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Carl Jung, balance and individuation

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One of Jung’s (many!) insights was the drive to find balance from which to individuate; to grow fully into our potential. Balance is dynamic, and between different dimensions within each of us, and between us. Three of these dimensions have been popularised by Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isobel Myers with the Myers-Briggs Personality Test and Typology. These are , Thinking-Feeling and Sensing-Intuition.

Carl Jung. Dynamic Balance and Individuation
These are discussed in Jung’s book – “Psychological Types”. However Jung saw these as fluid states rather than ways of categorising people. He did not agree with Briggs and Myers. Rather weare, each of us, a complex of each of the 16 MBTI typologies.

It is balance between these states that we should seek as we change and grow. If we express too much of one aspect, this sets up a force pulling us toward the other. For instance if we spend too much time extroverted then we develop a need to spend time alone ( and vice versa). As Jung says:

”Identification with one particular function at once produces a tension of opposites. The more compulsive the one-sidedness, and the more untamed the libido which streams off to one side, the more daemonic it becomes” Carl Jung on Psychological Types

It is not that we all should aim for some kind of grey average at the centre of each of the dimensions. Rather, the opposite. Jung saw our whole purpose as what he called “individuation”; within which there is a search for increasingly anuthentic expression of our true Self. This involves bringing to consciousness knowledge of that which is within us, and its connection to the transpersonal. This is anything but some kind of dumbing down. Indeed..

“A conscious capacity for one-sidedness is a sign of the highest culture, but involuntary one-sidedness, i.e., the inability to be anything but one-sided, is a sign of barbarism” Carl Jung, Collected Works

Eric Berne and Transaction Analysis

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Eric Berne brought Freudian thinking into everyday use; much as Myers and Briggs did for Carl Jung’s typology. He observed that we can understand our own and other people’s ego-states through our interactions with each other. He liked our interplay to a series of “transactions”, which we can then think about. His seminal book was “The Games People Play”, and it is extremely accessible.

His ideas have some overlap with Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT), in that he made a “contract” with patients about how they wanted to change and then worked to effect that.

He represented our internal ego-states as Parent, Adult and Child. Since each of us has these states within us we can then analysis our interactions with others in these terms. So that, for instance, a “transaction” between my Child and your Child is very different from that between my Child and your Parent.

These internal states are – for Eric Berne – each a part of our ego. They don’t for instance translate across to Sigmund Freud’s Superego, Ego and I’d.

Transaction Analysis (TA) can be extremely effective; for good or ill. It is used in sales training by some very large companies. For instance an initial Child-Child interaction – “come out to play” – can create an immediate bond, which then is translated into Adult-Adult (typically by asking open questions), from which the needs of a client can be ascertained. However the power of TA can be used to manipulate as well as to break ice or to understand one’s own internal ego-states and from that understanding to effect change.

Berne’s thinking has been taken forward for instance by Thomas Harris in his books “I’m OK, You’re OK” and “Staying OK”, and James Redfield’s “Celestine Prophecy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Berne

Duality, Love and Evolution

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We think in terms of opposing forces, opposites. Duality flows  from the fact of boundary created as we separate from the whole of existence – initially physically at birth, and then psychically in infancy. This schism has been expressed in many ways, often as opposing forces.For instance – good / evil ;life / death; aggressive / erotic ; Me / Not Me ; extrovert / introvert. I believe that the point of duality is in our response to it. There is a fundamental difference in outcome between choice between, and integration of – opposites.

Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein conceived of opposing Life and Death instincts. However surely a “Death” instinct is incompatible with evolution, what purpose is served by a “Death” instinct? More natural is Donald Winnicott’s expression of an Aggressive component, born of opposition and an Erotic component, born of complementarity – the birth of these components arising as an infant realises that there is a Me and a Not-Me. Carl Jung conceived of the struggle to integrate opposing forces. Many of us are familiar with the Myers-Briggs personality typing that arises from Jung with its 4 dimensions –  Extrovert-Introvert; Thinking-Feeling; Sensing-Intuition; and Judging-Perceiving. From the dawn of our species we have observed the difference between Light and Dark and described our nature as Good or Evil. Martin Buber gives us the double-dual-whammy of I-Thou way of being “over against” I-It.

“There is, Buber shows, a radical difference between man’s attitude to other men and his attitude to things. The attitude to other men is a relation between persons, to things it is a connexion with objects. ..These two attitudes represent the basic twofold situation of human life, the former constitutes the world of THOU and the latter the world of IT” Ronald Gregor Smith, translator of Ich Und Du

It appears then that fundamental to our reaction to the fact of our existence; woven into the fabric of our way of thinking and being, is duality – expressed as an opposition of forces.

What then is our response? Is it passive as in choice or balance or active – as in process or integration? Admitting polarity in all things – what should be our reaction. Do we choose – for instance between Good or Evil? Should we seek balance between different drives into a kind of dynamic equilibrium – for instance striving to be at the centre point of extroversion and introversion? Is reality in fact a process budding eternally at the very boundary that arises out of duality – life within Winnicott’s Transitional Space or Whitehead’s point of prehension? Or is it there a further truth behind this duality – the point being what arises out of unification of opposites ? After all paraphrasing Beethoven – there cannot be loud without soft, it is in contrast that music arises.

Perhaps its personal taste. If so then, at least for me, integration of duality is our purpose, and one which is unceasing because there is a counterveiling force of differentiation. There is a flow of existence which is driven by splitting and unification, birth and death. Duality is dynamic not static and the fundamental creative contrast is actually that of differentiation and integration. Freud’s Life/Death instincts replaced by Integration/Differentiation forces. This isn’t an original thought, and it’s not mine. It is inherent in the world-view of eastern tradition (Yin-Yang etc) and possibly our western ancestors (see Wisdom of the Wyrd, Brian Bates). It was  one of Carl Jung’s fundamental insights – “Much of Carl Jung’s writings are linked by the theme that mental illness is characterized by disunity of the personality, whilst mental health is manifested by unity” (Jung: Selected Writings, Anthony Storr).

If then we conceive of a schism-powered flow, what is the destination and what is the fundamental motive impulse? Well there you have Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the fundamental duality being spirit and material – an inner and outer. For him underlying existence is the force of Love, which powers evolution. An evolution conceived as complexification through spheres of the physical, chemical, biological to that of ideas – until we become conscious of God that is Love that is all. “There is a duality of material and spiritual, which he calls the “without” and “within”. He traces the development of the “within”, an evolution of consciousness. He names man as a stage in that process associated with the phase-shift from the evolution of biology to the evolution of ideas”.

In Teilhard de Chardin’s words:

“If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form. . . . Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”