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sciousness tends toward masculine and aggressive postures, the uncon–
scious will express a feminine and passive outlook, and so on. For Jung
this aspect of the unconscious is evidently a treasure-house of spiritual
energies to which consciousness may accommodate without irreparable
damage simply by liberalizing its character, forgoing a narrow preoccu–
pation with its immediate concerns. The life-task of the individual may
be said to lie in regularizing the passage of dispositions from this portion
of the unconscious to the conscious mind, tempering his eager pursuit of
ego-satisfactions by an awareness that the unconscious must be satisfied
too, that psychic health requires the free development of whatever facul–
ties are unused in conscious life simply to balance the self. It is tempting
to read into Jung an assertion that the immoral, the perverse, the un–
civilized and daemonic, are the normal, unconscious complements of a
civilized consciousness; but in fact Jung is saying nothing of the kind.
The unconscious, indeed, is a perfect source of liberal and humanitarian
sentiments, causing trouble only when the ego loses its suppleness and
becomes stern and uncompromising in the pursuit of its local aims. The
result is psychic imbalance, neurosis. "The unconscious itself," Jung has
written, "does not harbor explosive materials, but it may become ex–
plosive owing to the repressions exercised by a self-sufficient, or cowardly,
conscious attitude."
Jung's defection from the Freudian ranks, then, comes down to
this: Whereas for Freud the difference between the neurotic and the
normal was ineluctably one of "degree," Jung manages by a redefinition of
the term "unconscious," to argue for an absolute difference-in kind. Like
many of the post-Freudians, Jung has insisted upon the cultural sources
of our inner conflicts only because he wishes to convince us that the fault
does not lie in the human condition itself, that all is well with our
metaphysical situation. In this light, Jung's acceptance by the literary
mind reveals an interesting irony: his regard for the informing power
of fantasy supports a qualitative distinction between health and neurosis,
between a natural spirituality and one that contravenes nature, that it
has been the tendency of our most compelling literary fantasies to deny.
Repeatedly in the literature of the last hundred and fifty years we are
moved to take a position outside civilization itself and to come to an
accommodation between its demands and those of the primordial psyche.
Those who would deny the possibility of finding such a position may do
so,
of
course, with every show of logic, but they will have to dismiss as
meaningless the kinds of speculation of which Freud's
Civilization and
its Discontents
is a sample--dismiss, too, the dynamics of Freud's tenn–
inology, which, whether we like it or not, articulates the only account of
