My notes from Jung essay.
The individual face to massification : une quête de soi
C.G.Jung explored the question of individuality and consciousness in a world where the masse tend to outshine the uniqueness of each individual.
It starts like this : People think they know themselves, but in reality they are only aware of their ego(Conscious part, part that faces society and others), ignoring like this their unconscious self ( which he calls the shadow).
> Real knowledge of oneself isn't about some general theories sciences developed about humans ( as species or as a part of the animal kingdom) but on recognizing that each individual is unique.
We are between 2 realities : From one side : each is unique, and not just a mere number /statistical mean, and from the other side : We belong to a species and can be considered as a number among others in the mass.
And the bigger the mass , the more the indiviual is disspitaed, and loose his importance and power to act.
He says that this is due to the rise of scientific thinking , that usually quantify, makes norms, and by which remove from the human his psychological substance.
He then goes to talk about the role of religion : As a vector of internal experience. And that the human being need some point d'ancrage internes to resist the pressure of the collectif/mass. Without this intimate force, he will search for this illusory saftey outside ( structures, society , cofnrom to social norms as they are in the world today).
To Jung, massification doesnt seek te get people closer, but on the contrary isolate them psychocally so they can be more soumis to global structures.
And the more the individual links get loose, the more he needs to belong to this abstract entity , making the latter more powerful.
For him : Face to this phenomena, he thinks that the solution lies within the eveil "Awakening" of individual consciousness .
Only the one who is orgnized in his individuality can resist the pressure of the mass.
And to him, this implique a deep introspectif work, a reconciliation between knwoledge and belief. between consciousness and unconsciousness.
The shadow (= Unconsciousness is all the part of ourselves that are hidden from our psyche, those we prefer to ignore or deny.
However, confortation to the shadow is necessary for individuation.
Ignoring the shadow exposes us to uncoscious projections of others, of of certains automatic behviours that are dictated by non-healed wounds.
By integrating the shadow , we take back a part of our power and .. ourselves.
But shadow work needs both courage and honesty, since it means we will be in front of our fears and contradictions.
Through this search, the individual can break free from social conditionin and may be existe in an authentic way.
Quotes I'd like to keep >
1- 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 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
2-There is and can be no self-knowledge based on theoretical assumptions, for the object of this knowledge is an individual—a relative exception and an irregular phenomenon Hence it is not the universal and the regular that characterize the individual, 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 be neither known nor compared with anything else. At the same time man, as member of a species, can and must be described as a statistical unit; otherwise nothing general could be said about him.
3-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 completely 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.
4- 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.
5-Apart from the agglomeration of huge masses in which the individual disappears anyway, one of the chief factors responsible for psychological mass-mindedness is scientific rationalism, which robs the individual of his foundations and his dignity. As a social unit he has lost his individuality and become a mere abstract number in the bureau of statistics.
The bigger the crowd the more negligible the individual becomes
THE INDIVIDUAL'S UNDERSTANDING OF HIMSELF
It is astounding that man, the instigator, inventor and vehicle of all these developments, the originator of all judgments and decisions and the planner of the future, must make himself such a quantite negligeable. The contradiction, the paradoxical evaluation of humanity by man himself, is in truth a matter for wonder, and one can only explain it as springing from an extraordinary uncertainty of judgment—in other words, man is an enigma to himself. This is understandable, seeing that he lacks the means of comparison necessary for selfknowledge. He knows how to distinguish himself from the other animals in point of anatomy and physiology, but as a conscious, reflecting being, gifted with speech, he lacks all criteria for self-judgment. He is on this planet a unique phenomenon which he cannot compare with anything else.