Miss Henty’s question: Cannot the inferior functions be developed without such an overthrow of the superior functions as you described last time?
Dr. Jung: Can you lift water up from the bottom of a falls without loss of energy? You have to have energy in order to activate the inferior function, and if you don’t get this energy away from the superior function, whence is it to come? If you leave all your energy and will in the superior function you slowly go to hell — it sucks you dry. Normal people are those who can live under any circumstances without developing protests, but there are certain people in whom various conditions of life develop a protest. Take for example the effort to live a rounded life; it is most expensive. Today to bring up the inferior function is to live, but we pay dearly for it both in mistakes and in energy.
Sometimes it is not our choice — the inferior function takes us unawares. Such a situation presented itself at the time of the spread of Christianity two thousand years ago. The spiritual values had at that time sunk into the unconscious, and in order to realize them again, people had to go to tremendous lengths in the repudiation of material values. Gold, women, art — all had to be given up. Many even had to withdraw into the desert in order to free themselves from the world. Finally they came to the point of giving up life itself, and they were confronted with the arena and with being roasted alive. All this came to them through the growth of a psychological attitude. They were sacrificed because they undermined the most sacred ideals of the time. They threatened the disruption of the Roman family by their theological disputes. They refused to consider the Emperor divine. The effect they had on the collective viewpoint was similar to that produced today when anything is said against the god of Western Europe — Respectability. We today are also looking for certain other values. We seek life, not efficiency, and this seeking of ours is directly against the collective ideals of our times. Only those who have energy enough, or who have been gripped in spite of themselves, can go through this process, but once in it you have to bleed for it. It is a process that is going on all over the world today.
Mr. Robertson: What forced people into this attitude two thousand years ago?
Dr. Jung: People could see no other way of meeting the extreme to which paganism had led.
The reversal of attitude which Christianity induced took the juice out of the literature and the art of the time. According to the philologists, everything of value disappeared then; only a faint flame remaining burning in Apuleius. But as a matter of fact, it was simply that the main stream of creative power left the channel dug by antiquity and sought a new bed. A new literature and art grew up, of which Tertullian is an example. The libido went over into spiritual values and an enormous change took place in human mentality in three hundred years. These collective movements are always hard for the individual to sustain. They grip people from the unconscious without their being able to know what has happened to them. Thus the literature of those days was full of a sickish sentimentality — the spark had gone from the conscious standpoint and was buried in the unconscious. These people in the early Christian era were unaware of the general movement contemporaneous with them. They could not realize they were Christians, yet they were seeking initiation into all sorts of mysteries in search of the thing Christianity was offering. They could not accept it because of its origin in the hands of despised peoples.
Most of the troubles of our times come from this lack of realization that we are part of a herd that has deviated from the main currents. When you are in a herd you lose the sense of danger, and this it is that makes us unable to see where we deviate from the deep currents of collectivity.
- Carl Jung Depth Psychology
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