Quest of the Spirit: From Suffering to Acceptance

29. Overcoming Despair with Dreams:Kirkegaard, Carlyle, Jung, Jaspers, Hamlet!

                                                  Carl Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul

           "Human thought cannot conceive any system or final truth that could give the patient what he needs in order to live: that is, faith, hope, love, and insight" (Jung 226). Like Niebuhr, Jung says that modern man realizes that governments or collectives cannot attain earthly peace without the use of force, and cannot achieve spiritual peace at all. Moral growth must begin within man himself, not from any form of collective.

            In Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933), psychiatrist Carl Jung examines twentieth-century man's existential quest for meaning. The author begins by differentiating between modern and average man. According to Jung, "I must say that the man we call modern, the man who is aware of the immediate present, is by no means the average man, He is rather the man who stands upon a peak, or at the very edge of the world, the abyss of the future before him, above him the heavens, and below him the whole of mankind with a history that disappears in primeval mists" (196). This type of hero appears much like the Byronic hero who defies the social conventions and historical influences which determine the behavior of the average person. This prototype, if you please, stands detached from society as an observer who is alone and "fully conscious of the present." He chooses his own principles, and does not allow society to dictate either his materialistic or spiritual values. Several times, Jung uses the image of his hero standing on the edge of the world, "leaving behind him all that has been discarded and outgrown, and acknowledging that he stand before a void out of which all things may grow" (197). In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky uses a similar image of a condemned protagonist standing on a high rock along a narrow ledge overlooking "the ocean, everlasting darkness, everlasting solitude, and everlasting tempest around him" to symbolize the decision that he must reach: "to live on this small rock for a lifetime, one thousand years, or an eternity, or to die at once." The hero responds, "Only to live, to live and live! Life, whatever it may be! How true it is! Good God, how true!" (Dostoyevsky 127). Raskolnikov's choice, like the one Jung's hero must decide, constitutes his existential affirmation, which denotes a turning point leading to the next stage of his spiritual and emotional progress. In Jung's case, the archetypal hero refuses to be drawn into the materialism of the world and its illusions that can only result in a Kierkegaardian form of despair. Despite his detachment, Jung's main character tragically senses the guilt and sin associated with his being a part of society, as one who chooses to live apart from it yet carries with him the knowledge of its sinful condition, one which he cannot alter. As Jung puts it, "To be unhistorical is the Promethean sin, and in this sense, modern man lives in sin" (198). Like Christ, he is in the world but not of it. This unfortunate awareness, coupled with his necessary estrangement, gives the protagonist heroic proportions which make him a tragic figure. Like Hamlet who recognizes the corruption of his kingdom and chooses to suffer the ultimate sacrifice in order the purge it, modern man realizes that foremost advances in science, technology, and organization have rendered little or no progress in terms of spiritual development. The weight of guilt, like the burden of Sisyphus, lives in his consciousness at all times. Jung expresses it thus: "Think of nearly two thousand years of Christian ideals followed, instead of by the return of the Messiah and the heavenly millennium, by the World War among Christian nations and its barbed wire and poison gas." In another section, Jung's hero closely compares to Shakespeare's Hamlet whose Apostrophe to Man laments the contrast between the real and the ideal in terms of human achievement: "It is true that modern man is a culmination, but tomorrow he will be surpassed; he is indeed the end-product of an age-old development, but he is at the same time the worst conceivable disappointment of the hopes of humankind. The modern man is aware of this" (199). Like Niebuhr, the modern man realizes that governments or collectives cannot attain earthly peace without the use of force, and cannot achieve spiritual peace at all. Moral growth must commence within man himself, not in any form of collective. Jung expresses this more aptly when he says, "He has likewise seen that well-meaning governments have so thoroughly paved the way for peace on the principle, in time of peace prepare for war, that Europe has nearly gone to rack and ruin. And as for ideals, the Christian church, the brotherhood of man, international social democracy and the solidarity of economic interests have all failed to stand the baptism of fire, the test of reality." Just as Niebuhr maintains, Jung acknowledges that human institutions are ineffective in resolving man's existential dilemma. This sad realization is the cause for psychological uncertainty that largely contributes to the widespread religious disillusionment among Protestants today. The popular reliance upon psychology attests to this loss of faith. In essence, psychology and psycho-analysis now assume the failed role of religion. According to Jung, "The very fact that we have such a psychology is to me symptomatic of a profound convulsion of spiritual life. Disruption in the spiritual life of an age shows the same pattern as radical change in an individual" (202).