We celebrate individualism, or we think we do. We may even worry that we celebrate it too much, wondering whether our culture is too individualistic. Actually, C.G. Jung says, we are terrified of the idea of being an individual. The first thing he says about “The Development of Personality” in a 1934 essay of that title is that “the development of a personality from the germ-state to full consciousness is at once a charisma and a curse, because its first fruit is the conscious and unavoidable segregation of the single individual from the undifferentiated and unconscious herd. This means isolation, and there is no more comforting word for it. Neither family nor society nor position can save him from this fate, nor yet the most successful adaptation to his environment, however smoothly he fits in” (173). He goes on to say bluntly that “To develop one’s own personality is indeed an unpopular undertaking, a deviation that is uncongenial to the herd” (174). The central concept of Jung’s psychology is the “process of individuation,” but he warns that if you choose to embark upon that process, you can expect to be alone: “the vast majority of mankind do not choose their own way, but convention, and consequently develop not themselves but a method and a collective mode of life at the cost of their own wholeness” (174).
Jung was speaking of himself, although not only of himself. In the last few pages of his extraordinary autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, dictated to Aniela Jaffé when he was in his 80’s, he says, “As a child I felt myself to be alone, and I am still, because I know things and must hint at things which others apparently know nothing of, and for the most part do not want to know. Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible” (356). When I first came to consciousness, around the age of 17 or 18, the theme that struck me most powerfully was that of loneliness, especially in the stories of Theodore Sturgeon and Harlan Ellison. Years later, I assumed that stories such as Sturgeon’s “A Saucer of Loneliness” or Ellison’s “Lonelyache” hit me so hard because of adolescence—it was “a phase I was going through,” as they say. I now see that it was the initiation into a permanent condition, and that other writers have expressed it as well—May Sarton in Journal of a Solitude and Rilke, when he said in Letters to a Young Poet that love is “two solitudes that touch each other.” But all this is probably not something you want to put in your profile on a dating site.
Human beings begin as animals, and, like the animals, are governed by what Northrop Frye calls primary concerns. In The Double Vision, he says, “Primary concerns are such things as food, sex, property, and freedom of movement: concerns that we share with animals on a physical level” (6). Abraham Maslow posits a more or less similar hierarchy of “basic needs” that ascend from the physiological to the need for safety, love, and self-esteem. It has been fashionable for decades to say that human identity is entirely socially constructed, but, strictly speaking, that is ideologically motivated nonsense. To say that human beings have instincts is misleading, because we are not hard-wired with unmodifiable patterns of behavior in the way the animals are, but have a latitude of choice about how we fulfill, or perhaps choose not to fulfill, our concerns or needs. Maslow therefore preferred to speak of “instinctoid” rather than fully instinctive behavior. Jung spoke of instincts, but said that the difference between human beings and animals was that, while animals are governed directly by the instincts, human beings developed a process of symbolization that brings the instinctive drives into consciousness. The narrative patterns we call myths and the type of widely communicating images he called archetypes are the expression of deep desires and behavioral patterns made conscious as human concern.
Despite the fact that it is the individual who needs food or sex or safety, the needs themselves are generic and in that sense collective, trans-individual. Besides, we are a highly interdependent, social species, and our needs have to be fulfilled within a social context. Therefore, human concern begins as collective. Myths, and the rituals that dramatize and re-enact them, are collective cultural creations. Frye says in The Critical Path:
We naturally think of a mythology as a human cultural product, but few societies think of their mythologies at the beginning as something that they themselves have created. They think of them rather as a revelation given them from the gods, or their ancestors, or a period before time began. It is particularly law and religious ritual that are most frequently thought of as divinely revealed. A fully developed or encyclopaedic myth comprises everything that it most concerns its society to know, and I shall therefore speak of it as a mythology of concern, or more briefly as a myth of concern. | The myth of concern exists to hold society together, so far as words can help to do this. For it, truth and reality are not directly connected with reason or evidence, but are socially established. What is true, for concern, is what society does and believes in response to authority…In origin, a myth of concern is largely undifferentiated: it has its roots in religion, but religion has also at that stage the function of religio, the binding together of the community in common acts and assumptions. (36)
What Frye is saying here is that a mythology is a set of stories, but in taking on the function of holding society together, it becomes the kind of conceptualized belief system that we call an ideology. Myths emerge from the deep area of the mind that Jung calls the collective unconscious, but when they are adopted as part of an ideology, a system of belief and authority that holds society together, they unfortunately remain collective. Thus, out of a myth of concern emerges an ideology that makes that myth the basis of a system of authority, and out of the social ideology emerge the customs, conventions, manners, and taboos of that society. In the process of socialization, each member of the society is conditioned by those social values and behavior models, but the conditioning is on an unconscious and collective level. The member becomes an adult with a social function, but not an individual. Behavior is still collective—insofar as people are not awakened from the collective and ideological level, they are still ruled by “herd instinct.”
In the United States, the golden age of happy—or seemingly happy—collectivism was the 1950’s and early 1960’s, which is why that period is now looked back upon with such nostalgia. It is a commonplace observation that the sitcoms of that era portrayed “the American way of life” based on a traditional family and a work ethic. But, in Jungian psychology, every society, just like every individual, has a largely unacknowledged shadow side. The American way of life was achieved at the expense of the reduction of women to uneducated housewives totally dependent on men, and the reduction of men to cogs in the corporate machine, as shown both by sociological works with titles such as The Organization Man and literary works like Death of a Salesman. Social unity and harmony were achieved by means of a thoroughgoing conformism based on homogeneity. The middle class ideal was to be Average and Normal, which meant not standing out from the crowd in any way. Everyone looked and acted mostly alike, with racial differences out of sight in ghettoes, sexual differences out of sight “in the closet,” and religious differences effaced by a kind of warm and fuzzy Christianity of good will. I never met a Jewish person until I was in junior high school, and I never met a Muslim in Canton, Ohio at all. What those of us who grew up in that period did not realize was that we were in a bubble, dwelling in a brief moment that could not last, much like the late Victorian period in England. The larger reality was a cultural breakdown that began in the late 18th century but exploded at the time of World War I.
Frye and Jung implicitly agree that the crisis of our time derives from the fact that modernization has disrupted the old myth of concern—including under the term “modernization” the development of science and technology, of capitalism, of democracy, and of a social progressivism that works for equality of groups oppressed by the old myth of concern, including women, people of color, and people of various gender and sexual identifications. The result sounds exactly like what we are undergoing almost a century after Jung wrote his essay:
The mechanism of convention keeps people unconscious, for in that state they can follow their accustomed tracks like blind brutes, without the need for conscious decision. This unintended result of even the best conventions is unavoidable but is no less a terrible danger for that. For when new conventions arise that are not provided for under the old conventions, then, just as with animals, panic is liable to break out among human beings kept unconscious by routine, and with equally unpredictable results. (179)
Panic, blind collective panic, is exactly what we are witnessing in 2024, and the source of the panic is precisely that new conventions are arising that are not provided for under the old conventions. There is an irrational demand that all the changes stop, a demand driven by a fear that turns to resentment, sometimes to outright rage, and, on occasion, to violence. “Blind brutes” is not a very complimentary way of talking, but, after all, some of the behavior on display at the moment is brutish enough. January 6 was a stampede of blind brutes, and on the day I write this a member of Congress advocated vigilante violence against Gaza protestors. Writing between world wars, Jung understood that the chaos of modern times is the result of the death of the Western myth of concern beginning around the time of the French Revolution, which was its first symptom:
The gigantic catastrophes that threaten us today are not elemental happenings of a physical or biological order, but psychic events. To a quite terrifying degree we are threatened by wars and revolutions which are nothing other than psychic epidemics. At any moment several millions of human beings may be smitten with a new madness, and then we shall have another world war or devastating revolution. Instead of being at the mercy of wild beasts, earthquakes, landslides, and inundations, modern man is battered by the elemental forces of his own psyche. This is the World Power that vastly exceeds all other powers on earth. The Age of Enlightenment, which stripped nature and human institutions of gods, overlooked the God of Terror who dwells in the human soul. (177)
A short time ago, many awards were given to Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer, the story of a man who took the Manhattan Project’s goal of splitting the atom and turned it into a weapon, recognizing in the moment he succeeded that he had become a “destroyer of worlds.” Likewise, when the atom of the collectivized psyche or collectivized society—two forms of the same thing—is split, energy is released, but it is destructive energy, a return to chaos. Strikingly, I find that this is not even my own metaphor: Jung anticipated it in 1934, before the atomic bomb: “For the group, because of its unconsciousness, has no freedom of choice, and so psychic activity runs on in it like an uncontrolled law of nature. There is thus set going a chain reaction that comes to a stop only in catastrophe” (178). So far, no one has discovered the secret of nuclear fusion, of putting Humpty Dumpty back together. There are many who rise up to promise it, though, charismatic authoritarian leaders who invite their followers to dissolve themselves into a mass movement, melt themselves down into a collective psyche. They are themselves caught up, however, in the psychic tide, swollen to megalomaniacal proportions in the process that Jung aptly calls inflation. Trump’s MAGA rallies are frightening displays of mob excitement from the outside. For those caught up in their energy, though, they offer a sense of belonging to those who have lost all other sense of community. They lose themselves in that energy in a very real way.
Just the other day, a reader suddenly burst into the discussion forum of the comic strip Foxtrot with a hysterically furious tirade about the Biden administration. The attack was unprovoked: Foxtrot is an innocuous family humor strip, not political satire like Doonesbury. The tirade was a paranoid rant about Biden persecuting his political enemies: in other words, it was a defense against a non-existent attack on what the writer regarded as community. It struck me that I might as well have been listening to an AI, and in a sense I was: there was no actual thought process generating the verbal formulas, no human being on the other end of the line. The human being had been taken over. For all its sound and fury, the message was a robocall, and, like a robocall, directed at a random target. It seemed to me the ultimate and tragic loss of the individual subsumed into the authoritarian collective.
You might think that the intellectual world might mount a defense of individualism in the face of the danger of mass movements. Unfortunately, you would be wrong. The period of roughly 1965-1990 saw fierce controversy in the realm of literary and cultural theory, but in these “theory wars,” as they were sometimes called, there was a marked tendency to attack the tradition of individualism that derived from Renaissance humanism and became the liberal tradition of the 19th and early 20th centuries. “Bourgeois humanism” was in fact a term of dismissal applied to people like Frye—absurdly enough, since Frye’s views, however urbanely expressed, were rooted in the visionary revolutionary radicalism he derived from Blake. Critics of Anatomy of Criticism took it as a defense of the traditional “canon” of supposed Great Works of the Western tradition. A canon is indeed a form of collectivism, and the traditional canon did indeed reflect the social values of earlier times, and, like the society that created them, excluded most women writers and writers of color. The fact that some very canonical writers, starting with Shakespeare, were not strictly heterosexual was politely, all too politely, ignored. The breaking open of the old canon in the name of “difference” was a very healthy thing, the opening of a homogenous in-group to new forms of individuality. And the Anatomy was in fact its harbinger. It does not reinforce the canon, but rather replaces it with what it calls the “order of words,” the community formed by all works of literature, “great” or otherwise, united by common structural patterns but utterly diverse otherwise. Every work belongs, no matter whether a critic approves of its style or ideology, no matter whether it is high culture or popular culture, “great” or “minor.”
Regrettably, many critics were so eager to attack the kind of middle-class “individualism” that was really just conformism in disguise that they invented theories that denied the concept of the individual altogether. The cultural critic Michel Foucault spoke not of the individual but of the “subject,” in the sense of “subject to.” The subject is not merely subjected to the various power systems of society but is in fact an effect of power systems, a kind of epiphenomenon. Foucault does not deny human agency, but the, well, effect of his theory, which was widely influential, was to regard the individual in much the way that the old Calvinist theory of predestination did. Yes, we have the power to choose, but our choices are predetermined by what we are, and we are the product of interlocking systems of power. This is the myth of concern turned into a nightmare of imprisonment, and indeed the prison, of which Foucault made a famous study, Discipline and Punish, was a metaphor for a demonic myth of concern long before him. “Denmark’s a prison,” said Hamlet bitterly, and the prison becomes an image of a persecuting society in Dickens’ Little Dorrit. The prison and the law are related images of what in more undisplaced mythical form would be the labyrinth, like that in which Athenian youths were sacrificed to the Minotaur. Dicken’s Bleak House was based on an actual law case that took not years but decades to conclude. It has become newly topical now that we are marinating in frustration through seemingly endless delays, waiting for Donald Trump’s multiple trials even to begin, let alone to conclude. Marxist critics regarded capitalism as a system that constructed consumers’ identities by constructing their desires. The bourgeois consumer was a puppet of ideology. Marxists themselves, of course, were liberated from the false consciousness of consumerist ideology, but the theorists had a problem explaining how they themselves were free of the conditioning that presumably shaped all other individuals. Ultimately, Louis Althusser, influenced by the radical psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, arrived at the conclusion that everyone, Marxists included, were subjects constructed by ideology. Lacan lay stress on the crucial role of language in constructing the subject, leading back once again to the conclusion indicated in the title of Fredric Jameson’s book The Prisonhouse of Language. In their most radical form, such theories were not just saying that individuals were imprisoned in power systems. They were at least implying that the individual was an illusion generated by power systems. Most of them denied that they were nihilists, but their toes seemed at least to be on the edge of the abyss.
To arrive at a more adequate theory of individuation, let us go back behind the crisis of the modern period to examine the features of a functioning mythology of concern. Frye makes a distinction between primitive and mature societies that will prove useful so long as we stress that he is not using “primitive” in its colonialist sense, namely, as a society that does not have capitalism or the Internet and so is ripe for domination and exploitation by both. Rather, in The Double Vision, he says,
A primitive or embryonic society is one in which the individual is thought of as primarily a function of the social group. In all such societies a hierarchical structure of authority has to be set up to ensure that the individual does not get too far out of line. A mature society, in contrast, understands that its primary aim is to develop a genuine individuality in its members. In a fully mature society the structure of authority becomes a function of the individuals within it, all of them, without distinctions of sex, class, or race, living, loving, thinking, and producing with a sense of space around them. Throughout history practically all societies have been primitive ones in our present sense: a greater maturity and a genuine concern for the individual peeps out occasionally, but is normally smothered as society collapses back again into its primitive form. | The reason for this is that we all belong to something before we are anything, and the primitive structure has all the vast power of human inertia and passive social conditioning on its side. (8)
“Primitive” thus means collective: the individual is subordinated to the group. It comes as a surprise, perhaps, that the idea of individual immortality is a fairly late invention. In ancient Egypt, only the Pharaoh was immortal, because he was a god incarnate. It was only in late period Egyptian religion, with the cult of Osiris, that immortality was promised to all the god’s followers. Likewise in the Old Testament, belief in personal immortality was a late Jewish invention. Before that, the dead survived only as shades in sheol, a gloomy underworld very much like the one visited by Odysseus in the Odyssey, where Achilles survives but is so miserable that he says he would rather be a hired farm hand and alive than dead and Achilles. What are called the Mystery religions grew up as a counterbalance to this dreary belief. While their actual details are shrouded in, um, mystery, the Eleusinian mysteries and other such religions involved a ritual death to the natural self and rebirth as an immortal self. These may have influenced both Plato’s and Paul’s ideas on the immortality of the soul. But, again, these are later developments. Originally, human beings were like the flowers: they flourished, died, and returned to the earth. Flowers are beautiful, but they are generic. More flowers return next year, but we cannot really tell them apart.
In both the visual arts and literature, the growth of individuality can be traced by the appearance of portraits of individualized personalities as opposed to types. Greek sculpture develops from Cycladic figurines that lack faces to the hieratic figures of the Archaic period to the realism of the Classic period. The same development from the stylized to the realistic happens in the movement from Romanesque to Gothic in medieval art. In addition, the human figures on the great cathedrals gradually emerge from being halfway part of their stone background to being fully detached and in the round, a wonderful visual metaphor for the emergence of individual personalities out of the collective unconscious. The same development from types to vividly individual characters occurs in literature. Despite some prejudice on the part of critics, type characters are not necessarily inferior to realistic portraits. Melville’s Ahab is not realistic in the way that a character in a Henry James novel is realistic. His larger-than-life, titanic personality is archetypal, which is why he speaks in thunderous Shakespearean-style rhetoric rather than conversational style. It was Stan Lee’s great innovation in superhero comics to create characters that were, within limits, real human beings. They are often contrasted with the supervillains, who are usually types, and who usually speak in the stilted rhetoric of melodrama. Galactus would have an impossible time trying to order at McDonalds. (He would probably give up and absorb the entire restaurant for its energy content). Literature since the Renaissance has developed new genres to enable the expression of a greater individuality than previously, including the personal essay, more or less invented by Montaigne, who was for good reason a favorite of Shakespeare’s, and, of course, the novel, which is capable of greater interiority than any previous form of storytelling.
How does one become an individual, as opposed to merely a person? To be an individual is by definition to be unique, and to be unique is, in the eyes of the conventional people who are always the majority in this world, to be a bit “weird.” An odd thing happens in class discussions. When a student begins a response with a tentative, “This is probably weird, but…” I know I am going to get an original insight, something other than the usual intelligent but generic comment. I have to encourage students, both in discussion and in their essays, to risk not saying the expectable thing but the thing that has come to them intuitively and unexpectedly. It is often out of some deeper place—and the place it came from is their real individuality. Newsletter synchronicity strikes again: while writing this newsletter, I read an interview in Locus magazine with artist Winona Nelson. The introduction says, “Winona is a queer, Two Spirit Indigenous person, and her fine art often focuses on the stories and history of her tribe, the Ojibwe of Minnesota, and on gender and diversity.” When asked, “Is there one thing you wish you could have learned early on about making art,” she replied: “I am a teacher in addition to being a working artist, and the advice I give my students is to double down on the things that make you different. Conforming to the field might help you get some work in the short term, but by making your work look like others’, you make yourself interchangeable with them as well…Be your own weird self” (57)
This may sound, yeah, weird, but I think individuality may sometimes develop around some buried secret that is considered shameful, not necessarily because it is evil but because it is not socially respectable. That secret may act like the grain of sand that produces a pearl through irritation, through the desire to lacquer the secret with some kind of iridescent beauty. The secret may be a version of what Jung calls the shadow, the problematic and often unacknowledged part of oneself. Strange to think that wrestling with one’s inferior self may be what makes one grow, maybe even to greatness.
It is hard to pin down cause and effect, but I wonder how much having to learn to cope with his stutter had to do with Joe Biden’s growth into one of the better, if not best presidents in our history. For some people, it may be early poverty and humble social origin, as with Abraham Lincoln, who was not born into the elite and whose features were not considered handsome. How many of the remarkable cultural achievements of the Jewish people are intimately connected with their outcast status? How many geniuses have struggled with mental illness, like Van Gogh; with blindness, like Milton or James Joyce; with disabilities, like Stephen Hawking? And of course there are all the dirty secrets of our sexual desires, whether that means being gay, or trans, or drawn to one of the many “perversions” that seem so much harder to admit to than sexual orientation. Once, teaching about Abraham Maslow, I had a student who wrote about how, in the lingo, she was a “serious painslut,” and that BDSM was her path towards self-knowledge and self-actualization. I have no doubt that many people will consider that quite…perverse. But I don’t care. It was a brilliant paper, eloquently arguing the case for not keeping to the sunny side of life. And, by the way, BDSM fantasies were apparently shared by the theologian Paul Tillich. What does that mean? To me, it means that the tree stretching its branches into the sunlight, up towards the spirit, has roots that go down into the dark, fertile soil. In Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung suggests how personal secrets, one’s hidden private side, may develop into an intuition of the secret side of life itself:
It is important to have a secret, a premonition of things unknown. It fills life with something impersonal, a numinosum. A man who has never experienced that has missed something important. He must sense that he lives in a world which in some respects is mysterious; that things happen and can be experienced which remain inexplicable; that not everything which happens can be anticipated. The unexpected and the incredible belong in this world. Only then is life whole. For me the world has from the beginning been infinite and ungraspable. (356)
Even in societies that were “primitive” in Frye’s sense of collective, the process of individuation was recognized in the form of the myth of the hero, as Joseph Campbell rightly saw in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). He has been taken to task by some critics who understand the hero myth in a reductionist sense, in which the hero is a kind of macho libertarian, a power fantasy for immature adolescent boys. Jung recognizes that the true heroes were those who dared to follow, as Thoreau said, a different drummer:
They towered up like mountain peaks above the mass that still clung to its collective fears, its beliefs, laws, and systems, and boldly chose their own way. To the man in the street it has always seemed miraculous that anyone should turn aside from the beaten track with its known destinations, and strike out on the steep and narrow path leading into the unknown. Hence it was believed that such a man, if not actually crazy, was possessed by a daemon or a god… According to the Nordic view they had snake’s eyes, and there was something peculiar about their birth or descent… | What is it, in the end, that induces a man to go his own way and rise out of unconscious identity with the mass as out of a swathing mist?.... | It is what is commonly called a vocation: an irrational factor….True personality is always a vocation and puts its trust in it as in a God, despite its being, as the ordinary man would say, only a personal feeling. But vocation acts like a law of God from which there is no escape. (175)
I have written a previous newsletter on vocation, pointing out that Maslow agrees with Jung: all self-actualized people that he had known were possessed by a sense of vocation. They had not just a life but a mission. The idea of a vocation is simply alien to most people, who think of it as something specialized that only certain atypical people have. But without it, people are generic. They are not individuals—nice people, yes, but not individuals. Most people are content with being nice people, and I am absolutely not judging them for it. For one thing, I like nice people. But especially because I understand why they don’t want to be individuals. You look around, especially if you are searching for a life companion, and there is no one like you, no one who shares the vocation you are passionate about, no one perhaps who even understands that vocation as a quest, a kind of service to an ideal, or at least to the mystery Jung speaks of—not just as a hobby on which you are fixated in some kind of obsessive, self-centered way, a way that takes time and attention away from time shared with them.
Jung does not deny the price that has to be paid for vocation, and thus for individuality. What he does say is this:
If a man knows more than others, he becomes lonely. But loneliness is not necessarily inimical to companionship, for no one is more sensitive to companionship than the lonely man, and companionship only thrives when each individual remembers his individuality and does not identify with others. (Memories, 356)
The individual does not belong to the crowd, but even in loneliness there are kindred spirits, who communicate at a distance, like people on mountain tops lighting fires to one another in the dark. As if we were stars, hoping to find that we are members of the same constellation, however wide the dark spaces between us. Some of us become writers, hoping that the message we figuratively put into the bottle and cast into the sea may reach someone, somewhere, somehow, and that it will be understood, and matter.
References
Frye, Northrop. The Critical Path: An Essay on the Social Context of Literary Criticism. Indiana University Press, 1971. Also in ‘The Critical Path’ and Other Writings on Critical Theory: 1963-1975. Edited by Jean O’Grady and Eva Kushner. Volume 27 in The Collected Works of Northrop Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2009.
Frye, Northrop, The Double Vision: Language and Meaning in Religion. University of Toronto Press, 1991. Also in Northrop Frye on Religion. Edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady. Volume 4 in The Collected Works of Northrop
Frye. University of Toronto Press, 2000.
Jung, C.G. “The Development of Personality.” In The Development of Personality: Papers on Child Psychology, Education, and Related Subjects. Translated by R.F.C. Hull. Volume 17 of The Collected Works of C.G. Jung. Bollingen: Princeton University Press, 1954. 165-86.
Jung, C.G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffé. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Vintage, 1965. Originally Random House, 1961.
Nelson, Winona. “Spotlight on Winona Nelson.” Locus. Issues 755/756. December 2023/January 2024. 57.
Alas, the message in a bottle indeed landed upon a local shyster, particularly struggling with his own individuality at an age and in a time when individuality seems both futile and onerous (in some ways). I appreciated your incorporation of Foucault and the “subject”; I’ve turned to translations of his words for solace recently. This edition of your newsletter not only gives me much comfort and spiritual rest, it also mattered. Deeply.
Cheers,
Cole