Dr. Jung on misconceptions about "Types.

Dr. Evans: Of course, one of the very common misconceptions, at least in my opinion, about your work among some of the writers in America
is that they have characterized your discussion of introversion and extroversion as suggesting that the world is made up of only two kinds of
people, introverts and extroverts. I’m sure you have been aware of this. Would you like to comment on it? In other words, do you perceive of
the world as one made up only of people who are extreme introverts and people who are extreme extroverts?

Dr. Jung: Bismarck once said, "God may protect me against my friends; with my enemies I can deal myself alone."

You know how people are.

They have a catch word, and then everything is schematized along that word.

There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert.

Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.

Those are only terms to designate a certain penchant, a certain tendency.

For instance, the tendency to be more influenced by environmental influences, or more influenced by the subjective fact—that’s all.

There are people who are fairly well-balanced who are just as much influenced from within as from without, or just as little.

And so with all the definite classifications, you know, they are only a sort of point to refer to, points for orientation.

There is no such thing as a schematic classification.

O􀁛en you have great trouble even to make out to what type a man belongs, either because he is very well balanced or he is very neurotic.

The last one is hard because when you are neurotic, then you have always a certain dissociation of personality.

And then too, the people themselves don’t know when they react consciously or when they react unconsciously.

So you can talk to somebody, and you think he is conscious.

He knows what he says, and to your amazement you discover after a while that he is quite unconscious of it, doesn’t know it.

It is a long and painstaking procedure to find out of what a man is conscious and of what he is not conscious, because the unconscious plays in him all the time.

Certain things are conscious; certain things are unconscious; but you can’t always tell.

You have to ask people, "Now are you conscious of what you say?"

Or, "Did you notice?"

And you discover suddenly that there are quite a number of things that he didn’t know at all.

For instance, certain people have many reasons; everybody can see them. They themselves don’t know it at all.

Dr. Evans: Then this whole ma􀂂er of extremes—introvert and extrovert—you say is a schematic approach, a frame of reference.

Dr. Jung: My whole scheme of typology is merely a sort of orientation.

There is such a factor as introversion; there is such a factor as extroversion.

The classification of individuals means nothing at all. It is only the instrumentality, or what I call "practical psychology," used to
explain, for instance, the husband to a wife, or vice versa.

It is very often the case, for instance—I might say it is almost a rule, but I don’t want to make too many rules in order not to be schematic— that an introvert marries an extrovert for compensation, or another type marries a countertype to complement himself.

For example, a man who has made a certain amount of money is a good business man, but he has no education.

His dream is, of course, a grand piano at home and being around artists, painters or singers or God knows what, and intellectual people; and he marries accordingly a wife of that type, in order to have that too.

She has it, and she marries him because he has a lot of money.

These compensations go on all the time.

When you study marriages, you can see it easily.

And, of course, we analysts have to deal a lot with marriages, particularly those that go wrong, because the types are too different sometimes and they don’t understand each other at all.

You see, the main values of the extrovert are anathema to the introvert, and he says, "To hell with the world, I think."

His wife interprets this as his megalomania.

But it is just as if an extrovert said to an introvert, "Now, look here fellow; these here are the facts; this is reality."

And he’s right! And the other says, "But I think, I hold—," and that sounds like nonsense to the extrovert because he doesn’t know that the other one, without knowing it, is beholding an inner world, an inner reality; and that other one may be right, as he may be wrong, even if he found himself upon God knows what solid facts.

Take, for instance, the interpretation of statistics.

You can prove almost anything with statistics.

What is more a fact than a statistic? Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 23.

Carl Jung on Introversion-Extraversion and Fantasy

Dr. Evans: Dr. Jung, another set of ideas, original with you and very well known to the world, center around the terms "introversion" and "extroversion." I know that you are aware that these terms have now become so widely known that the man on the street is using them constantly in describing members of his family, his friends, and so on. They have become probably the psychological concepts most often used by the layman today.

Dr. Jung: Like the word "complex"—I invented it too, you know, from the association experiments—this is simply practical, because there are certain people who definitely are more influenced by their surroundings than by their own intentions, while other people are more influenced by the subjective factor.

Now you see, the subjective factor, which is very characteristic, was understood by Freud as a sort of pathological auto-egotism.

Now this is a mistake. The psyche has two conditions, two important conditions.

The one is environmental influence and the other is the given fact of the psyche as it is born.

As I told you yesterday, the psyche is by no means tabula rasa here, but a definite mixture and combination of genes, which are there from the very first moment of our life; and they give a definite character, even to the little child.

That is a subjective factor, looked at from the outside.

Now if you look at it from the inside, then it is just so as if you would observe the world.

When you observe the world, you see people; you see houses; you see the sky; you see tangible objects.

But when you observe yourself within, you see moving images, a world of images generally known as fantasies.

Yet these fantasies are facts.

You see, it is a fact that the man has such and such a fantasy; and it is such a tangible fact, for instance, that when a man has a certain fantasy, another man may lose his life, or a bridge is built.

These houses were all fantasies.

Everything you do here, all this, everything, was fantasy to begin with, and fantasy has a proper reality.

That is not to be forgotten; fantasy is not nothing.

It is, of course, not a tangible object; but it is a fact nevertheless.

Fantasy is, you see, a form of energy, despite the fact that we can’t measure it.

It is a manifestation of something, and that is a reality.

That is a reality, like for instance, the Peace Treaty of Versailles, or something like that.

It is no more; you can’t show it; but it has been a fact.

And so psychical events are facts, are realities.

And when you observe the stream of images within, you observe an aspect of the world, of the world within, because the psyche, if you understand

it as a phenomenon that takes place in so-called living bodies, is a quality of matter, as our bodies consist of matter.

We discover that this ma􀂂er has another aspect, namely, a psychic aspect.

And so it is simply the world from within, seen from within.

It is just as though you were seeing into another aspect of matter.

That is an idea that is not my invention.

The old credos already talked of the spiritus atomis, namely, the spirit that is inserted in atoms.

That means psychic is a quality that appears in matter.

It doesn’t matter whether we understand it or not, but this is the conclusion we come to if we draw conclusions without prejudices.

And so you see, the man who is going by the external world, by the influence of the external world—say society or sense perceptions—thinks that he is more valid, you know, because this is valid, this is real; and the man who goes by the subjective factor is not valid, because the subjective factor is nothing.

No, that man is just as well based, because he bases himself upon the world from within.

And so he is quite right even if he says, "Oh, it is nothing but my fantasies."

And of course, that is the introvert, and the introvert is always afraid of the external world.

This he will tell you when you ask him.

He will be apologetic about it; he will say, "Yes, I know, those are my fantasies."

And he has always resentment against the world in general.

Particularly America is extroverted.

The introvert has no place, because he doesn’t know that he beholds the world from within.

That gives him dignity, and that gives him certainty, because it is the psyche of man. Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Page 22.

Carl Jung on: The Unconscious: Archetypes

Dr. Evans: You mentioned earlier that Freud’s Oedipal situation was an example of an archetype.

At this time would you please elaborate on the concept, archetype?

Dr. Jung: Well, you know what a behavior pattern is, the way in which a weaver bird builds its nest. That is an inherited form in him.

He will apply certain symbiotic phenomena, between insects and plants.

They are inherited patterns of behavior.

And so man has, of course, an inherited scheme of functioning.

You see, his liver, his heart, all his organs, and his brain will always function in a certain way, following its pattern.

You may have a great difficulty seeing it because you cannot compare it.

There are no other similar beings like man, that are articulate, that could give an account of their functioning.

If that were the case, we could—I don’t know what.

But because we have no means of comparison, we are necessarily unconscious about the whole conditions.

It is quite certain, however, that man is born with a certain functioning, a certain way of functioning, a certain pattern of behavior which is expressed in the form of archetypal images, or archetypal forms.

For instance, the way in which a man should behave is expressed by an archetype.

Therefore, you see, the primitives tell such stories. A great deal of education goes through story telling.

For instance, they call together the young men, and two older men act out before the eyes of the younger all the things they should not do.


Then they say, "Now that’s exactly the thing you shall not do."

Another way is they tell them all of the things they should not do, like the Decalogue, "Thou shalt not," and that is always supported by mythological tales.

That, of course, gave me a motive to study the archetypes, because I began to see that the structure of what I then called the collective

unconscious was really a sort of agglomeration of such typical images, each of which had a unique quality.

The archetypes are, at the same time, dynamic.

They are instinctual images that are not intellectually invented.

They are always there and they produce certain processes in the unconscious that one could best compare with myths.

That’s the origin of mythology.

Mythology is a pronouncing of a series of images that formulate the life of archetypes.

So the statements of every religion, of many poets, etc., are statements about the inner mythological process, which is a necessity because man is not complete if he is not conscious of that aspect of things.

For instance, our ancestors have done so and so, and so shall you do.

Or such and such a hero has done so and so, and that is your model.

For instance, in the teachings of the Catholic church, there are several thousand saints.

They show us how to do— They have their legends— And that is Christian mythology.

In Greece, you know, there was Theseus and there was Heracles, models of fine men, of gentlemen, you know; and they teach us how to behave.

They are archetypes of behavior.

I became more and more respectful of archetypes, and that naturally led me on to a profound study of them.

And now, by Jove, there is an enormous factor, very important for our further development and for our wellbeing, that should be taken into account.

It was, of course, difficult to know where to begin, because it is such an enormously extended field.

And the next ques􀢢on I asked myself was, "Now, where in the world has anybody been busy with that problem?"

I found that nobody had except a peculiar spiritual movement that went together with the beginning of Christianity, namely, the Gnostics; and that was the first thing actually that I saw.

They were concerned with the problem of archetypes, and made a peculiar philosophy of it.

Everybody makes a peculiar philosophy of it when he comes across it naively, and doesn’t know that those are structural elements of the unconscious psyche.

The Gnostics lived in the first, second and third centuries; and I wanted to know what was in between that time and today, when we suddenly are confronted by the problems of the collective unconscious which were the same two thousand years ago, though we are not prepared to admit that problem.

I was always looking for something in between, you know, something that would link that remote past with the present moment.

I found to my amazement that it was alchemy, that which is understood to be a history of chemistry.

It was, one could almost say, nothing less than that. It was a peculiar spiritual movement or a philosophical movement.

They called themselves philosophers, like Narcissism.

And then I read the whole accessible literature, Latin and Greek.

I studied it because it was enormously interesting.

It [Alchemy] is the mental work of 1,700 years, in which there is stored up all they could make out about the nature of the archetypes, in a peculiar way that’s foolish.

It is not simple.

Most of the texts are no more published since the middle ages, the last editions dated in the middle or the end of the sixteenth

century, all in Latin; some texts are in Greek, not a few very important ones.

That has given me no end of work, but the result was most satisfactory, because it showed me the development of our unconscious relation to the collective unconscious and the variations our consciousness has undergone; why the being’s unconscious is concerned with these mythological images.

For instance, such phenomena as in Hitler, you know.

That is a psychical phenomenon, and we’ve got to understand these things.

To me, of course, it has been an enormous problem because it is a factor that has determined the fate of millions of European people, and of Americans.

Nobody can deny that he has been influenced by the war.

That was all Hitler’s doing—and that’s all psychology, our foolish psychology.

But you only come to an understanding of these things when you understand the background from which it springs.

It is just as though, as if a terrific epidemic of typhoid fever were breaking out, and you say, "That is typhoid fever— isn’t that a marvelous disease!"

It can take on enormous dimensions and nobody knows anything about it. Nobody takes care of the water supply, nobody thinks of examining

the meat or anything like that; but everyone simply states, "This is a phenomenon."—Yes, but one doesn’t understand it.

Of course, I cannot tell you in detail about alchemy.

It is the basic of our modern way of conceiving things, and therefore, it is as if it were right under the threshold of consciousness.

This is a wonderful picture of how the development of archetypes, the movement of archetypes, looks when you look upon them with broader perspective.

Maybe from today you look back into the past and you see how the present moment has evolved out of the past.

It is just as if the alchemistic philosophy— That sounds very curious; we should give it an entirely different name.

Actually, it has a different name.

It [Alchemy] is also called Hermetic Philosophy, though, of course, that conveys just as little as the term alchemy.—It was the parallel development, as Narcissism was, to the conscious development of Christianity, of our Christian philosophy, of the whole psychology of the middle ages.

So you see, in our days we have such and such a view of the world, a particular philosophy, but in the unconscious we have a different one.

That we can see through the example of the alchemistic philosophy that behaves to the medieval consciousness
exactly like the unconscious behaves to ourselves.

And we can construct or even predict the unconscious of our days when we know what it has been yester

day.

Or, for instance, to take a more concise archetype, like the archetype of the ford—the ford to a river.

Now that is a whole situation.

You have to cross a ford; you are in the water; and there is an ambush or a water animal, say a crocodile or something like that.

There is danger and something is going to happen.

The problem is how you escape.

Now this is a whole situation and it makes an archetype.

And that archetype has now a suggestive effect upon you.

For instance, you get into a situation; you don’t know what the situation is; you suddenly are seized by an emotion or by a spell; and you behave in a certain way you have not foreseen at all—you do something quite strange to yourself.

Dr. Evans: Could this also be described as spontaneous?

Dr. Jung: Quite spontaneous.

And that is done through the archetype that is concerned.

Of course, we have a famous case in our Swiss history of the King Albrecht, who was murdered in the ford of the Royce not very far from Zurich.

His murderers were hiding behind him for the whole stretch from Zurich to the Royce, quite a long stretch, and after deliberating, still couldn’t come together about whether they wanted to kill the king or not.

The moment the king rode into the ford, they thought, "Murder!"

They shouted, "Why do we let him abuse us?"

Then they killed him, because this was the moment they were seized; this was the right moment.

So you see, when you have lived in primitive circumstances, in the primeval forest among primitive populations, then you know that phenomenon.

You are seized with a certain spell and you do a thing that is unexpected.

Several times when I was in Africa, I went into such situations where I was amazed afterwards.

One day I was in the Sudan and it was really a very dangerous situation, which I didn’t recognize at the moment
at all.

But I was seized with a spell.

I did something which I wouldn’t have expected and I couldn’t have intended.

You see, the archetype is a force. It has an autonomy, and it can suddenly seize you. It is like a seizure.

So, for instance, falling in love at first sight, that is such a case.

You have a certain image in yourself, without knowing it, of the woman—of any woman.

You see that girl, or at least a good imitation of your type, and instantly you get the seizure; you are caught.

And afterward you may discover that ￿ it was a hell of a mistake.

You see, a man is quite capable, or is intelligent enough to see that the woman of his choice was no choice; he has been captured!

He sees that she is no good at all, that she is a hell of a business, and he tells me so.

He says, "For God’s sake, doctor, help me to get rid of that woman." He can’t though, and he is like clay in her fingers.

That is the archetype.

It has all happened because of the archetype of the anima, though he thinks it is all his soul, you know.

It is like the girl—any girl.

When a man sings very high, for instance, sings a high C, she thinks he must have a very wonderful spiritual
character, and she is badly disappointed when she marries that particular "letter."

Well, that’s the archetype of the animus.

Dr. Evans: Now Dr. Jung, to be even a bit more specific, you have suggested that in our society, in all societies, there are symbols that in a sense direct or determine what a man does. Then you also suggest that somehow these symbols become "inborn" and, in part, "inbred."

Dr. Jung: They don’t become; they are.

They are to begin with. You see, we are born into a pattern; we are a pattern.

We are a structure that is pre-established through the genes.

Dr. Evans: To recapitulate then, the archetype is just a higher order of an instinctual pattern, such as your earlier example of a bird building a nest. Is that how you intended to describe it?

Dr. Jung: It is a biological order of our mental functioning, as, for instance, our biological-physiological function follows a pattern.

The behavior of any bird or insect follows a pa􀂂ern, and that is the same with us.

Man has a certain pa􀂂ern that makes him specifically human, and no man is born without it.

We are only deeply unconscious of these facts because we live by all our senses and outside of ourselves.

If a man could look into himself, he could discover it.

When a man discovers it in our days, he thinks he is crazy—really crazy.

Dr. Evans: Now would you say the number of such archetypes are limited or predetermined, or can the number be increased?

Dr. Jung: Well, I don’t know what I do know about it; it is so blurred.

You see, we have no means of comparison.

We know and we see that there is a behavior, say like incest; or there is a behavior of violence, a certain kind of violence; or there is a behavior of panic, of power, etc.

Those are areas, as it were, in which there are many variations.

It can be expressed in this way or that way, you know.

And they overlap, and o􀁛en you cannot say where the one form begins or ends.

It is nothing concise, because the archetype in itself is completely unconscious and you only can see the effects of it.

You can see, for instance, when you know a person is possessed by an archetype; then you can divine and even prognosticate possible developments.

This is true because when you see that the man is caught by a certain type of woman in a certain very specific way, you know that he is caught by the anima.

Then the whole thing will have such and such complications and such and such developments because it is typical.

The way the anima is described is exceedingly typical.

I don’t know if you know Rider Haggard’s She, or L’Atlantide by Benoît—c’est la femme fatale.

Dr. Evans: To be more specific, Dr. Jung, you have used the concepts, anima and animus, which you are now identifying in terms of sex, male or female. I wonder if you could elaborate perhaps even more specifically on these terms? Take the term "anima" first. Is this again part of the inherited nature of the individual?

Dr. Jung: Well, this is a bit complicated, you know.

The anima is an archetypal form, expressing the fact that a man has a minority of feminine or female genes.

That is something that doesn’t appear or disappear in him, that is constantly present, and works as a female in a man.

As early as the 16th century, the Humanists had discovered that man had an anima, and that each man carried female within himself.

They said it; it is not a modem invention.

The same is the case with the animus.

It is a masculine image in a woman’s mind which is sometimes quite conscious, sometimes not quite conscious; but it is called into life the moment that woman meets a man who says the right things.

Then because he says it, it is all true and he is the fellow, no matter what he is.

Those are particularly well-founded archetypes, those two.

And you can lay hands on their bases. Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Pages 16-18.

Carl Jung on the Anima and Animus

Dr. Evans: To be more specific, Dr. Jung, you have used the concepts, anima and animus, which you are now identifying in terms of sex, male or female. I wonder if you could elaborate perhaps even more specifically on these terms? Take the term "anima" first. Is this again part of the inherited nature of the individual?

Dr. Jung: Well, this is a bit complicated, you know.

The anima is an archetypal form, expressing the fact that a man has a minority of feminine or female genes.

That is something that doesn’t appear or disappear in him, that is constantly present, and works as a female in a man.

As early as the 16th century, the Humanists had discovered that man had an anima, and that each man carried female within himself.

They said it; it is not a modem invention.

The same is the case with the animus.

It is a masculine image in a woman’s mind which is sometimes quite conscious, sometimes not quite conscious; but it is called into life the moment that woman meets a man who says the right things.

Then because he says it, it is all true and he is the fellow, no matter what he is.

Those are particularly well-founded archetypes, those two.

And you can lay hands on their bases. Carl Jung, Evans Conversations, Pages 16-18.

Jung’s Appraisal of Freud’s Structural Concepts: Id, Ego, and Super-Ego

Dr. Evans: Going still further into the development of Dr. Freud’s theory, which you acknowledge as a significant factor in the development of
many of your own early ideas, Dr. Freud, of course, talked a great deal about the unconscious.

Dr. Jung: As soon as research comes to a question of the unconscious, things becomes necessarily blurred, because the unconscious is something which is really unconscious!

So you have no object—nothing.

You only can make inferences because you can’t see it; and so you have to create a model of this possible structure of the unconscious.

Now Freud came to the concept of the unconscious chiefly on the basis of the same experience I have had in the association experiment;
namely, that people reacted—they said things—they did things—without knowing that they had done it or had said it.

This is something you can observe in the association experiment; sometimes people cannot remember afterward what they did or what they said in a moment when a stimulus word hits the complex.

In the word association reproduction experiment, you go through the whole list of words.

You see that the memory fades when there is a complex reaction or block.

That is the simple fact upon which Freud based his idea of the unconscious.

There is no end of stories, you know, about how people can betray themselves by saying something they didn’t mean to say at all; yet the
unconscious meant them to say just that thing.

That is what we can see, 􀢢me and again, when people make a mistake in speech or they say something which they didn’t mean to say; they just make ridiculous mistakes.

For instance, when you want to express your sympathy at a funeral, you go to someone and you say, "I congratulate you"; that’s pretty painful, you know, but that happens, and it is true.

This is something that goes parallel with Freud’s whole idea of the psychopathology of everyday life.

In Paris there was Pierre Janet who worked out another side of the understanding of unconscious reactions.

Now, Freud refers very little to Pierre Janet, but I studied with him while in Paris and he very much helped form my ideas.

He was a first class observer, though he had no systematic, dynamic psychological theory; his is a sort of physiological theory of the unconscious phenomena.

There is a certain depotentation of the tension of consciousness; it sinks below the level of consciousness and thus becomes unconscious.

That is Freud’s view too, but he says it sinks down because it is helped; it is repressed from above.

That was my first point of difference with Freud.

I think there have been cases in my observations where there was no repression from above; those contents that became unconscious had withdrawn all by themselves, and not because they were repressed.

On the contrary, they have a certain autonomy.

They have discovered the concept of autonomy in that these contents that disappear have the power to move independently from my will.

Either they appear when I want to say something definite; they interfere and speak themselves instead of helping me to say what I want to say; they make me do something which I don’t want to do at all; or they withdraw in the moment that I want to use them.

They certainly disappear! Dr. Evans: And this then is independent of any of the, you might say, pressures on the consciousness as Freud suggested?

Dr. Jung: Yes.

There can be such cases, sure enough, but besides them, there are also the cases that show that the unconscious contents acquire a certain independence.

All mental contents having a certain feeling tone that is emotional have the value of an emotional affect—have the tendency to become autonomous.
So, you see, anybody in an emo􀢢on will say and do things which he cannot vouch for.

He must excuse himself of a mistake; he was non compos mentis.

Dr. Evans: Dr. Freud suggested that the individual is born under the influence of what he called the Id, which is unconscious and undeveloped, a collection of animal drives. It is not very easily understood where all these primitive drives—all these instincts—come from.

Dr. Jung: Nobody knows where instincts come from.

They are there and you find them.

It is a story that was played millions of years ago.

Their sexuality was invented, and I don’t know how this happened; I wasn’t there!

Feeding was invented very much longer ago than even sex, and how and why it was invented, I don’t know.

So we don’t know where the instinct comes from.

It is quite ridiculous, you know, to speculate about such an impossibility.

So the ques􀢢on is only—where do those cases come from where instinct does not function.

That is something within our reach, because we can study the cases where instinct does not function.

Dr. Evans: Could you give us some rather specific examples of what you mean by cases where instinct does not function?

Dr. Jung: Well, you see, instead of instinct, which is a habitual form of activity, take any other form of habitual activity.

Consider a thing that is absolutely controlling which fails to function; then it’s worse, and suddenly we can’t think of any other thing.

For instance, a man who writes fluently suddenly makes a ridiculous mistake; then his habit hasn’t functioned.

Also, when you ask me something, I’m supposed to be able to react to you; but certainly if I am pushed beyond, or if you succeed in touching upon one of my complexes, you will see that I become absolutely perplexed.

Words fail me.

Dr. Evans: We haven’t seen you very perplexed yet, Dr. Jung.

Dr. Jung: I am a good example of psychology, you know, a fellow who knows his stuff quite well—the professor asks him and he cannot say a word.

Dr. Evans: To continue, another part of Dr. Freud’s theory, of course, that became very important, to which we have already alluded, was the idea of the conscious; that is, out of this unconscious, instinctual "structure," the Id, an Ego emerges. Freud suggested that this ego resulted from the organism’s contact with reality, perhaps a product of frustration as reality is imposed on the individual. Do you accept this conception of the ego?

Dr. Jung: If man has an ego at all, that is your question.

Ah, that is again such a case as before; I wasn’t there when it was invented.

However, in this case, you see, you can observe it to a certain extent with a child.

A child definitely begins in a state where there is no ego, and about the fourth year or before, the child develops a sense of ego—"I, myself."

There is, in the first place, a certain identity with the body.

For instance, when you ask primi􀢢ves, they emphasize always the body.

When you ask—who has brought this thing here—the Negro will say "I brought it," no accent on the "I," simply "brought it."

Then if you say—why have YOU brought it—he will say, you know, ME, ME, Yes, I, MYSELF, this given object, this thing here.

So the iden􀢢ty with the body is one of the first things which makes an ego; it is the spatial separateness that induces, apparently, the concept of an ego.

Then, of course, there are lots of other things.

Later on there are mental differences and other personal differences of all sorts.

You see, the ego is continuously building up; it is not ever a finished product—it builds up.

You see, no year passes when you do not discover a new little aspect in which you are more ego than you have thought.

Dr. Evans: Dr. Jung, there has been much discussion about how certain experiences in the early years influence the formation of the ego.

For example, one of the most extreme views concerning such early influences was advanced by Otto Rank.

He spoke
of the birth trauma and suggested that the trauma of being born would not only leave a very powerful impact on the developing ego, but would have residual influence throughout the life of the individual.

Dr. Jung: I should say that it is very important for an ego that it is born; this is highly traumatic, you know, when you fall out of heaven.

Dr. Evans: However, do you take literally Dr. Otto Rank’s position that the birth trauma has a profound psychological effect on the individual?

Dr. Jung: Of course it influences you.

If you believe in Schopenhauer’s philosophy, you say, "it is a hellish trauma to be born."

Well, there is a Greek saying that "it is beautiful to die in youth, but the most beautiful of all things is not to be born."

Philosophy, you see.

Dr. Evans: But you don’t take this as a literal psychic event?

Dr. Jung: Don’t you see, this is an event that happens to everybody that exists—that each man once has been born.

Everybody who is born has undergone that trauma, so the word has lost its meaning.

It is a general fact, and you cannot say "it is a trauma"; it is just a fact, because you cannot observe a psychology that hasn’t been born —only then you could say what the birth trauma is.

Until then, you cannot even speak of such a thing; it is just a lack of epistemology.

Dr. Evans: In his later writing, in addition to the ego, Freud introduced a term to describe a particular function of the ego. That term was the Super-Ego. Broadly speaking, the super-ego was to account for the "moral restrictive" function of the ego.

Dr. Jung: Yes, that is the super-ego, namely that codex of what you can do and what you cannot do.

Dr. Evans: Built-in prohibitions which Freud thought might be partly acquired and partly "built-in."

Dr. Jung: Yes.

However, Freud doesn’t see the difference between the "built-in" and the acquired.

You see, he must have it almost en􀢢rely within himself; otherwise, there could be no balance in the individual.

And who in Hell would have invented the Decalogue? That is not invented by Moses, but that is the eternal truth in man himself, because he checks himself. Carl Jung Conversations Evans, Pages 14-16.