Faced with the bewildering profusion of animated objects, we create an abstraction, an abstract universal image which conjures the welter of impressions into a fixed form.
This image has the magical significance of a defence against the chaotic flux of experience.
The abstracting type becomes so lost and submerged in this image that finally its abstract truth is set above the reality of life; and because life might disturb the enjoyment of abstract beauty, it gets completely suppressed.
He turns himself into an abstraction, he identifies with the eternal validity of the image and petrifies in it, because for him it has become a redeeming formula.
He divests himself of his real self and puts his whole life into his abstraction, in which he is, so to speak, crystallized.
The empathetic type suffers a similar fate.
Since his activity, his life is empathized into the object, he himself gets into the object because the empathized content is an essential part of himself.
He becomes the object, he identifies with it and in this way gets outside himself.
By turning himself into an object he desubjectifies himself. ~Carl Jung, CW 6, Para 499
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