjusting (i.e., the paternal, or, again in Neumann’s terminology, the ‘patriarchal’) stage; and, 

c)     the centering/integrating (in Neumann’s terminology, the individual stage).

These can be coordinated with Erickson’s seven stages of psychological development. The two major crises of individuation fall in the transitions between these stages, the first between adolescence and early adulthood and the second during midlife.”

From this perspective, individuation is a natural process that can be traced distinctly in an individual’s psychological development. From a medical perspective, most individuals go through this process of individuation without becoming medical patients in need of psychoanalytical treatment. From the perspective of this book, we inquire as to where the Jungian use of the term individuation fits on the spectrum of self-study leading to the arising of a Sense of Self. General medical objectives do not deal with an individual’s pursuit of enlightenment, which is more generally the interest of religion, but are we able to place individuation in a useful context related to the question of the strength of our own wish for a sense of Being?

 Jung wrote: 

     “Being that has soul is living being. Soul is the living thing in man that which lives of it and causes like.  Therefore God breathed into Adam a living breath that he might live. With her cunning play of illusions the soul lures into life the inertness of matter that does not want to live. She makes us believe incredible things, that life may be lived.  She is full of snares and traps, in order that man should fall, should reach the earth, entangling himself there so that life should be lived; as Eve in the garden of Eden could not rest content until she had convinced Adam of the goodness of the forbidden apple.  Were it not for the leaping and twinkling of the soul, man would rot away in his greatest passion, idleness.  A certain kind of reasonableness is its advocate, and a certain kind of mortality adds its blessing.  But to have soul is the whole venture of life, for soul is a life-giving demon who plays his elfin game above and below human existence, for which reason - in the realm of dogma - he is threatened and propitiated with superhuman punishments and blessings that go far beyond the possible deserts of human beings.  Heaven and hell are the fates meted out to the soul and not to civilized man, who in his nakedness and timidity would have no idea what to do with himself in a heavenly Jerusalem.[43]”

Failure to reconcile important emotional opposites within us is recognized in psychology as the stuff that neuroses are made from. That is, psychology recognizes the large part of our nature that is associated with unconscious elements.  They appear in habits of body and emotion that we have discussed above, as well as in our unquestioned attitudes towards them. As long as we fail to bring about a relation among these various conflicting functionings, we are liable to become trapped into struggles between what we think we want, and what is ordained by the unconscious sides of our nature. As Jung[44] put it:

“Underlying our appetites are desires; underlying our desires are needs; and underlying our needs are goals. At each level of the peeling away of the layers of our unrecognized motivations, we encounter new sets of contradictory elements that may command the field unless they are resolved by being seen in their successively broader settings.” 

Psychoanalysis has been used to show that as long as these contradictory elements are held separate from one another, they create tensions that inhibit a development that depends on the free circulation of energies. The “impeded” energy easily explodes into irrational behaviour. So, for example, is explained the zealousness of religious "temperance" leaders, or the immoderacy of the modern activist environmentalists, whose externalized moral judgments, fortified by tensions, prevent them from recognizing their own unconscious urges to violence. On both sides it is seen as justifiable righteous anger in the face of perceived evil. 

The process of resolving unrecognized and possibly deeply fundamental dichotomies or contradictions in our nature was termed by Jung a process of enantiodromia [45]. This remarkable word for a remarkable phenomenon he credits to the Greek Heraclitus, who recognized the inevitable "running contrariwise" of the forces within us. By enantiodromia Jung meant the process that makes the tug-of-war between alternatives relatively unimportant. It is a process through which the opposing forces are enabled to flow together in such a way as to provide an under-current of energy for the real, higher goals of our lives. It is a phenomenon that is essential to sustaining the kind of development that he called "individuation". It also appears to be a process that ancient knowledge understood. It lies behind the resolution among disparate forces that the stories personify in the form of oppositions between gods of all cultures and time periods from the Sumerian Enlil and Enki, Ancient Egyptian Seth and Osiris and the Christian dichotomy of God and Satan. 

The need for a neutralizing higher sense of purpose between the polar opposites of our ordinary life points to a direction that can be seen and understood in relation to simple events. It may show up in the simple reluctance to undertake studying for an exam or beginning to start writing an essay. Our lives are filled with other almost trivial examples: the struggle between eating or not eating that extra piece of cake must surely take into account the present strength of my aim to lose weight. If I "think" about it too long, would I go jogging? And how does this state of initial resistance to physical exertion compare with the sense of being alive that appears after the effort has been successfully undertaken? The feeling that I "should" get up in the morning, versus the delicious warmth of lying in bed, may easily be resolved when I remember that I wanted to go enjoy a quiet relaxing day of fishing. Even the automatic tendency to snap back at a neighbour's stupid remark, or react to his accidental intrusion on a corner of my new, carefully laid-out lawn, may disappear altogether if I remember, in time, that I want to borrow his brand-new lawnmower, and he won't lend it if he is angry with me.

In these examples of opposites, when I compare the two levels of awareness of which I have direct experience, it is apparent that my sense of purpose requires a centre of attention in me that cannot be found in the automatic reactions. In the sleep of reaction between unconscious opposites there is something missing, and that something is, in fact, an awareness of myself! The sense of awakening to a larger framework that allows release from the tension between opposites has in every case an element of standing aside from them. To the habitual ordinary mind one must add a freedom in the emotional energies to generate an active awareness at the very site of reaction and that invites a balanced response. In encounters with my neighbour, for example, the added element of perspective that accompanies the attention of self-awareness enables a freedom from my reactive temper. The energy is enabled to flow in the service of another, broader and more desirable purpose. The examples we use may describe minor incidents, but experience shows us that more than incidental effects can be involved. That is, most of our personal examples are trivial compared to the levels of opposites that are represented in the stories.

Jung is at pains to point out that by the process of enantiodromia he does not mean a disappearance of the formerly opposing forces or simply an awareness of their differences. Instead he intends to draw attention to the development of the perspective that allows us to learn that the level at which we encounter opposites is not the level at which we find our purposes to be best served. In order to learn to live with such forces we have to find within us a level of understanding that is able to make use of the energies that would otherwise be tied up in unconscious oppositions. They are inevitably kept separated by our various partial appreciations of ourselves, by our failure to be attentive either to the many "I's" or to the different levels at which they appear. Study of examples given in the cultural stories may, in fact, be a particularly effective way of establishing the actuality of the scales at which different levels may appear, enabling us to better understand the often unrecognized levels of phenomena that are of such importance in our experiences.

To undertake a bridging between opposites requires an additional force; one that is characteristic of a different level of being than the elementary oppositions themselves. This missing force seems to be a necessary sense of myself and my aim in relation to the opposing elements[46]. To step outside the points of conflict between the existing forces, we need to create in ourselves a separate place to move to. This place is one we recognize as giving us a sense of unity, quite beyond the oppositions. This is a principle that the ancients clearly intended that we be able to examine through myth, and one to which we alluded earlier in this discussion. 

            Another way that the reconciliation of opposites can be represented visually is in the Vesica piscis of Sacred Geometry[47]  (Figure 31). The reconciliation of the opposites creates a new area between the two circles.

Figure 31. The Vesica piscis[48].

Figure 32 shows how the simple Vesica piscis can express many important creative irrational relations in Sacred Geometry such as the Golden Ratio.

Figure 32. The Vesica piscis, shown above, and below, its representation to include geometric directions for its construction[49].

We believe that these two processes of individuation and enantiodromia are different aspects of the rarely explicitly appreciated but essential phenomenon of “transformation”. In the case of individuation we are envisaging a longer time scale than is implied with the term enantiodromia[50]. This latter word we use in a sense of the immediate completing of a particular finite process; completing a particular phenomenon that may be only part of a longer developmental process.  What arises from this union is an obligatory successor point of view that can then become the beginning of a new encounter in another process that is logically distinguishable as the beginning of a new event at a higher level of understanding.  

As Jung well understood, this transformation into a totally new state always depends on the union of an original set of opposites.  It is the union of the original “do” or “don’t” opposites resolved into a new understanding that has been illustrated as a natural part of the process of joke-telling by the Sufi writer Rumi[51] as we presented in the last Chapter and by Arthur Koestler[52]. As Koestler points out, the unexpected resolution of an opposition set up by the joke-teller always results in a sudden, “explosive” but harmless energy release, of the sort shown by the laughter elicited in joke telling. It results in an unexpected change from one level of thought to a quite new level; one that is a logically unexpected event that nevertheless evokes that sense of agreement that is always at a level of understanding above where the original confrontation took place.  Jung termed this process an enantiodromia to express the nature of the process of “arising” that is experienced at the always new level of understanding that is unveiled. That is, the phenomenon of “enantiodromia” gives rise to a complex, if delicate, process of an immediate increase in the sense of personal understanding to a new level, which, as might be said in English colloquial language is “no joke”(!)  in the sense that it accomplishes the needed defusing of the short-term build-up of energy in the original confrontation of opposites.

Psychoanalysis and the Creative Irrational

What has this discussion on Nietzsche and Jung provided us in the way of presenting the importance of the creative irrational to individual and species success? In the late 18th and early 19th Century these researchers were forced to face the irrational unconscious in their efforts to understand and treat their patients. What they found is of use to our present day efforts to observe and appreciate the necessary balance between our rational and irrational sides. Rather then the common approach at the time of denying and burying the irrational impulses, they found great profitability in recognizing and supporting that sides of our nature that could not be denied. The creative irrational of humans is essential to our full sense of Being.

—— Chapter 9: Love, Comedy and Mystery: Power the Irrational — Awakening Higher Consciousness ——

———— Table of Contents ———————————-

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrich_Nietzsche

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigmund_Freud

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Adler

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodor_Reik

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Jung

[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor Frankl

[7] Kaufmann, W. 1959. The Portable Nietzsche. Penguin Books.

[8] http://www.biography.com/people/carl-jung-9359134

[9] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich Nietzsche.

[10] Nietzsche, F. 2003. The Birth of Tragedy. Penguin Classics.

[11] Nietzsche, F. 2003. Thus Spake Zarathustra. Penguin Classics.

[12] Nietzsche, F. 2003. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Penguin Classics.

[13] https://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/jksadegh/A Good Atheist Secularist Sceptical Book Collection/Also Sprach Zarathustra Nietzsche  English_Deutsch final.pdf – pp. 432

[14] Dickie, L.M. and P.R. Boudreau. 2015. Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer. Inner Traditions.

[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thus_Spoke_Zarathustra

[16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dying-and-rising_god

[17] Dickie, L.M. and P.R. Boudreau. 2015. Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egypt and Sumer. Inner Traditions.

[18] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_again_(Christianity)

[19] Nietzsche, F. 2003. The Birth of Tragedy. Penguin Classics.

[20] Nietzsche, F. 2003. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Penguin Classics.

[21] Jung, C.G. 1958.  Psychology and Religion:  West and East.  Vol. 11, The Bollingen Foundation, New York. 261 pp.

[22] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self_in_Jungian_psychology

[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Individuation

[24] Jung, C.G. 1961.  Memories, Dreams and Reflections. Random House, New York. 

[25] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Genealogy_of_Morality

[26] Jung, C.G. 1953. Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. Vol. 7. The Collected Works.  Bollingen Series XX.  Pantheon Books. Princeton University Press. 329 pp.

[27] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance

[28] Shaw, F.S. 2010. Notes on The Next Attention: Chandolin 1993-2000. Indications Press, New York. 360 pp.

[29] Kaufmann, W.  1974.  Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. (4th edition) Princeton University Press. 532pp.

[30] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philology

[31] Nietzsche, F. 2003. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Penguin Classics.

[32] Nietzsche, F. 2003. The Birth of Tragedy. Penguin Classics.

[33] Dickie, L.M. and P.R. Boudreau. 2015. Awakening Higher Consciousness: Guidance from Ancient Egyptian and Sumer. Inner Traditions. Vermont

[34] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo

[35] Kingsley, P. 2003. Reality. The Golden Sufi Centre Publishing, Inverness, California.

[36] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dionysus

[37] Jung, C.G. 1965. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Random House.

[38] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_Nietzsche

[39] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yin_and_yang

[40] Jung, C.G. 1959. Collected Works, vol. 9.1: The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.  Bollingen Series. XX. Pantheon Books.

[41] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadow_(psychology)

[42] http://murraystein.com/individuation.shtml

[43] Jung, C.G. 1959.  The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious.  Volume 9.1 of the Collected Works. Bollingen Series XX.  Pantheon Books. Pp. 26-27.

[44] Jung, C.G. 1953. Psychology and Alchemy. Routledge and Kegan Paul, London. 563 pp. 

[45] Jung, C.G. 1953. Two Essays in Analytical Psychology. vol. 7. Bollingen Series XX, Pantheon Books, New York. 329 pp.

[46] Ouspensky, P.D. 1949. In Search of the Miraculous. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. New York and London.

[47] Lawlor, R.  1992.  Sacred Geometry, Philosophy and Practice.  Thames and Hudson, London.

[48] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vesica_piscis

[49] http://portal.groupkos.com/index.php?title=POVRay_scene_Vesica_pisces.pov

[50] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enantiodromia

[51] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rumi

[52] Koestler, A. 1969. “The Act of Creation”.  Hutchinson of London. 491pp.