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Carl Gustav

Jung
The Undiscovered Self

London and New York

Gegenwart und Zukunft first published 1957
by Rascher, Zurich
English edition first published 1958
by Routledge & Kegan Paul
First published in Routledge Classics 2002
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s
collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 1958 Carl Gustav Jung

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted

or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without
permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0-203-99427-2 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0–415–27838–4 (hbk)

ISBN 0–415–27839–2 (pbk)
To my friend Fowler McCormick
 C ONTENTS

1 The Plight of the Individual in Modern Society 1

2 Religion as the Counterbalance to
Mass-Mindedness 13
3 The Position of the West on the Question of
Religion 23
4 The Individual’s Understanding of Himself 31
5 The Philosophical and the Psychological
Approach to Life 51
6 Self-Knowledge 63
7 The Meaning of Self-Knowledge 75
 1
THE PLIGHT OF THE
INDIVIDUAL IN
MODERN SOCIETY

What will the future bring? From time immemorial this ques-
tion has occupied men’s minds, though not always to the
same degree. Historically, it is chiefly in times of physical,
political, economic and spiritual distress that men’s eyes turn
with anxious hope to the future, and when anticipations,
utopias and apocalyptic visions multiply. One thinks, for
instance, of the chiliastic expectations of the Augustan age at
the beginning of the Christian Era, or of the changes in the
spirit of the West which accompanied the end of the first
millennium. Today, as the end of the second millennium
draws near, we are again living in an age filled with apoca-
lyptic images of universal destruction. What is the signifi-
cance of that split, symbolized by the “Iron Curtain,” which

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 the undiscovered self

divides humanity into two halves? What will become of our

civilization, and of man himself, if the hydrogen bombs begin
to go off, or if the spiritual and moral darkness of State
absolutism should spread over Europe?
We have no reason to take this threat lightly. Everywhere in
the West there are subversive minorities who, sheltered by
our humanitarianism and our sense of justice, hold the
incendiary torches ready, with nothing to stop the spread of
their ideas except the critical reason of a single, fairly intelli-
gent, mentally stable stratum of the population. One should
not, however, overestimate the thickness of this stratum. It
varies from country to country in accordance with national
temperament. Also, it is regionally dependent on public edu-
cation and is subject to the influence of acutely disturbing
factors of a political and economic nature. Taking plebiscites
as a criterion, one could on an optimistic estimate put its
upper limit at about 40 per cent of the electorate. A rather
more pessimistic view would not be unjustified either, since
the gift of reason and critical reflection is not one of man’s
outstanding peculiarities, and even where it exists it proves to
be wavering and inconstant, the more so, as a rule, the bigger
the political groups are. The mass crushes out the insight and
reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this
necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever
the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.
Rational argument can be conducted with some prospect
of success only so long as the emotionality of a given situation
does not exceed a certain critical degree. If the affective
temperature rises above this level, the possibility of reason’s
having any effect ceases and its place is taken by slogans and
chimerical wish-fantasies. That is to say, a sort of collective
possession results which rapidly develops into a psychic

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 the plight of the individual in modern society

epidemic. In this state all those elements whose existence is

merely tolerated as asocial under the rule of reason come to
the top. Such individuals are by no means rare curiosities to
be met with only in prisons and lunatic asylums. For every
manifest case of insanity there are, in my estimation, at least
ten latent cases who seldom get to the point of breaking out
openly but whose views and behavior, for all their appearance
of normality, are influenced by unconsciously morbid and
perverse factors. There are, of course, no medical statistics on
the frequency of latent psychoses – for understandable
reasons. But even if their number should amount to less than
ten times that of the manifest psychoses and of manifest
criminality, the relatively small percentage of the population
figures they represent is more than compensated for by the
peculiar dangerousness of these people. Their mental state is
that of a collectively excited group ruled by affective judg-
ments and wish-fantasies. In a state of “collective possession”
they are the adapted ones and consequently they feel quite at
home in it. They know from their own experience the lan-
guage of these conditions and they know how to handle
them. Their chimerical ideas, upborne by fanatical resent-
ment, appeal to the collective irrationality and find fruitful
soil there, for they express all those motives and resentments
which lurk in more normal people under the cloak of reason
and insight. They are, therefore, despite their small number in
comparison with the population as a whole, dangerous as
sources of infection precisely because the so-called normal
person possesses only a limited degree of self-knowledge.
Most people confuse “self-knowledge” with knowledge of
their conscious ego personalities. Anyone who has any ego-
consciousness at all takes it for granted that he knows himself.
But the ego knows only its own contents, not the unconscious

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 the undiscovered self

and its contents. People measure their self-knowledge by

what the average person in their social environment knows of
himself, but not by the real psychic facts which are for the
most part hidden from them. In this respect the psyche
behaves like the body with its physiological and anatomical
structure, of which the average person knows very little too.
Although he lives in it and with it, most of it is totally
unknown to the layman, and special scientific knowledge is
needed to acquaint consciousness with what is known of the
body, not to speak of all that is not known, which also exists.
What is commonly called “self-knowledge” is therefore a
very limited knowledge, most of it dependent on social fac-
tors, of what goes on in the human psyche. Hence one is
always coming up against the prejudice that such and such a
thing does not happen “with us” or “in our family” or
among our friends and acquaintances, and on the other hand,
one meets with equally illusory assumptions about the
alleged presence of qualities which merely serve to cover up
the true facts of the case.
In this broad belt of unconsciousness, which is immune to
conscious criticism and control, we stand defenseless, open to
all kinds of influences and psychic infections. As with all dan-
gers, we can guard against the risk of psychic infection only
when we know what is attacking us, and how, where and
when the attack will come. Since self-knowledge is a matter of
getting to know the individual facts, theories help very little
in this respect. For the more a theory lays claim to universal
validity, the less capable it is of doing justice to the individual
facts. Any theory based on experience is necessarily statistical;
that is to say, it formulates an ideal average which abolishes all
exceptions at either end of the scale and replaces them by an
abstract mean. This mean is quite valid, though it need

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 the plight of the individual in modern society

not necessarily occur in reality. Despite this it figures in the

theory as an unassailable fundamental fact. The exceptions at
either extreme, though equally factual, do not appear in the
final result at all, since they cancel each other out. If, for
instance, I determine the weight of each stone in a bed of
pebbles and get an average weight of 145 grams, this tells me
very little about the real nature of the pebbles. Anyone who
thought, on the basis of these findings, that he could pick up a
pebble of 145 grams at the first try would be in for a serious
disappointment. Indeed, it might well happen that however
long he searched he would not find a single pebble weighing
exactly 145 grams.
The statistical method shows the facts in the light of the
ideal average but does not give us a picture of their empirical
reality. While reflecting an indisputable aspect of reality, it
can falsify the actual truth in a most misleading way. This is
particularly true of theories which are based on statistics. The
distinctive thing about real facts, however, is their individual-
ity. Not to put too fine a point on it, one could say that the real
picture consists of nothing but exceptions to the rule, and
that, in consequence, absolute reality has predominantly the
character of irregularity.
These considerations must be borne in mind whenever
there is talk of a theory serving as a guide to self-knowledge.
There is and can be no self-knowledge based on theoretical
assumptions, for the object of self-knowledge is an individual
– a relative exception and an irregular phenomenon. Hence it
is not the universal and the regular that characterize the indi-
vidual, but rather the unique. He is not to be understood as a
recurrent unit but as something unique and singular which in
the last analysis can neither be known nor compared with
anything else. At the same time man, as member of a species,

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 the undiscovered self

can and must be described as a statistical unit; otherwise

nothing general could be said about him. For this purpose he
has to be regarded as a comparative unit. This results in a
universally valid anthropology or psychology, as the case may
be, with an abstract picture of man as an average unit from
which all individual features have been removed. But it is
precisely these features which are of paramount importance
for understanding man. If I want to understand an individual
human being, I must lay aside all scientific knowledge of the
average man and discard all theories in order to adopt a com-
pletely new and unprejudiced attitude. I can only approach
the task of understanding with a free and open mind, whereas
knowledge of man, or insight into human character, presupposes
all sorts of knowledge about mankind in general.
Now whether it is a question of understanding a fellow
human being or of self-knowledge, I must in both cases leave
all theoretical assumptions behind me. Since scientific know-
ledge not only enjoys universal esteem but, in the eyes of
modern man, counts as the only intellectual and spiritual
authority, understanding the individual obliges me to com-
mit lèse majesté, so to speak, to turn a blind eye to scientific
knowledge. This is a sacrifice not lightly made, for the scien-
tific attitude cannot rid itself so easily of its sense of responsi-
bility. And if the psychologist happens to be a doctor who
wants not only to classify his patient scientifically but also to
understand him as a human being, he is threatened with a
conflict of duties between the two diametrically opposed and
mutually exclusive attitudes of knowledge, on the one hand,
and understanding, on the other. This conflict cannot be
solved by an either-or but only by a kind of two-way
thinking: doing one thing while not losing sight of the other.
In view of the fact that in principle, the positive

6
 the plight of the individual in modern society

advantages of knowledge work specifically to the disadvantage of

understanding, the judgment resulting therefrom is likely to be
something of a paradox. Judged scientifically, the individual
is nothing but a unit which repeats itself ad infinitum and
could just as well be designated with a letter of the alphabet.
For understanding, on the other hand, it is just the unique
individual human being who, when stripped of all those con-
formities and regularities so dear to the heart of the scientist,
is the supreme and only real object of investigation. The doc-
tor, above all, should be aware of this contradiction. On the
one hand, he is equipped with the statistical truths of his
scientific training, and on the other, he is faced with the task
of treating a sick person who, especially in the case of psychic
suffering, requires individual understanding. The more schematic
the treatment is, the more resistances it – quite rightly – calls
up in the patient, and the more the cure is jeopardized. The
psychotherapist sees himself compelled, willy-nilly, to regard
the individuality of a patient as an essential fact in the picture
and to arrange his methods of treatment accordingly. Today,
over the whole field of medicine, it is recognized that the task
of the doctor consists in treating the sick person, not an
abstract illness.
This illustration in the case of medicine is only a special
instance of the problem of education and training in general.
Scientific education is based in the main on statistical truths
and abstract knowledge and therefore imparts an unrealistic,
rational picture of the world, in which the individual, as a
merely marginal phenomenon, plays no role. The individual,
however, as an irrational datum, is the true and authentic
carrier of reality, the concrete man as opposed to the unreal
ideal or normal man to whom the scientific statements refer.
What is more, most of the natural sciences try to represent the

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 the undiscovered self

results of their investigations as though these had come into

existence without man’s intervention, in such a way that the
collaboration of the psyche – an indispensable factor –
remains invisible. (An exception to this is modern physics,
which recognizes that the observed is not independent of the
observer.) So in this respect, too, science conveys a picture of
the world from which a real human psyche appears to be
excluded – the very antithesis of the “humanities.”
Under the influence of scientific assumptions, not only the
psyche but the individual man and, indeed, all individual
events whatsoever suffer a leveling down and a process of
blurring that distorts the picture of reality into a conceptual
average. We ought not to underestimate the psychological
effect of the statistical world picture: it displaces the indi-
vidual in favor of anonymous units that pile up into mass
formations. Science supplies us with, instead of the concrete
individual, the names of organizations and, at the highest
point, the abstract idea of the State as the principle of political
reality. The moral responsibility of the individual is then
inevitably replaced by the policy of the State (raison d’état).
Instead of moral and mental differentiation of the individual,
you have public welfare and the raising of the living standard.
The goal and meaning of individual life (which is the only real
life) no longer lie in individual development but in the policy
of the State, which is thrust upon the individual from outside
and consists in the execution of an abstract idea which ultim-
ately tends to attract all life to itself. The individual is increas-
ingly deprived of the moral decision as to how he should live
his own life, and instead is ruled, fed, clothed and educated as
a social unit, accommodated in the appropriate housing unit,
and amused in accordance with the standards that give pleas-
ure and satisfaction to the masses. The rulers, in their turn, are