Carl Jung: This then was the holy ghost to him (pt. 2)

Miss Hincks: When you were speaking of bringing up your inferior function, did you mean the one in the unconscious?

Dr. Jung: Yes.

Miss Hincks: I understood you to mean that you had developed your intuition in contradistinction to your thinking.

Dr. Jung: No, I meant to place feeling in opposition to thinking. As a natural scientist, thinking and sensation were uppermost in me and intuition and feeling were in the unconscious and contaminated by the collective unconscious. You cannot get directly to the inferior function from the superior, it must always be via the auxiliary function. It is as though the unconscious were in such antagonism to the superior function that it allowed no direct attack. The process of working through the auxiliary functions goes on somewhat as follows: Suppose you have sensation strongly developed but are not fanatical about it. Then you can admit about every situation a certain aura of possibilities; that is to say, you permit an intuitive element to come in. Sensation as an auxiliary function would allow intuition to exist. But inasmuch as sensation (in the example) is a partisan of the intellect, intuition sides with the feeling, here the inferior function. Therefore the intellect will not agree with intuition, in this case, and will vote for its exclusion. Intellect will not hold together sensation and intuition, rather it will separate them. Such a destructive attempt will be checked by feeling, which backs up intuition.

Looking at it the other way around, if you are an intuitive type, you can’t get to your sensations directly. They are full of monsters, and so you have to go by way of your intellect or feeling, whichever is the auxiliary in the conscious. It needs very cool reasoning for such a man to keep himself down to reality. To sum up then, the way is from the superior to the auxiliary, from the latter to the function opposite to the auxiliary. Usually this first conflict that is aroused between the auxiliary function in the conscious and its opposite function in the unconscious is the fight that takes place in analysis. This may be called the preliminary conflict. The knock-down battle between the superior and inferior functions only takes place in life. In the example of the intellectual sensation type, I suggested the preliminary conflict would be between sensation and intuition, and the final fight between intellect and feeling.

Dr. de Angulo: Why cannot the main battle take place in analysis?

Dr. Jung: That can only happen when the analyst loses his objectivity and becomes personally involved with the patient. In this connection it can be said that the analyst is always in danger of intoxications through his unconscious. Suppose a woman comes and tells me I am her savior. While consciously I may know perfectly well she has made a terrible projection upon me, unconsciously I drink it up and possibly swell to tremendous proportions.

Mrs. Keller’s question: (This question as originally presented was lost. The problem concerned was in connection with the will.)

Dr. Jung: It cannot be said that the will of man is like a stone rolling downhill. What is true is that through the will you can release a process, say a fantasy, which then proceeds on its own course.
There are two ways of looking at will. That of Schopenhauer, for instance, who speaks of the will to live and the will to death in the sense of an urge to life and an urge to death. I like to reserve the concept of will for that small amount of energy that is disposable by us in consciousness. Now if you put this small amount toward activating the instinctive process, the latter then goes on with a force much bigger than yours.

The libido of man contains the two opposite urges or instincts: the instinct to live and the instinct to die. In youth the instinct toward life is stronger, and that is why young people don’t cling to life — they have it. The libido as an energetic phenomenon contains the pairs of opposites, otherwise there would be no movement of the libido. It is a metaphor to use the terms of life and death; any others will do, so long as they show the opposition. In animals and in primitive peoples, the pairs of opposites are closer together than in so-called civilized peoples, hence both animals and primitives part with life more easily than do we. A primitive can kill himself just for the luxury of haunting an enemy. In other words, because of our dissociation, the pairs of opposites are much further apart. This gives us our increased psychical energy, and the price we pay is one-sidedness.

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