Neurosis: The Logic of a Metaphysical Illness 9780367477196, 9780367477219, 9781003036166

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Preface
Sources and Abbreviations
Introduction: Neurosis from the perspective of the soul’s logical life
1. The psychological standpoint
2. Thinking neurosis
Part 1: The concept of neurosis
1. Surplus of value and significance
2. Neurosis as metaphysical illness
3. Neurosis as logical illness and the necessity to approach neurosis thinkingly
4. The logical genesis of the neurotic “The Absolute”
5. Morbus sacer
Part 2: The historicity of neurosis. Its historical enabling conditions
1. Critique of the idea of the religious depth of neurosis
2. The historical emergence of the definition of man as single solitary individual
3. The “cosmic” constitution of man
4. The isolation of the human individual from the cosmos
5. The sinking of the stars into the individual and the creation of the “inner”
6. “The frontier is closed.” The end of the soul’s self-releasement into its own infinity
7. Absolute negativity
8. “The Absolute” as will and desire
9. The sphere of the personal and private as the new “battleground”
Part 3: The internal logic and functioning of neurosis
1. The spellbound soul and “the absolute principle”
2. Excursus: An alternate interpretation of the tale as not about neurosis. The psychology of the virgin and the shift from inner concept to real life
3. Dissociation
a) Self-contradiction
b) Immunization
c) Chiasmus
d) “Yes, truly—but still more truly”
4. Partial total dependence
5. The internal view of neurosis
6. The truly internal view. Or: Neurosis as Bühnenweih-Festspiel (Sacred Festival Drama)
7. Consequences for therapy
8. The self-occluding glory of the Sacred Festival Drama
Part 4: Neurosis in the context of normal life
1. The fabrication of a trauma, or the initial origin of a neurosis
2. Loopholes for the ghost. The sudden outburst of complex reactions out of the blue
3. Having the right insights but rendering them ineffective
Part 5: The soul issue, meaning, and purpose of neurosis as a cultural phenomenon
1. Winkelried. Zeroing in on the subject’s self as the soul’s new battleground
a) The Winkelriedian principle: from truth to “I!,” “Me!”
b) Acquisition of the logic of subjectivity
c) The materialization of the logic of subjectivity
2. The theology of neurosis and “the neurotic” as the figure of exemplary man
3. The soul purpose of neurosis as a cultural phenomenon
Part 6: The Absolute’s further-determination in its striving for its incarnation as immediate present reality. Or the semantics of neurosis
1. THE neurosis
2. Semantic specification
3. Deducing the content of neurosis
4. Metamorphosis of the content of neurosis
a) “I”
b) Here
c) Now
d) Not-I
Appendix Neurotic traps. A miscellany
Index

Citation preview

NEUROSIS The Logic of a Metaphysical Illness

SPRING JOURNAL BOOKS

STUDIES IN ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGY SERIES Series Editor: GREG MOGENSON

OTHER TITLES IN THE SERIES COLLECTED ENGLISH PAPERS: VOL. 1—THE NEUROSIS OF PSYCHOLOGY: PRIMARY PAPERS TOWARDS A CRITICAL PSYCHOLOGY VOL. 2—TECHNOLOGY AND THE SOUL: FROM THE NUCLEAR BOMB TO THE WORLD WIDE WEB VOL. 3—SOUL-VIOLENCE VOL. 4—THE SOUL ALWAYS THINKS VOL. 5—THE FLIGHT INTO THE UNCONSCIOUS: AN ANALYSIS OF C.G. JUNG’S PSYCHOLOGY PROJECT Wolfgang Giegerich DIALECTICS & ANALYTICAL PSYCHOLOGY: THE EL CAPITAN CANYON SEMINAR Wolfgang Giegerich, David L. Miller, Greg Mogenson RAIDS ON THE UNTHINKABLE: FREUDIAN AND JUNGIAN PSYCHOANALYSES Paul Kugler NORTHERN GNOSIS: THOR, BALDR, AND THE VOLSUNGS IN THE THOUGHT OF FREUD AND JUNG Greg Mogenson THE ESSENTIALS OF STYLE: A HANDBOOK FOR SEEING AND BEING SEEN Benjamin Sells THE SUNKEN QUEST, THE WASTED FISHER, THE PREGNANT FISH: POSTMODERN REFLECTIONS ON DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY Ronald Schenk FIRE IN THE STONE: THE ALCHEMY OF DESIRE Stanton Marlan, ed. AFTER PROPHECY: IMAGINATION, INCARNATION, AND THE UNITY THE PROPHETIC TRADITION Tom Cheetham

OF

THE WOUNDED RESEARCHER: A DEPTH PSYCHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO RESEARCH Robert Romanyshyn ARCHETYPAL PSYCHOLOGIES: REFLECTIONS IN HONOR OF JAMES HILLMAN Stanton Marlan, ed.

NEUROSIS The Logic of a Metaphysical Illness

WOLFGANG GIEGERICH

First published 2013 by Spring Journal Books Published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, ~ew York, NY 10017

Rout/edge is an imprint of the T aylor & Francis Croup, an inform a business ©

2020 W olfgang Giegerich

The right ofWolfgang Giegerich to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Contents

Preface ....................................................................................... xi Introduction: Neurosis from the perspective of the soul’s logical life .................................................................. 1 1. The psychological standpoint ................................................. 3 2. Thinking neurosis ................................................................... 19

Part 1. The concept of neurosis .............................................. 23 1. Surplus of value and significance .......................................... 31 2. Neurosis as metaphysical illness ........................................... 34 3. Neurosis as logical illness and the necessity to approach neurosis thinkingly ........................................... 44 4. The logical genesis of the neurotic “The Absolute” .............. 52 5. Morbus sacer ............................................................................ 63

Part 2. The historicity of neurosis. Its historical enabling conditions ...................................... 77 1. Critique of the idea of the religious depth of neurosis ......... 79 2. The historical emergence of the definition of man as single solitary individual ......................................... 83 3. The “cosmic” constitution of man ...................................... 102 4. The isolation of the human individual from the cosmos ................................................................ 107 5. The sinking of the stars into the individual and the creation of the “inner” ......................................... 113 6. “The frontier is closed.” The end of the soul’s self-releasement into its own infinity ................................ 122 7. Absolute negativity .............................................................. 128 8. “The Absolute” as will and desire ....................................... 135 9. The sphere of the personal and private as the new “battleground” ................................................ 144

Part 3. The internal logic and functioning of neurosis ......... 157 1. The spellbound soul and “the absolute principle” ............. 158 2. Excursus: An alternate interpretation of the tale as not about neurosis. The psychology of the virgin and the shift from inner concept to real life ..................... 181 3. Dissociation ......................................................................... 209 a) Self-contradiction .......................................................... 210 b) Immunization ............................................................... 213 c) Chiasmus ....................................................................... 216 d) “Yes, truly—but still more truly” ................................ 222 4. Partial total dependence ...................................................... 225 5. The internal view of neurosis ............................................... 227 6. The truly internal view. Or: Neurosis as Bühnenweih-Festspiel (Sacred Festival Drama) ................... 247 7. Consequences for therapy .................................................... 249 8. The self-occluding glory of the Sacred Festival Drama ....... 265

Part 4. Neurosis in the context of normal life ....................... 278 1. The fabrication of a trauma, or the initial origin of a neurosis ....................................... 278 2. Loopholes for the ghost. The sudden outburst of complex reactions out of the blue ................................................... 306 3. Having the right insights but rendering them ineffective ................................................ 309

Part 5. The soul issue, meaning, and purpose of neurosis as a cultural phenomenon .............................................. 317 1. Winkelried. Zeroing in on the subject’s self as the soul’s new battleground .......................................... 317 a) The Winkelriedian principle: from truth to “I!,” “Me!” ............................................ 319 b) Acquisition of the logic of subjectivity ......................... 324 c) The materialization of the logic of subjectivity ............ 329 2. The theology of neurosis and “the neurotic” as the figure of exemplary man ......................................... 335 3. The soul purpose of neurosis as a cultural phenomenon ........................................................ 345

Part 6. The Absolute’s further-determination in its striving for its incarnation as immediate present reality. Or the semantics of neurosis .......................................... 355 1. 2. 3. 4.

THE neurosis ....................................................................... 356 Semantic specification ......................................................... 360 Deducing the content of neurosis ....................................... 363 Metamorphosis of the content of neurosis .......................... 367 a) “I” .................................................................................. 367 b) Here .............................................................................. 376 c) Now ............................................................................... 390 d) Not-I ............................................................................. 401

Appendix Neurotic traps. A miscellany ................................................... 405 Index ............................................................................................... 433

Acknowledgments

I

do not want to let this book go out into the world without expressing my gratitude to Greg Mogenson, who accompanied the writing process of the present final version of this book with his always stimulating, competent, and insightful advice and personal intellectual involvement, which proved to be an invaluable help and encouragement. My heartfelt thanks! W.G.

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Preface

A

t the end of The Soul’s Logical Life (first edition 1998) I expressed my hope of being able to present to the public “in not too distant future” another book in which, after the more fundamental discussions that aimed for a rigorous notion of psychology at large, I intended to turn “to the lowlands of practical psychology” in terms of the idea of the soul’s logical life, namely to psychotherapy’s bread-and-butter topic of neurosis. This indirect pledge was partially fulfilled with the publication one year later of Der Jungsche Begriff der Neurose. I say “partially” because, first, this later book was written in German whereas the promise had been made to the Englishspeaking public, and because, secondly and mainly, it was basically a detailed analysis and unfolding of C.G. Jung’s concept of neurosis implicit in his description and discussion of his own childhood neurosis included in his report in Memories, Dreams, Reflections (pp. 30–32). About this episode Jung himself stated that “From it I learned what a neurosis is” (p. 32, transl. modif.). Although I concur with the general direction of this one particular concept of Jung’s about neurosis—it is quite different from, indeed incompatible with, Jung’s other and predominant notions of neurosis (neurosis as an attempt by the psyche to correct a one-sidedness of consciousness and in this sense as what cures us rather than what needs to be cured; neurosis as the first [still pathological] immediacy of an emerging new constitution of the personality; neurosis as bound up with the collective problem of the Zeitgeist and representing “an unsuccessful attempt on the part of the individual to solve the general problem in his own person” [CW 7 § 18]; the healing of a neurosis as ultimately depending on numinous experience, etc.)—and although I think that his report about his own childhood neurosis is one of the few places in all of psychological literature on the topic where for once what is

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specifically neurotic about neurosis has been sighted, a discussion of Jung’s concept is not yet an exposition of my own concept of neurosis, not of neurosis seen in the light of the soul’s logical life. With the present volume I at long last try to deliver what I had promised years ago. I could have done this so much earlier if I had found the time (and motivation) to complete the translation of and give a last finish to what I had worked out in writing during the years around the turn of the century. For the first time, I believe, I presented a few of my new ideas about the inner structure of neurosis, ideas that go beyond my book about the Jungian concept of neurosis, in a public lecture at the C.G. Jung Institute Stuttgart and in a seminar at the C.G. Jung Institute of München, both in March 2000 (in German, under the title of “Die Neurose—das Werk der Seele”). Another seminar at the München Institute in 2001 had the title, “Das innere Funktionieren der Neurose.” During the winter semester 2002–2003, in a lecture course for graduate students in the field of Clinical Psychology at the University of Kyoto I presented the major part of what I had worked out about the concept of neurosis (that is, the first version of the text that was to become this book), under the title, “The Inner World of Neurosis.” Parts of this material, in somewhat revised form, were from 2003 on presented at the C.G. Jung Institute Zürich during several semesters (“The Internal Logic and Functioning of Neurosis”), and later, from 2007 onwards, also in a more extensive German course (“Die Neurose als Werk der Seele”). From 2005 to 2008, in seven of my “Neresheim Seminars” (biannual weekend workshops for a steady group of colleagues from the C.G. Jung Institute Stuttgart), I had occasion to present my ideas at length to long-standing analysts, this time under the title of “Die Neurose aus der Perspektive des logischen Lebens der Seele,” and to expose them to a spirited and engaged discussion, for which I would like to express my gratefulness to the participants of the Neresheim Seminars. The different formulations of the title (inner world of neurosis / internal logic and functioning of neurosis / neurosis as an opus of the soul / neurosis from the perspective of the soul’s logical life) do not reflect a change of standpoint, but represent variations of one and the same original conception, as does “‘This Stinking Water Contains

PREFACE

xiii

Everything It Needs.’ Neurosis as Self-Generating and the Fabrication of a Trauma,” which was the title of several different versions of lectures or worshops presented in December 2004 at a CIPA (Centro Italiano di Psicologia Analitica) conference in Milan, in May 2005 at Taisho University, Tokyo, for Tokyo Sanno Institute, and in June 2011 at the Fourth International Annual Conference of the MAAP (Moscow Association of Analytical Psychology) in Moscow. After this long prehistory I am finally ready to make the full text of this work available to the reading public. Intellectually my view of neurosis has two roots. The one is my experience over decades in the consulting room, my work with patients. In the course of the 1990s it more and more gave rise to my strongly feeling the need to critically reflect what it was that I had been doing in the consulting room all these years and on what basis I had been doing it. In addition, this work in the consulting room had already from the beginning of my work as therapist also necessitated my continuous reflection about how to discriminate between genuine neuroses and other, perhaps at first glance similar-looking, but nevertheless fundamentally different types of psychic disorders, psychic pathologies, psychic suffering. The other root is my commitment to the rigorous notion of psychology, to a “psychology with soul” (C.G. Jung) and “as the discipline of interiority,” and thus to a thinking psychological phenomena through in terms of soul. As far as neurosis in particular is concerned, long before I had developed my understanding of psychology as discipline of interiority, even before I had begun my training as a Jungian analyst, it had been Franz Kafka who had first opened my eyes to the inner logic and functioning of neurosis. With works such as The Judgment, The Metamorphosis, The Trial, A Hunger Artist, Kafka depicted the inner structure and life of neurosis from within itself, that is, neither from the subjective point of view of the neurotic, nor from the “objective” external point of view of a doctor. In my teaching, among other authors, Kafka during the years 1969–72 at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ, Kafka taught me first to see through neurosis, see through to how it works and what makes neurosis neurotic. I consider him “the poet of neurosis,” without wanting to reduce him to that designation.

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Although I had used Kafka texts in various courses I taught about neurosis at psychological institutes in Germany and in the USA during the 1980s, the present book develops the concept of neurosis entirely in its own different way, without any reference to the literary works by Kafka, on the basis of my ideas developed later during the 1990s. This is so because meanwhile I have learned to see neurosis from the standpoint of soul, from a cultural and historical point of view, and as a metaphysical illness, aspects which are at least not explicit in Kafka’s texts.

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Sources and Abbreviations

For frequently cited sources, the following abbreviations have been used: CW:

Jung, C. G. Collected Works. 20 vols. Ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham, Gerhard Adler, and William McGuire. Trans. R. F. C. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957-1979. Cited by volume and, unless otherwise noted, by paragraph number.

GW:

Jung, C. G. Gesammelte Werke. Zürich and Stuttgart (Rascher), now Olten and Freiburg i:Br: Walter-Verlag, 1958 ff. Cited by volume and, unless otherwise noted, by paragraph number.

Letters: Jung, C. G. Letters. 2 vols. Ed. Gerhard Adler. Bollingen Series XCV: 2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. MDR: Jung, C. G. Memories, Dreams, Reflections. Rev. ed. Ed. Aniela Jaffé. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Cited by page number.

INTRODUCTION

Neurosis from the perspective of the soul’s logical life

I

s it not amazing? We have had more than a hundred years of psychoanalysis (the word taken in the broadest sense, including all the different depth-psychological schools) whose core concern has from the start been neurosis, but to date there has not yet been a psychological concept of neurosis. This is all the more astounding as psychoanalysis owes its very existence to neurosis. Neurosis was instrumental for the constitution of psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysis continually developed, diversified, became ever more complex because neurosis, in all the many individual cases that appeared before the analysts in the consulting room, slowly taught it how to think and proceed, how to conceive the nature, structure, and foremost concerns of the psyche. B. F. Skinner, who gained most of his behaviorist insights from his laboratory study of rats, dedicated one of his books, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men (1932), to the white rat because the white rat had, as it were, been his teacher. Neurosis is the psychoanalytic equivalent to the behaviorist Skinner’s rat. Neurosis made psychoanalysis. On the basis of this lasting and intimate dependence, psychoanalytical psychology has of course provided numerous theories of neurosis. Neurosis has been discussed for more than a century. A

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host of books and articles have appeared in which neurosis at large, as well as particular aspects or kinds of it, were discussed often in painstaking detail and on the basis of solid case material. But the question can be raised whether the theories of psychology about neurosis have been truly psychological theories. In fact, as indicated I think it is fair to state that therapeutic psychology has not been able to comprehend neurosis psychologically—this is the first component of “psychological concept of neurosis”—and not been able—this is the second component—to come up with a clear concept of what a neurosis is, a concept of what that is that makes neurosis “neurotic.” But even more amazing than this failure is that, so it at least appears to me, such a psychological understanding of neurosis has not even been missed by the people active in the field. One of the great problems of psychology is that from the time it began, it applied itself in all innocence directly to what it thought psychological phenomenology to be, just like that, without further reflection. It presupposed that what psychology is and what it is about could simply be taken for granted. It did not work out a clear criterion for when an investigation and a subject matter are truly psychological ones and when not. As the word psychology suggests, psychology is about the soul. But since its beginnings in the 19th century, modern psychology had ridded itself of the notion of “soul” in order to establish itself as a positivistic science. However, C.G. Jung contradicted this idea of a “psychology without soul!” (Friedrich Albert Lange), explicitly demanding that psychology had to be a “psychology with soul.”1 James Hillman followed him. And I agree. A psychology without soul is a contradiction in terms. It is self-defeating. Speaking most generally, we can say that an investigation is truly psychological only if it bases itself squarely on the presupposition of “soul” and views things from this perspective. Neurosis, too, has to be rigorously comprehended as the work of the “soul.” “Soul” is the criterion that we have been looking for. However, this criterion is far too general, in fact, at this point not much more than a mere word. We need a more specific and workable description of the criterion that is to vouchsafe that our effort to develop a concept of “neurosis” will be a psychological one. 1 I discussed this whole issue at length in my What Is Soul?, New Orleans (Spring Journal Books) 2012, chapter 1.1.

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So our first task will be to work out a proper standpoint for any psychological investigation. We cannot simply start with our habitual ideas and turn directly to the phenomena. This view that we cannot simply start out with our conventional frame-of-mind is unusual. Usually one thinks that there is a continuity of consciousness from our everyday attitude as well as from the scientific attitude, on the one hand, to the consciousness needed to study psychology and to practice psychotherapy, on the other hand. But we cannot go to psychology just like that, the way we think normally and with the ordinary style of consciousness. It is not so simple that in psychology we merely have to learn new facts, theories, methods. No, in order to do psychology, a change of consciousness is needed. We are not already there where we could simply begin to study cases or discover psychological laws, etc. It is first necessary to struggle to get ourselves to the point where we can begin to think psychologically. First we have to prepare consciousness, thereafter we can turn to the contents of consciousness. First we have to learn the “syntax” of psychology, before we can devote ourselves to the “semantics” of psychology. This is what is special about psychology. And the reason is that psychology, properly understood, requires not simply an alternative style of consciousness on the same level with ordinary consciousness, but, as we will see later on, a radically new level or status of consciousness. And a new level or logical status of consciousness can come about only through a kind of revolution of consciousness.

1. THE PSYCHOLOGICAL STANDPOINT Psychology (I use this word to refer to the psychoanalytic, depthpsychological tradition of therapeutic psychology) has generally been fully content with viewing neurosis from an external standpoint. It adopted the point of view of medicine towards illness as its own approach to neurosis. It took neurosis, we could say, as a “clinical entity,” which means, first, that it viewed and described from an outside observer standpoint all the different symptoms in which it manifested as well as the typical course that the disease takes, and, secondly, it means that it tried to develop an explanatory theory by searching for the factors that were in a causal sense (the sense of the efficient cause) responsible for the disease, a search which, finally, when successful was

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supposed to show the way to an appropriate curative approach to neurosis. The only difference between neurosis, on the one hand, and, say, typhus or pneumonia, on the other hand, was that the “organ” or “part” of the sick person that was affected by a neurosis was “the psyche” and not a body organ. Already Jung said, “The point is, we are not dealing with clinical diseases but with psychological ones. ... Psychological diagnosis aims [...] at the formulation of facts which are far more likely to be concealed than revealed by the clinical picture” (CW 16 § 196). However, what makes neurosis a psychological topic is from the conventional external point of view no more than the fact that its “locus” is that “organ” or “part” that we call the psyche. This means that psychology is implicitly turned into one of the specialties of medicine. Just as diseases of the eye fall into the competence of ophthalmology, those of the heart into that of cardiology, and those of muscles and joints into that of orthopaedics, so illnesses of the psyche fall into the competence of psychology—which ipso facto is medical psychology, whether it is explicitly called thus or not. Psychology is here exclusively defined by its object, by the psyche conceived as empirical fact, a given entity vis-à-vis an observing subject. But a serious problem with this view is that the psyche is not a given entity comparable to the eyes, the heart, the stomach, to muscles and bones. You can point at an eye, you can transplant the heart of a person. But not the psyche or soul. 2 We cannot demonstrate the objective existence of the psyche as the locus of neurosis. It is precisely not a positive fact. Rather, it is first of all an idea in the mind, a fantasy in us, a name as part of language, a concept in our mental cosmos. Of course, we mean something when we say this word, we may even have some particular ideas about what we mean by it, may they be hazy or clear and specific. And the idea or fantasy of the psyche is certainly an idea or fantasy about an object, a reality. It is conceived as a factual entity. But an idea of or about something is and remains primarily an idea and not an object out there. So psychology runs into a contradiction. It defines itself via its object, but this object turns out not to be a real object at all, or only 2 “Psyche” and “soul” are here still used as synonyms, although in other contexts they are radically set apart by the “psychological difference.”

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an imagined object and thus an imagination. With this insight, provided it is heeded, psychology is thrown back upon itself, upon itself as subject that theorizes about (aspects of ) reality. This is what fundamentally distinguishes psychology from all the real specialties of medicine. Since they are dealing with demonstrably existing organs and their malfunction, they each do have a veritable object as positive fact and thus a reliable base. Therefore they are perfectly entitled to define themselves by their objects as parts of nature and accordingly to be strictly committed to an empiricist methodology and a naturalistic, positivistic stance. But with all this I do not wish to suggest that there are not in fact neuroses. How could I deny the realness of the suffering of people, for example, from serious obsessive-compulsive neuroses, from hysterical blindness or paralysis, from diverse phobias (i.e., from the character of this suffering as not merely imagined or feigned)? There can be no doubt concerning its real existence. More generally we can say that psychological phenomena possess reality or, another way of putting it, that there is what with Jung we call “psychic reality.” However, this unquestioned realness of neuroses does not mean that neurosis is an ailment of a real “organ” of the human being called “psyche” the same way that pneumonia is an ailment of the real organ called “lung.” Neurosis is not a clinical entity. It cannot be pinned down to anything positive-factual. Its manifestations are absolutely real in an empirical sense, but there is nothing empirically real behind it in the sense of a natural thing-like entity, a positivity, as a ground, substrate, or basis of it. Naturalistically or positivistically considered, neurosis is baseless. The idea of the psyche as the carrier or locus of neurosis is a fiction by the psychological mind and a projection into factually existing human beings. As long as it is actually seen and treated as a fiction and projection, there is no problem. But of course, it is the very dynamic of projections to posit themselves as inherent in the external other into or upon which they are projected and to make the mind believe in them as literal realities. The moment the psyche has in this sense been positivized and is envisioned as a thing-like organ, entity, or part of the personality, its thing-likeness invites a thinking about it according to the model of things in space as well as a mechanical (begrifflos) style of thought. For the theorizing mind, the thing ‘psyche’ then turns easily into a “psychic apparatus” with various

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layers (e.g., consciousness, subconscious, unconscious) and agencies (the Id, the ego, the superego) or components (“complexes”), and their interactions are imagined in terms of physics, above all hydraulics, or of power politics (e.g., “the flow of energy is damned up and needs to be released again,” fixation, repression, censor), and the psychic apparatus itself is viewed as determined by external factors as efficient causes (e.g., “traumatization”). Of course, most of the time psychologists do not at all literally and actually believe that the psyche is a thing-like entity. Usually they merely study psychological phenomenology with this idea as the implicit and often quite unconscious horizon of their studies, an idea in the back of their minds. And as such it does not take on the form of a hypostatized substance for them, an entity with a positive substantial content and empirical reality. Rather, in their theoretical scheme it is present only as absent, as a blank space, serving as no more than a “black box,” a black box into which stimuli from “outer reality” enter and from which psychic reactions come forth. However, despite the fact that in this way a literal hypostasis or reification of the psyche is avoided on the semantic or content level (because “black box” means that one cannot say anything about its quality or content), i.e., despite the fact that the whole idea of “psyche” is bracketed, this way of thinking can nevertheless not escape the reproach of being a case of hypostatizing after all: because the very bracketing shows that syntactically the position (the blank space) of a substance within the whole system is retained and affirmed. The logical structure of this type of psychological thought operates with the (be it implicit or explicit) notion of something, the psyche, behind the psychic phenomena, something that produces them, a kind of author, an origin, whose manifestation the psychic phenomena are. This is a clear case of mystification. Science, by contrast, does not work with the idea of a “black box”-like hidden entity or reality behind the natural phenomena that it studies. For it, “nature” is simply the sum-total of all natural phenomenology. Science does not need to mystify, it can be completely “up front,” because, to return here only to the one field of medicine, the substance behind illnesses or their carriers (the organs, the eyes, the heart, the skin, the joints, in which those illnesses manifest) are themselves completely phenomenological, i.e., positive-factual.

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But conventional depth-psychology operates with a mysterious “psyche” behind psychological phenomenology. And although (by not explicitly positing the psyche as an existing soul substance, but rather keeping it totally enclosed and bracketed in a “black box”) it avoids becoming literally metaphysical, it nevertheless retains the quasimetaphysical thought structure. In Freudian psychoanalysis as well as Jung’s analytical psychology the “black box” has even become an explicit integral part of psychological theory in the idea of “the unconscious.” Of course, “the unconscious” is, despite its explicitness, a more refined, subtle version of the “black box” inasmuch as what in the case of the ordinary “black box” is a strict prohibition to open it has become logical; the prohibition receded into the very concept and definition of this “black box”: it is inherent in the notion of “the unconscious” that it is utterly “black,” “bracketed” for, and inaccessible to consciousness. “The unconscious” is given out as empirical, i.e., as an actual positive fact, and it is said to be the source of all essential psychic events, above all of all psychopathology, but it remains on principle hidden, fundamentally unempirical. Nobody has ever seen it or could possibly see it. In other words, it remains purely speculative, an idea in the mind, just as “the psyche.” What can we learn from this? The fact that psychology with its ideas of “the unconscious” and “the psyche” believes itself to have an empirical object, a real substrate of psychic phenomenology. But that this object or substrate is in itself purely speculative, a fiction and precisely not a positive fact, tells us something about the nature of psychology itself. It clearly indicates that psychology is not, and cannot be, a natural science like physics or medicine, but that on the contrary it is a fundamentally speculative enterprise. The ideas of “the unconscious” and the psyche as substrates and as objects of empirical investigation only come about if and when psychology projects its own intrinsic speculative nature out and away from itself and posits, indeed, hypostatizes (reifies, almost personifies) something which in truth is its very own inner nature and functioning as an external object of its observation and study. Kant spoke, with respect to the theoretical ideas of classical metaphysics such as “God” and “the immortal soul,” of the subreption (Erschleichung) of a thing-like object where there is actually only a mental function. Structurally, “the unconscious” and the idea of the psyche are such a subreption.

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Psychologically, the main function that this mode of thinking has is to take psychology (psychological thinking) prisoner for externality, the same externality that prevails in medicine and in all the traditional natural sciences.3 But in contrast to the sciences where this externality is legitimate, because it is constitutive for them (science is about “nature out there,” nature as object of empirical observation, nature as positivity), in the case of psychology this amounts to its selfalienation and self-betrayal. By projecting its speculative ideas concerning the psyche and psychic reality out and away from itself, out of the realm of mental speculation, and setting them up as positivefactual reality “out there,” to be empirically observed, studied, explained, and treated by psychology, psychology sends itself, so we could say, on a wild goose chase. In one of the insightful Sufi anecdotes, Mullah Nasrudin is one day observed by some of his leisurely chatting friends on the market place suddenly galloping past them and, after a while, again galloping past them in the opposite direction, and then once more in a third direction and so on. At last they signaled him to stop and asked him what in heaven’s name he was doing chasing around in all possible directions. His answer was: “I am looking for my horse.” As usually, such a jocose anecdote is just as revealing as it could be misleading if one were to take it straightforwardly. Stories, images, metaphors, illustrations are never fully adequate means for giving truthful expression to speculative insights. The point to be made by this anecdote is not simply the view that what he had been searching for was the very thing, the horse, that he had already been sitting on and that enabled him to search for it all over the place. Rather, the point is that what he was looking for was neither the horse as an object in the distance nor the horse he had always already been sitting on during his search. Or, applying it to our topic, it will not do to realize that “the psyche” is not an empirical object, not a hidden entity “out there,” but rather an idea in the subjective mind of the theorist. A mere switching from object to subject will not do. It would only be a reversal into the opposite and thus six of one and half a dozen of the other, when what is actually demanded of us is to progress to an entirely different level by leaving behind both subject and object, that is, the 3 I disregard here the tendency of the most modern physics to move in the direction of self-reflection.

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whole opposition-of-consciousness. The horse sought somewhere out there and the horse that Mullah Nasrudin is already riding on during his search for it are both literal horses, both positive facts, and by the same token the psyche reified and projected into people, on the one hand, and the psyche comprehended as nothing but an idea in the observing or theorizing mind, on the other hand, are two options that belong to one and the same style of positivistic thought. What is really sought is neither the one nor the other but at the same time comprises them both. It is the third of the two. It is truly speculative. Psychological. Freudians make a difference between psychological phenomenology, on the one hand, and so-called metapsychology, on the other hand. C.G. Jung, by contrast, showed us that such a dissociation between subject and object, between observed fact and theory (or interpretation of fact) is untenable in psychology. He could say that there are people who have a Freudian psychology, whereas others may have an Adlerian, a Jungian or whatever other psychology. In other words, psychology is both what the psychologist has before himself as the object of his investigation (“what is going on” in his patients or in people in general) and what he thinks about this object of his, both his theories and the lived life of the soul that his theories try to grasp. The fact that people have a certain psychology must also be understood to mean that they are (exist as) this psychology. Psychology is idea and reality at once. Jung could say: “At any rate, philosophical criticism has helped me to see that every psychology—my own included—has the character of a subjective confession” (CW 4 § 775). In doing psychology, Jung realized, “I speak of myself in the wrapping of alleged empirical data” (ibid., transl. modif.), and about a hypothesis that is central to his thinking he said that it “certainly has its origin in me even if I am deluded to believe [mir einbilde] I had discovered it through empirical observation” (ibid., § 778, transl. modif.). But we also need to turn these sentences around and say conversely, for example, that in observing myself and speaking about my psychic condition the objective soul itself is expressing itself in the wrapping of my selfobservation. More than that: psychological phenomena and thus also psychopathological states, behaviors, and neurotic symptoms are in themselves and from the outset theories (implicit theorizing) or, if one wants to use the Freudian term, in themselves (implicit) “metapsychology.” They are in themselves interpretations, come as

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spontaneously appearing interpretations. They are not first of all facts of nature that merely await interpretation. They are objectified, congealed, embodied fantasies, views, ideas. And psychological theory is in itself a part of the soul’s life process, soul-making; it is productive, constructive—itself part of psychic phenomenology, to some extent maybe even part of psychopathology (with Hillman’s term, of “pathologizing”) or, conversely, itself therapeutic. The psychic is in itself psychological, the psychological in itself psychic reality. The first half of this last sentence is spelled out in Jung’s dictum: “But every psychic process [...] is essentially ‘theoria,’ that is, intuition [Anschauung], and its reconstruction is at best only a varietal of the same intuition” (CW 17 § 162, transl. modif., Jung’s italics). “At best,” because if the reconstruction or interpretation is not only such a varietal of the same intuition it misses the point; then, as Jung adds, “it amounts” “to a compensatory attempt (to improve, find fault with, etc.), or to a piece of polemic (or criticism).” The second half of the former sentence we find expressed in the following statement: “... psychology inevitably merges with the psychic process itself. It can no longer be distinguished from the latter, and so turns into it. ... it is not, in the deeper sense, an explanation of this process, for no explanation of the psychic can be anything other than the living process of the psyche itself” (CW 8 § 429). What comes to mind here is the alchemical dictum that what is inside, is outside. And the idea of this merging, this returning into itself, evokes the alchemical image of the uroboros, the serpent eating its own tail. The reason for this uroboric intertwinement of subject and object, of the psychic and the psychological is expressed in Jung’s fundamental theoretical statement that psychology “lacks the immense advantage of an Archimedean point such as physics enjoys. ... The psyche ... observes itself and can only translate the psychic back into the psychic. ... There is no medium for psychology to reflect itself in: it can only portray itself in itself, and describe itself” (ibid. § 421), “ignotum per ignotius” (e.g., CW 17 § 162). Soul is self-reflection, self-relation, and psychology (psychological explanations or descriptions) is one of the ways in which the soul reflects itself. The clear distinction, indeed, opposition, prevailing in all sciences, of subject and object, theory and nature, does not exist in

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and for psychology. Psychology cannot be a science. It is in itself and from the outset sublated science, in itself sublated ‘scientific’ psychology. Psychology is inevitably speculative. The clear distinction between psychology and its subject-matter, the soul, cannot be maintained: Psychology is itself an expression of soul, and soul is interpretation of itself (in other words, it is in itself psychology and not a piece of nature, not natural fact or event). Both soul and psychology follow a “uroboric” logic. Although psychology is a study of the soul it is not dealing with facts out there, facts that await our interpretation or understanding, our theorizing. There are no simple facts for psychology. Psychology cannot be described as a simple subject–object relation, as a simple vis-à-vis, here the psychologist as the subject, there the facts of psychic reality. The relation prevailing in psychology needs to be described with a more complex formula: as a subject–subject relation in which the first subject, e.g., the psychologist, is in itself an object–subject relation and the second subject, e.g., the neurosis of a patient, in itself a subject–object relation.

Jung said: “We should never forget that in any psychological discussion we are not making statements about the psyche, but the psyche is inevitably expressing itself” (CW 9i § 483, transl. modif.). But the lack of an Archimedean point is not only a lack and the dilemma of psychology,4 it is in reality also (or much rather) its privilege and prerogative. It is indicative of the fact that psychology is of a higher level of consciousness or a more sophisticated logical status. In psychology, consciousness is forced to transcend the observer standpoint; it has to overcome the naive idea of the directness of an opposition of subject and object. It awakens to a higher complexity, so that when this has happened it has now objectively become selfreflexive, uroboric, and has comprehended itself as such (which are of course not two separate changes, but one and the same, since in 4 This adverse aspect is what Jung emphasized: “the psychology of complex phenomena finds itself in an uncomfortable [mißlich] situation compared with the other natural sciences because it lacks a base outside its object” (CW 10 § 429).

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psychology being is in itself thinking and thought or theory or understanding is psychic reality). What does this mean for our question concerning the issue of a “psychology with soul”? The position we have reached is both beyond the metaphysical concept of soul and beyond that attitude that is willing to throw the concept of soul simply overboard. With the formulas that I provided, we have arrived at a position where the “object” has disappeared, not totally, of course, but as immediate or direct object or as positive fact; the other way around we can say, it is still there, however not literally so, but only as sublated object, as object reflected into itself. Or better: Not the object (“the soul”) has disappeared, but the very notion of “object,” the notion of “soul,” has been sublated. “Psychology with soul” now no longer means a psychological theory about the soul as an existing natural entity, as a thing-like substance, a positivity; the soul is no longer substantiated, but the notion of “soul” has been alchemically distilled, sublimated, liquefied. “Soul” is, logically speaking, absolute negativity. The notion of it has been interiorized into itself, into psychology. We could also say: This notion has been removed from “ontology” to “logic” or “method.” “Soul” is now a perspective, a style of thinking. Thus the notion of the object of psychology has itself become psychologized. Psychology has come home to itself, because its object, “the soul,” has come home to it. Psychology does have an object. It is a psychology with soul. But the soul is not an external object for psychology, not an object out there: it (the soul) is simply psychology’s own self. It is in this sense that psychology has logically become uroboric, self-reflective. The soul investigates the soul. It is not as in the sciences that the mind studies an Other, namely nature as positivefactually existing reality, but what it studies is itself already (and inescapably so) mind, noetic, intelligible. On both sides of the opposition you have the same. Instead of literally losing the notion of soul or of getting rid of it altogether.5 5 What I described is of course not the conventional, prevailing conception of psychology. Usually consciousness stays in the old pre-reflective mode of thinking in terms of subject and object. The problem of narcissism as a pathology can be understood as the repression of the uroboric logic in the style of psychology, the repression of its speculative nature, and the return of the repressed as an external and literalized, positivized fact! What ought to be the logic or “syntax” of psychology as such, appears within it as a particular “semantic” content.

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This makes it impossible to comprehend psychology as an empirical science (as Jung usually still wanted, despite his far-reaching insight that “Psychology has to sublate [aufheben] itself as a science and therein precisely it reaches its scientific goal” CW 8 § 429. transl. modif.). Rather, now that the very notion of its object, “the soul,” has dissolved from “existing entity” to method or style, psychology has to be defined differently: as the discipline of interiority. What does this mean, discipline of interiority? It first of all means that our investigation is a psychological one if we try to get inside the phenomenon that we study and manage to see it from within. Here I make a big jump to a totally different topic in order to make this a little more accessible. In a seminar, in the context of discussing the topic of “assimilating one’s own animal nature,” Jung once said: ... it is difficult to say to anybody, you should ... become acquainted with your animal, because people think it is sort of a lunatic asylum, they think the animal is jumping over walls and raising hell all over town. Yet the animal is a well-behaved citizen in nature, it is pious, it follows the path with great regularity ... Only man is extravagant ... So if you assimilate the nature of the animal you become a peculiarly law-abiding citizen; you go very slowly and you become very reasonable in your ways ... We have an entirely wrong idea of the animal; we must not judge from the outside. From the outside you see a pig covered with mud and wallowing in dirt ... that pig from the outside is dirty ... for you it would be dirty, but it is not for the pig. What you have to do is to put yourself inside the pig.6

Although the particular subject of this quotation has nothing to do with our context, the quotation nevertheless shows us the essential move that turns a topic or phenomenon into a psychological one. We have to get inside the phenomenon and understand it from within itself. But now the new question arises, “How can we get into a phenomenon so that we can indeed see it from within and so that it therefore indeed turns into a psychological one?” Obviously this is not a move in the externality of space, but a psychological change of attitude or viewpoint. We see something from within if, and only if, we conceive 6 Jung, Visions: Notes of the Seminar given 1930-1934, ed. Claire Douglas, 2 vols, Bollingen Series, Princeton (Princeton Univ. Press) 1997, p. 168.

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of it according to the oft-repeated alchemical principle expressed by Jung, for example, in the following way: Above all, don’t let anything from outside, that does not belong, get into it, for the fantasy-image [or for us: the psychological phenomenon in general] has ‘everything it needs’ [omne quo indiget] within itself (CW 14 § 749).7

This sentence, which might in analogy to Occam’s razor8 be called the “psychological razor,” contains the criterion by which statements and theories and phenomena can be judged concerning whether they are truly psychological or not. As psychologists we have to view, better: to think, the phenomenon as having everything it needs within itself, even its cause and origin, its telos and fulfillment, its meaning and truth. This is our job as psychologists! It is in this sense that Jung could also say with a Talmudic statement: “The dream is its own interpretation,” a dictum that shows that it is spoken from the position of self-reflectivity. The same idea applies to any phenomenon perceived psychologically, also to a symptom or to neurosis. We have to impute to it the character of being complete within itself, uroborically self-enclosed. I say ‘impute’ because this self-containment of the phenomena is of course not an ontological assertion (“phenomena have everything within themselves”), but a methodological stance that one may or may not adopt, but that I will have to adopt if my thinking is supposed to be psychological. If it were an ontological assertion we would be back to the position we have left, back to the simple subject – object relation. The question of how truly to get into a phenomenon has now been answered. We get into a phenomenon so that we can indeed see it from within if we methodically impute to it that it has everything it needs within itself and just as systematically prevent anything from outside that does not belong from getting into it. “[...] the interpretation must guard against making use of any other viewpoints than those manifestly given by the content itself” (CW 4 § 162). Our getting into a phenomenon is not in need of an active move on our 7 I have added the not unimportant words “within itself,” which have been omitted in the CW translation, but are part of Jung’s German original (GW 14/II § 404). 8 “Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate,” or: “Principia (or entia) non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem.”

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part (neither a locomotion nor an act of empathy or of our trying to mentally transport [imagine] ourselves into the phenomenon). That interiority that is constitutive for psychology is much rather achieved through nothing more than a negation: through a “preventing,” “guarding against”—nothing else but our strictly protecting the phenomenon in question (our apperception of the phenomenon) from a possible intrusion of any extraneous ideas, associations, emotions, or perspectives. Let me point out just two of the implications of this methodological principle. a) Before we begin with our study of the psychology of neurosis, all the fixed, established concepts with which neurosis is conventionally explained must be swept away and left behind as much as possible, concepts and ideas like trauma, childhood development, repression and regression, conflict, compensation, the unconscious, archetypes. If they are important we can trust that the freshly looked at phenomenon of neurosis will of its own accord reintroduce them, but then no longer as preconceptions brought to the phenomenon from outside, but as generated and necessitated by it from within. b) By turning the phenomenon into itself and enclosing it within itself and by rigorously keeping away from it anything from outside that does not belong, even the mere thought of an outside reality around it, the psychological phenomenon is at the same time logically detached from the idea of a substrate whose manifestation or quality it might have been thought to be. In this way, the naturalism, biologism, and the personalistic fallacy of conventional psychology are overcome. Conventionally, psychic reality has been conceived as the behavior of the organism or as what goes on inside people. But from the truly psychological perspective, the phenomenon is viewed as sufficient unto itself. The idea of the substrate personality has no place in a psychology aware of itself. Psychology is not about people; “men” and “women” are not concepts of psychology. I quote Jung: “In myths and fairytales, as in dreams, the soul speaks about itself, and the archetypes reveal themselves in their natural interplay, as ‘formation, transformation / the eternal Mind’s eternal recreation’” (CW 9i § 400, transl. modified). Already earlier I quoted Jung’s statement that “the psyche is inevitably expressing itself.” The soul speaks about itself, not about us! Psychology is about the ideas, thoughts, emotions, feelings, impulses, symptoms,

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images, dreams as realities in their own right. The moment one views these phenomena as expressions of the organism or of the personality, one has left psychology proper and entered human biology, ethology, or maybe also sociology. With the conception of psychology as the discipline of interiority and with the maxim by Jung prohibiting us to let anything from outside get into the prime matter, we can see what “psychology with soul” means for the object of psychology. Because it is no longer a substance, a positive-factual entity, but has been reflected into psychology, psychology does not have anymore “the advantage of a ‘delimited field of work’” (CW 9i § 112). This means that psychology is precisely not restricted to what goes on inside people in contrast to the world at large. Rather, any object in the whole wide world of human experience and culture, any object of any science or theory or fantasy can be an object, i.e., subject-matter, for psychology. “Every other science has so to speak an outside; not so psychology, whose object is the subject of all science” (CW 8 § 429, my emphasis, transl. modif.).9 This is so because all objects that we know of or think about have gone through the mind. And this aspect is what psychology has to study. Human culture at large! c) By construing phenomena as realities in their own right, each phenomenon (this neurosis, this dream, this impulse) is assigned the character of a true individual—individual not merely in the sense of singularity, but of a self. [The term self here implies the uroboric structure of self-relation. It does not mean an entity.] It is a serious flaw of Jung’s psychology that he literalized, reified, and mystified the self as the Self, an entity in the human psyche expressing the superordinate, supra-empirical, “transpersonal” wholeness as well as the center of the person, whereas in reality “self” is simply the specific nature [= logical structure] of any psychological phenomenon, any image, dream, idea, symptom, etc. [as self-contained, self-enclosed, self-relating]. Obviously Jung was not able to fully free himself from a personalistic bias (despite his emphasis on the transpersonal). The self-nature of, e.g., an image 9 Describing what “has always claimed my deepest interest and my greatest attention” Jung accordingly lists: “the manifestation of archetypes, or archetypal forms, in all the phenomena of life: in biology, physics, history, folklore, and art, in theology and mythology, in parapsychology, as well as in the symptoms of insane patients and neurotics, and finally in the dreams and life of every individual man and woman” (Letters 2, p. 397, to Flinker, 17 October 1957).

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shows in that the image, just like a poem or painting, demonstrates its internal infinity by ever again restoring itself over against our finite interpretations of it; on its own accord it annuls its previous interpretations and, having time and again regained its original freshness and integrity, produces new interpretations. In imaginal language we could also say that each psychological phenomenon is an alchemical prime matter enclosed in the retort, whereby the retort is, as we hear from Jung, “an artificial human product and thus signifies the intellectual purposefulness and artificiality of the procedure.” It is “‘hermetically’ sealed” and has “to be as round as possible, since it (is) meant to represent the universe [the Weltall]” (CW 13 § 245, transl. modif.). The hermetic seal indicates the radical exclusion of anything from outside, indeed the decision to altogether do away with the very idea of an “outside.” The fact that the hermetic vas enclosing the matter represents the universe, the All, makes the self-character apparent: the matter is to be viewed as an individual, a totality, a world unto itself, the whole world (for the time being): “this is it!” [Only this! Nothing else exists for me while looking at the matter in the retort. I have my back turned to everything else: this is the stance of interiority! Not introspection, no looking into myself, but looking at the retort in front of me, with my back turned to everything else.] Mythological thinking, too, portrayed the world as a self by imagining it surrounded and enclosed by Okeanos, whose waters stream uroborically back into themselves and who thereby is the “origin of all” and the “Father of the Gods.” And as far as the alchemical retort is concerned, the artificiality of the procedure points to the methodological rather than ontological-metaphysical character of the idea of the uroboric self-containedness of the matter or phenomenon; also, it shows that psychology’s phenomenological stance is not a naive one. Psychology knows that the subject is already entangled and inherent in the phenomenon that it wants to investigate as its object of study before itself; it is, with respect to the prime matter as well as to the desired end product of the procedure, as productive (in the sense of poiêsis) as it is theoretical. It is at once soul-making AND cognition of the soul. Jung said that psychology does not have “the advantage of a ‘delimited field of work.’” The whole world of human experience and culture is its field of work. But what then is the difference between,

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e.g., biology studying a lion and psychology studying a lion? In the natural sciences, the lion, in addition to being a positivity and an object vis-à-vis the observer, is apperceived and studied as a part or piece of nature. In this one piece, the general laws of nature at large are at work. And the focus of the sciences is on the specific ways in which these laws manifest in the particular phenomenon. So the phenomena are here reductively explained in terms of something larger. The phenomena have their essence outside of themselves in nature at large. Psychology, by contrast, looks at all phenomena, first, as already apperceived, viewed, i.e., to the extent that they have already been interpreted and thus are statements by “the soul,” rather than natural facts or positivities. Psychological phenomena are absolute-negative. They are psychological to the extent that they are a negation of “nature.” Contra naturam. And therefore, secondly, psychology looks at all phenomena as being selves, and this is why the lion, e.g., is for psychology a symbol, a psychic idea. It has its own depth within itself, that depth that Jung called archetypal. So we see here, by the way, how the theory of the archetypes is dependent on the conception of phenomena as selves. If the phenomenon as prima materia is a self, then our thinking must be “monistic.” There is no room here for a duality, for the idea of a relation between two. There is only this, the matter at hand. It has everything it needs within itself. But the converse to this is that this One is in itself mercurial, utriusque capax, a dialectical, uroboric union of opposites. And of course, it can only be dialectical and mercurial because any toying with an Other outside is excluded. The idea of an external Other would permit the Mercurius to escape, or rather, it would undo his mercurial nature by allowing the conflicting moments of his internal contradictoriness to be distributed upon two. We would have simple opposites instead of mercurial dialectics. The exclusion of any external Other must not be misunderstood as the psychologist’s active, maybe even violent, ‘turning against ... ,’ which would of course have the counter-productive effect of always logically maintaining that very Other against which it turns. No, the exclusion is “pathic,” passive, a side effect of something else: of the fact that all “libido,” all love, the whole intensity of one’s dedication, flows to the one image at hand (or whatever else the psychological

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phenomenon in the retort may be), so that everything else is simply forgotten; there is no attention left for it; it is all in the phenomenon, captivated by it. Thus it is ultimately love which turns the phenomenon into the prime matter, into a self, into the universe. From here we can understand, by the way, why in Freudian psychoanalysis the labored work with the personal transference is so extremely important, whereas in a Jungian analysis it is not. Psychoanalysis has not left behind the idea of the personality as substrate; it clings to the idea of duality and to that of physically existing objects (both come together, but are logically also kept separate, in the idea of “object relations”!). By operating with the idea of the patient and his or her literal, positive Other, the therapist, transference analysis is the ritual through which every psychological phenomenon is tied back to, or “taken prisoner for,” the logic of “person” (even “object”) and “substrate.” Consciousness is constantly reminded of the positive, literal existence of the two empirical persons in the consulting room. Transference analysis is a ritual to syntactically or logically reaffirm otherness, externality, positivity or, the other way around, to prevent consciousness from falling into interiority and internal infinity, while semantically (often desperately) trying to overcome this externality. In a Jungian analysis informed by an alchemical spirit, it is much easier to abandon oneself to a dream or other phenomenon and forget about the two people outside its retort. Both persons in the consulting room can find themselves in the dream as a third. Transference here is comprehended as the coniunctio problem within the mercurial, dialectical life of the one prime matter of the objective psyche, not the relation and interaction between the two empirical persons in the consulting room.

2. THINKING NEUROSIS This book views neurosis from the perspective of the soul, the soul’s logical life. It tries to develop the psychological concept of neurosis, and this concept in the strict sense of “concept.” It is about the “logic of a metaphysical illness.” Another way of putting the same thing would be to say that this book has the task of thinking neurosis, thinking it through.

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For reasons that will become clearer later, neurosis, to a much higher degree than other psychic phenomena, requires of us to think it, to approach it thinkingly, to penetrate it with conceptual thought. Thought proper is the only medium in which we can do justice to it, do justice to it particularly also in therapeutic regards. The thesis of a connection between soul and thought which I insist on here is admittedly unusual. The normal thing in psychology is to connect soul with emotion, feeling, with desire, attachment, and wounds, etc. But all these realities (or ideas), as important as they may be in their own right and at their proper place, miss the essence of neurosis. Why this is so will, as I indicated, become clear from the further discussion of the nature of neurosis in the following chapters. May it suffice here to say by way of anticipatory hint that neurosis is a logical and intellectual illness, a highly devious, cunning undertaking, and needs to be seen on a purely structural level (in contrast to a personal level: persons as entities, “objects,” as they are called in psychoanalytical jargon). Thinking here thus means not to become impressed by and fall for the external (phenomenal) appearance that neurosis gives itself, but to see through to and comprehend its underlying structure, or rather, since “structure” gives the wrong impression of a static architecture, to the complex logic of the maneuver, ongoing under the surface, as which neurosis exists. But this is not all. In addition to the necessity of comprehending the individual manifestations of neurosis our project of thinking the neurosis must also go beyond the level of all the individual neurotic symptoms and mechanisms in the plural and focus on the neurosis in the singular. We need to understand that the individual neurotic illnesses do not have their truth each in themselves, but in the neurosis as the actual reality, of which the neuroses that all the different patients have and all the numerous neurotic manifestations are merely specific and partial exemplifications. The many neurotics participate in the neurosis, much like, on a much larger scale and dimension, all living beings are individual representations of “life as such.” The neurosis, so to speak, disseminates into the individual neuroses, but in each neurotic individual it is the neurosis in individualized form.

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Neurosis is a thought that as thought has come real. It is a lived and embodied (and thus existing) concept, and as such it is, despite its disseminated reality, an undivided whole in its own right. It is, after all, a psychological reality, an expression of soul, and it is, we must not forget this, a cultural “institution.” 10 The individuals who become neurotic are merely the place where this cultural institution realizes itself. It realizes itself in them, when we look from an empirical, causal perspective, probably because they are temptable by or susceptible to it, lending themselves to it on account of their own personal psychic constitution, needs, and desires as well as life circumstances. The institution of neurosis, as part of the logic of a historical age, has easy play in some persons within a society, easier than in others. In some external way this may, on a societal level, be comparable to what in medicine is called an organism’s locus minoris resistentiae. Or it may be comparable to how in a society certain people get captivated by current movements, ideas, crazes and completely identify themselves with them so that they lose their critical distance to them, whereas most other people may perhaps also sympathize with the same trends without, however, losing their own identity to them. Or to how certain individuals drift into drug addiction while others don’t. Neurosis as an existing concept cannot be explained personalistically, just as the “I,” another existing concept, cannot be explained personalistically. As a concept, neurosis has its own integrity. It is not something circumstantial, not an attribute or accident of the human person as substance. Qua concept it is itself, if you wish, a “substance,” a res. Often, “to think” is understood as our reflecting about something, having thoughts, ideas, opinions about it. But when I speak of wanting to think neurosis, I mean something very different. I mean a thinking by us in which we let the neurosis itself think out its own nature and truth and unfold the thought that it is to its very end.

10

I will come back to the topic of “the neurosis” in Part 5, ch. 3 and Part 6, ch. 1.

PART 1

The concept of neurosis

All attempts at specific aetiologies of neurosis and corresponding psychological formulations I consider to be conceptual acrobatics. —C.G. Jung11

I don’t teach how neuroses come about, but what one finds in neuroses. —C.G. Jung12

The psyche is a disturber of the cosmos governed by natural laws. —C.G. Jung13

T

urning specifically to neurosis, after having gained a general insight into the nature of what constitutes the standpoint of psychology and how to approach neurosis, it is clear that we need to comprehend neurosis, too, as a self. With the help of ideas developed by Jung we approach this view in two steps. 11

Letters 2, p. 299, to von Koenig-Flachsfeld, 5 May 1941 (transl. modif.). Letters 2, p. 293, to Jolande Jacobi, 13 March 1956 (transl. modif.). 13 CW 8 § 422 (transl. modif.). 12

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1. The first step was taken by the early Jung, who developed the idea of the Aktualkonflikt theory of neurosis. Aktualkonflikt, the “presently prevailing, or current, conflict” is the conflict that exists in the present and has its origin in the present. We see immediately that this view is incompatible with the usual view in psychoanalysis of neurosis as being due to fixations that originated in early childhood and, of course, were caused by the conditions under which the child grew up. Neurosis then is also, to be sure, a present state, but it has its deeper origin outside of itself in the past. Past and present: the structure of otherness. Jung from very early on rejected this conception and was at least on the way to a theory that was not governed by otherness and thus came close to an understanding of neurosis as a self, although Jung did not quite see and express it in these terms as yet. Already in 1912, in his lectures at Fordham University in New York (“Versuch einer Darstellung der psychoanalytischen Theorie,” given in English under the title: “The Theory of Psychoanalysis”), Jung’s “current-conflict” theory of neurosis was basically fully developed. It amounts to a rejection or negation of the past as a full-fledged factor in the theory of neurosis and instead shows a wholehearted commitment to the present. I am not concerned here with whether this theory is correct or not, whether it is truer or not than the rejected view. I am only concerned with the logical move that Jung made and what this move means. I believe Jung’s move was driven by the impulse for the psychologization of psychology. Jung eliminated in effect alterity and sided with sameness. What did Jung say in 1912? “... the cause of the pathogenic conflict lies mainly in the present moment.” (CW 4 § 373) He rejected “the earlier, ‘historical’ conception of neurosis” (§ 409). “... I no longer seek the cause of a neurosis in the past, but in the present.” (§ 570) In another text many years later (1934) the same idea is expressed even more succinctly: The true reason for a neurosis lies in the “today,” for the neurosis exists in the present. It is by no means a hangover from the past, a caput mortuum, but it is daily maintained [or fed], indeed even generated anew, as it were. And it is only in the today, not in our yesterdays, that a neurosis can be “cured.” Because the neurotic conflict faces us today, any historical deviation is a detour, if not actually a going astray. (CW 10 § 363, transl. modif.)

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What we see here very clearly at work behind such statements is a need for a logic of sameness, a commitment to the self-contained today. The “today” is the cause and the reason, it is what continuously feeds the neurosis, and it is the potential of a cure. The “today” has everything it needs within itself. And Jung holds off from it everything that does not belong to the Now. Because Jung rejects the past and encloses himself theoretically in the present moment, he of course needs to explain in some other way the ideas of fixation, of the “polymorphous-perverse” disposition of the child, and of the “amnesia of childhood.” To the extent that they are based on observed phenomena he explains them in terms of regression: as “the particular use which [the neurotic] makes of his infantile past” (from within the needs of his “current conflict”) (CW 4 § 564, my italics). And to the extent that they have become components of the theory of neurosis, he explains them as a Rückschluß aus der Neurosenpsychologie, an inference [back] or a borrowing from the psychological theory of neurosis and a projection backwards [i.e., a retrojection] of what one finds psychologically in a present neurosis of adults (CW 4 § 369) into the psychology of the child, in which, as Jung says, it is of course quite out of place (§ 293). I repeat, the main point in Jung’s thinking about the “current conflict” here is his aiming for a theory of self-enclosed sameness without any external Other. 2. But the Aktualkonflikt theory of neurosis does not go far enough. The very idea of a conflict still involves a duality and a fundamental otherness, such as the duality of the desires, or resistances of the individual vis-à-vis the social demands. So we have to go even beyond the “current conflict” idea. Jung took a second step in which what he more or less unconsciously intended became explicit. This second theoretical move was inspired by alchemical ideas. Jung quotes an alchemical dictum: “‘This stinking water contains everything it needs.’” And he adds, “It [i.e., the stinking water] is sufficient unto itself, like the Uroboros, the tail-eater, which is said to beget, kill, and devour itself ” (CW 16 § 454). With this statement we have arrived at the truly psychological logic. For a truly psychological conception, neurosis “begets” itself. It is self-generative, causa sui. Like Athena, who sprang from the head of Zeus completely finished and in full armor, so, too, neurosis comes

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into being all at once. All ideas of an external cause, of a reaction to external conditions, of object-relations, of an internal compensation for one’s own one-sidedness of consciousness, of a defense against an unbearable reality, have to be left behind, because they all operate with a duality, with some Other outside the neurosis itself, and thereby fixate our thinking in positivity and externality. In fact, these ideas are themselves the very split or dissociation that is the main character of neurosis; they are a neurotic interpretation of neurosis. Quote: “There is no way, it seems to me, how the psychotherapy of today can escape the necessity of having to do a great deal of unlearning and relearning, [...] until it may succeed in no longer thinking neurotically itself,” Jung said 80 years ago (GW 10 § 369, my transl.), but it is still true today. Even the idea of “conflict” has to be kept away from the notion of neurosis. Neurosis is a creative Work, an opus, poiêsis, much like a work of art, and therefore has to be comprehended solely from within itself. Alfred Adler realized that it was an arrangement,14 and Jung followed him. The idea that neurosis is a Work implies that it has an organic form and an internal purposiveness. The idea of neurosis as a Work excludes any ideas of it as a mere mishap, deformity, something having gone wrong. Neurosis is a staged show, a theatrical mise-en-scène, not a natural event, not something that simply happens. Even if neurosis sometimes imagines its own cause as a trauma in external reality and in the past and imagines itself as a natural, necessary, and thus inevitable reaction to a traumatic event or condition, it nevertheless imaginatively fabricates this allegedly external cause within itself, as an integral part of its own opus, and thus subsequently (nachträglich). It follows from what I said that I cannot agree with the idea of a “repetition compulsion.” Of course, this idea of Freud’s was highly speculative and, as Laplanche and Pontalis said, rather muddled from the outset. And it has caused quite controversial discussions in psychoanalytical literature, also because it involves controversial ideas such as those of the pleasure principle and the death drive. But however difficult the specifics of this concept may be, in the practical thinking of wide circles of psychotherapy the popularized idea of the repetition compulsion has been quite effective, regardless of whether it was 14

Adler used a French term.

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correctly understood and whether the theoretical background of this idea was also taken over or not. At any rate, the repetition compulsion is viewed as an autonomous factor. It suggests that the present compulsive repetition of a neurotic behavior points back behind the present into the past: that this presently powerful urge receives both its momentum and its ultimate cause from past events. It is of course true that the reason for a neurotic behavior today does not lie in the obvious present situation in which the neurotic finds himself, e.g., not in what others are now doing to him. But nevertheless I insist that the neurotic behavior has its source within itself, within the present— only not in the external surface reality of today, but in the presently prevailing highest ideals and needs of the invisible “soul.” Neurosis has to be comprehended as a product of freedom, the freedom, however, of what, with a mythological personification, we call “the soul.” In this spirit Jung said, “The word psychogenic suggests that certain disorders come from the soul” (cf. CW 7 § 4), and he stated, as already quoted, that neurosis “is daily maintained and indeed even generated anew, as it were” (CW 10 § 363, transl. modif.). To avoid misunderstandings, I want to stress here that the idea of “neurosis as a product of freedom and as self-caused” does not imply that it is caused by the free will of the ego-personality (nor by the Self in Jung’s sense either). It is caused by itself. It has, as I said, its cause within itself: it is its cause. (To see things this way amounts, of course, to a revolution of consciousness.) The obvious fact that neurosis, if seen from outside, goes along with tremendous suffering from it, with feelings of helplessness with respect to its compelling force must not fool us. When a friend once visited Alexandre Dumas père, and found him at his desk wet with tears, he asked him what had happened and was told that Dumas had just killed his dear Pothos, his favorite figure from The Three Musketeers, in one of the sequels to this novel. This rather trivial example shows how the internal necessities or the internal logic of a creative invention can have a compelling effect on the empirical person in and through whom the work is born. The personal, subjective feeling experience gives us only the external or “ego” view. But we have to learn to appreciate neurosis from within, as a self. Of course, creative works in the realm of art are much more straightforward. Neurosis, by contrast, is essentially tricky and

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cunning, devious, sly. It is dissociation, ultimately self-contradiction. Other than a work of art it is the very point of the opus called neurosis to be something “impossible”: the positively existing contradiction in itself. And thus it is inherent in the truth and message of neurosis to present itself as the opposite of itself—in the present context to present itself as caused by an external necessity, whereas in fact it is a work of freedom, or as being about the positively existing person that suffers from a neurosis, whereas it is about itself. It is the job of neurosis, as it were, to fool itself, and this is why it is also so much more likely that we let ourselves be fooled by it. This is why Jung once pointed out that “The fright and the apparently traumatic effect of the childhood experience [of a particular hysterical patient discussed by Jung] are merely staged, but staged in that particular [...] way that the mise en scène is almost exactly like a reality” (CW 4 § 364, transl. modif.). What is actually a staged performance presents itself as hard-core reality, as a natural event. It conceals its Work character, its artful-creation nature. For this reason alone Jung’s already cited statement is still relevant today, his statement that “There is no way, it seems to me, how the psychotherapy of today can escape the necessity of having to do a great deal of unlearning and relearning, [...] until it may succeed in no longer thinking neurotically itself” (GW 10 § 369, my transl.). So neurosis is its own cause and not a natural reaction to bad circumstances. But are there not in fact terrible events that can happen to children and terrible conditions under which they have to live? And do such events and conditions not possibly have serious, maybe even disastrous natural effects? Of course. However, we have to keep our concepts clear. We have to distinguish between two kinds of illnesses which I label “psychic” illnesses (or illnesses of the “human psyche”) in the one case versus “psychological” illnesses (or illnesses of “the soul”) in the other. While psyche is natural and exterior, “soul” is contra naturam. My differentiation of the meaning that I assign to these words is of course a bit arbitrary, but it is necessary. While “psychic” refers to what has been called the “behavior of the organism,” we could also say: the behavior of the human animal, the word “psychological” contains “logical” in it; it refers to the noetic or

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intelligible quality of that to which it refers, and designates it as already reflected, as interpretation, and this is what distinguishes the one type of illness from the other. Just like vitamin deficiencies or malnutrition during the first few years of life cause bodily impairments often for all of life, so can also lack of emotional and body contact, lack of attention and attachment, deprivation of perceptual and intellectual stimulation, cruel treatment, etc., in the early months and years of a child indeed cause lasting psychic damage. But this is then psychic harm, psychic impairment, disorder of the human organism and its functioning, which as such belongs to the wider field of human biology, not to psychology. It belongs to the natural stream of events. 15 And because such disorders are indeed firmly embedded in the cause-and-effect nexus of natural events, they have ipso facto nothing to do with neurosis as a truly psychological, “psychogenic” or self-generated illness and as a free creative arrangement. Not every non-somatic disorder is to be subsumed under the category of neurosis. We need a strict, specific concept of neurosis. On account of our clear criterion for neurosis, we also have to exclude two further types of problems often confounded with neuroses. By way of an example for the first form, we read in MDR (p. 343, transl. modif.) that, “A great many individuals cannot bear this isolation [brought by an individual soul secret]. They are the neurotics, [...]. As a rule they end by sacrificing their individual goals to their craving for collective conformity [...].” But, as I see it, there is nothing per se neurotic about sacrificing one’s individual goals for the benefit of gaining the love or approval of one’s environment (just as there is nothing neurotic about a monk’s sacrifice of his sexual drives and his worldly riches for a life solely devoted to the praise of God). It is simply a free choice that such a person takes, maybe a bad, a stupid, a highly problematic choice, or maybe not, but at any rate 15 To make the contrast between psychic and psychological disorders all the sharper, I disregarded in my description the fact that a psychic illness is not in the same way a natural effect of harmful events or conditions as, in geology or physics, causes have determinate effects. In the human sphere, the psychic harm, too, is a response of this person to those conditions and thus fundamentally “linguistic” behavior, not a mechanical causal effect, even if this response may consist in no more than one’s giving up to continue to respond, i.e., one’s surrendering, so that one’s being conditioned by the conditions may set in. In other words, even here there is a however small moment of freedom. In this sense, the psychic disorder is not a merely natural event, but an event within truly human nature.

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it is not per se neurotic. In general, one-sidedness and specializations are phenomena of normal life. In the next paragraph Jung gives an example for the opposite extreme (p. 344). He speaks of the fact that sometimes an individual “finds himself involved in ideas and actions for which he is no longer responsible. He is being motivated neither by caprice nor arrogance, but by a dira necessitas which he himself cannot comprehend. This necessity comes down upon him with savage fatefulness, and perhaps for the first time in his life demonstrates to him ad oculos the presence of something alien and more powerful than himself in his own most personal domain, where he thought himself the master.” Jung uses also for this type of psychological situation the label neurosis, which in such cases he tends to consider either a morbus sacer (CW 11 § 521), or as “nature’s attempt to heal him [the man who is ill]” (CW 10 § 361), or even an (incomplete or unsuccessful) attempt to heal a general, collective problem (cf. CW 7 § 438 and § 18). But here again I have to say: there is nothing neurotic about such situations of a dira necessitas. They may lead to pathological conditions, but not every psychopathology is neurotic. Both types mentioned lack the dissociation in the sense of selfcontradiction that is the sine qua non of a neurotic condition. In the first type, the dissociation is avoided through the sacrifice or repression of the one of the two options, in the other type there cannot be a dissociation as a free arrangement of “the soul” because this “soul” has simply been overwhelmed by a new elementary psychological force from within itself and thereby thrust into severe conflict; it is a confrontation with an entirely new situation (maybe something similar to a move to a foreign country and what we call “culture shock”) that necessitates a fundamental change of orientation. So we have to exert great care to make sure that when we speak about neurosis we always have the same type of phenomenon in mind and do not use the term equivocally for structurally very different realities. It would be just as absurd to use the definition of neurosis as a causa sui to claim that there are no psychopathological conditions caused by certain circumstances, as it would, conversely, be to claim that because certain events can cause serious psychic impairments neurosis cannot be an expression of freedom.

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1. SURPLUS OF VALUE AND SIGNIFICANCE One absolutely essential characteristic feature of that Work produced by the soul that we call neurosis is visible in the phenomenology of neurotic symptoms. Neurotic symptoms are characterized by what I call the inflation of empirical-reality aspects with metaphysical significance. This is a general aspect of neurosis as such, more precisely, of neurotic symptomatology. Neurosis exists, on the one hand, in the shape of all the individual neuroses in the plural, and from this point of view each neurosis is in itself an accomplished Work of the soul and could be appreciated in its particularity with respect to the specific role it has within the life of the individual concerned. But neurosis, as I pointed out at the end of the Introduction, is also a singular, something general, the neurosis, namely a cultural phenomenon characteristic for the late 19 th and the 20 th centuries, one contribution to the mental, psychological life of our age. Just as a work of art does not belong to the artist, but to a whole people or age, thus neurosis, too, does not only belong to each particular individual affected and does not have a significance only for him or her personally. Viewed as a work, as the neurosis, it also has a significance for the generality, the entire culture. And, similarly to how the phenomenon of movies represents a completely new genre of cultural products that enriches the array of the traditional ones (such as painting, music, poetry, religion, philosophy), so is neurosis, too, a new type of cultural creation, one might perhaps even say a completely new “symbolic form” in the sense of Ernst Cassirer. The following remarks refer to neurosis in the singular—the concept of neurosis—and concentrate exclusively on the one aspect of the “inflation with metaphysical significance” that is manifest in the neurotic symptom. Everything else, the meaning of neurosis for the life of the individual, the mechanics or the internal functioning of neurosis, the specific content of neurosis (of an individual neurosis as well as of neurosis at large) and all other aspects will here remain disregarded. I begin with a few examples that display the feature of neurotic symptomatology to be discussed. We distinguish, for example, ordinary anxiety, Freud spoke of Realangst, from neurotic anxiety. In the same way we can distinguish simple, ordinary pain, simple

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disappointment, simple feelings of insult from the neurotic versions of the same feelings. Analogously it is true for all neurotic symptoms that they have normal or simple feelings or reactions as their nonneurotic counterpart. What is special about neurotic anxiety and neurotic fears? In claustrophobia, a perfectly ordinary elevator or tunnel, in agoraphobia a normal open plaza, may cause total panic. There is nothing special about the plaza or elevator, nothing factually threatening. But nevertheless they appear as absolutely menacing and intolerable. The threat does not stem from the real places where it is experienced, but from a different source. However, because this source produces the feeling of being menaced and attaches it to, indeed, crams it into, the particular real place, the menace in fact stares at the agoraphobic person from within this actually harmless place. Another example. For someone who suffers from an obsessivecompulsive neurosis, say compulsive handwashing, it may amount to a full-fledged catastrophe if he cannot wash his hands, even if he has just done so, indeed repeatedly, or if a large-scale cleaning project encompassing his entire apartment, even including all rugs and all clothes, fails because in the middle of the purification operation he unexpectedly got into contact with something experienced by him as unclean. When this happens it is not just a small disturbance of his program. It has the character of an absolute, unthinkable disaster. And again the feeling that it is a catastrophe does not arise out of the real empirical circumstances. It is merely subjectively experienced in them. For another person, a student, the task of writing an ordinary term paper turns into an unsurmountable obstacle that, despite ever new resolutions, causes him to procrastinate again and again, which in turn has the effect of letting this task even more appear as an unsurmountable mountain towering before him. This is often even the case if the person is, as far as his intelligence and state of knowledge are concerned, fully equal to the task. To sit down and start writing the required paper is absolutely out of the question. It is not uncommon that in such cases the person voluntarily takes upon himself the burden of another much harder and more strenuous task only for the purpose of not having to begin with this one real assignment, the term paper.

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In anorexia nervosa, the issue of intake of food and one’s own body are inflated with truly absolute importance, an importance so overwhelming that even the real danger of death often cannot overcome it. Very often one can experience that a harmless comment evokes uncontrolled anger, or that a minor slight is taken as an intolerable offense. Above all, the neurotic endows his personal parents with quasimythical power. They are by no means simply empirical persons with their own weaknesses and complexes, even with real faults16; they are not simply persons who merely happen to have been his father or mother. No, his ultimate happiness or destruction somehow still depends for him on being accepted and appreciated by them, even now during adulthood. It is, for example, still absolutely unbearable that his mother had wished to have a girl instead of a boy, or that his father did not show enough love for him or had an authoritarian style. In all these examples, we can note a discrepancy between the real fact and the significance that it has for the neurotic. The blatant disproportionateness is not only noticed by the people around him and often reproachfully pointed out to the neurotic. He himself, too, is frequently sorely conscious of it. He is annoyed about himself, about these absolutely exaggerated reactions of his, both because they make life for him much more difficult, greatly limiting his room to move, and because he experiences his own behavior as irrational and disgraceful. However, this his own verdict simply does not penetrate to that level on which the decisions about his factual feeling and behavior are made. What he as ego personality may consider absurd, is on this other, deeper layer still fully “believed.” On this level the unshakeable conviction rules that this or that comment by his mother was an absolute insult to him, that this plaza or this elevator are totally threatening and the term paper he has to write is truly an unsurmountable obstacle in front of which one simply has to give up. What is this feature that inheres the neurotic symptom and is that which turns it into, and proves it to be, a neurotic one in the first 16 They may, for example, be guilty of actual wrong treatment to which the neurotic had been exposed as a child.

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place? One could describe the inadequacy as an excessive reaction. In the deep layers of the neurotic person that determine the way he perceives and acts, certain elements of reality are charged with an excess of significance. Certain events possess, measured against what they empirically are and, in ordinary experience, mean, an added value, a surplus significance. However, the concept’s excess, overvaluation, exaggeration, surplus do not yet capture the particular quality of that which turns a reaction into a neurotic one. It is not simply a question of a difference in degree, although it is that too. Rather, the excessive significance is characterized by the quality of unconditionality: something is experienced as absolutely intolerable, absolutely unthinkable, totally menacing, at all cost to be avoided, by all means to be controlled. We are confronted with more than a “more than,” for there is also an excess that is not neurotic and has its place within the range of human, all-too-human behavior. For the soul, it’s much rather a question of all or nothing, of life or death. It’s the principle of the matter. Something absolute is at stake. It is only for this reason that neurotic symptoms come with absolute compelling conviction and necessity and prove to be completely immune to rational insight and one’s being taught better by life— even immune to one’s own experience and insight into the absurdity of one’s neurotic feelings or behaviors.

2. NEUROSIS AS METAPHYSICAL ILLNESS “More than,” “exaggerated,” “excess” are terms that refer to higher degrees on one and the same scale. The scale itself persists. It is always possible to react more or less strongly or even excessively. Felt experience and behavior are relative. There is a wide range of possible reactions to one and the same event, and it can in turn be divided into a range of “normal” varieties of behavior and one that goes beyond the normal and ordinary. But it is crucial to see that neurotic experience and behavior have left that scale behind altogether, on principle. In the case of neurosis it is precisely no longer a question of a little more or a little less, not even of very much more, of exaggeration or excess, because there is also an excess that is not neurotic and belongs to the sphere of what is possible in ordinary human life. But the neurotic condition in its specificity amounts to a breaking out from the

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dimension of the relative as such, from the earthly-finite, from empirical reality, and into the dimension of the absolute, the infinite, the unconditional, the sphere of principles—in short, into what we can term “the metaphysical” (in a loose sense). One must not be deceived by the fact that the neurotic can frequently control his neurosis quite a bit, and thus hide it from others pretty much; that he may be able to compensate it relatively well, or that his neurosis affects only certain areas of life, leaving major other areas unaffected. Neurotic symptoms can thus at times be of minor extent and relatively inconspicuous for others. But even in the most minor, inconspicuous and perhaps rather curbed neurotic feeling or behavior, the level of the absolute is always wholly present. The German psychiatrist and psychotherapist Harald SchultzHencke, founder of the neopsychoanalytical school of psychoanalysis in Germany, tried to show that the neurotic forms of experiencing and inhibitions have precursors in analogues familiar from normal experience. In this sense he distinguished pathological inhibitions as crude (“grobe”) ones from more subtle (“feine”) inhibitions that can occur in every person. We can of course generally agree with this observation. But we must also state that with it the peculiar feature of neurotic pathology is not made explicit; indeed, it is even concealed. This way of viewing is also an example of how to explain psychological phenomena reductively downwards, in terms of a lower, more banal, commonplace category, and not in terms of the soul. But something becomes neurotic not through nothing more than an intensification beyond a certain degree, but through a radical disruption of the continuity of the ordinary, that is to say, through the breakthrough to the level of principle. Not the fact that something empirically real is given an exaggerated significance makes a feeling or reaction neurotic, but only when absolute, “metaphysical” significance is attributed to it. In neurosis, (certain specific) ordinary things, persons, events lose their simple, natural, pragmatic significance and receive the full weight of something “transcendent.” The fundamental rupture with which we are here concerned can be described in the words that in neurosis the oneness of ordinary reality has fallen apart into two. For the neurotic, there are two separate kinds of reality, ordinary empirical reality, on the one hand, and the sphere of the absolute or unconditional, on the other hand, however in such

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a way that both realities are nevertheless merged into one in a peculiar fashion, “stuck together.” Whereas one might perhaps be inclined to imagine such a merging as a mixture or, perhaps, also as a kind of “compromise formation,” the special kind of amalgamation characteristic of neurosis consists much rather in the fact that the metaphysical significance inheres the element of empirical reality affected by this surplus charge of significance only in such a way that it has been tacitly foisted onto, or planted in, this (in other regards unaltered) empirically real element. Empirical reality is short-circuited with the wholly other dimension of unconditionality. The fundamental duplicity of the worlds or realms that come together in a neurotic symptom, or, to express it another way, the fact that the metaphysical dimension, as a wholly other one, has fundamentally intruded into everyday reality, is, however, completely obliterated: it is precisely an ordinary open plaza, in its empirical beingso and its positive-factual reality, that for the neurotic perception a priori comes with that special absolute significance, and only for this very reason does it cause (and does it have the power to cause) agoraphobia. What is feared here is something as irrational (but in reality nevertheless absolutely powerful) as once were a witch’s curse in fairytales, or excommunication from the Church. Such a curse or excommunication did not merely threaten a person in practical regards, in his empirical condition, but also in his personhood, i.e., in his metaphysical substance. The same is true for all the other neurotic symptoms: to lose a loved person, or one’s being rejected, has the effect of a metaphysical annihilation, not merely of an empirical wound. The necessity inherent in a neurotic compulsion has the character of metaphysical indispensability, not of practical unavoidability. Finding oneself confronted with the obligation to write a term paper does not amount to an empirical constraint of personal freedom, but as an absolute renunciation of the infinity of that freedom that is inherent in man’s humanness .... Precisely this is absolutely crucial in neurosis: namely, that, on the one hand, the absolute significance experienced in some real thing or event is not corroborated by that thing or event as such, but that, on the other hand, this real thing or event, in its “positivistic” banality, nevertheless immediately possesses this higher significance. This is an essential point, for it is what marks the difference between neurotic

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symptom and symbol. In a symbol, the other, absolute dimension of reality shines forth from within the empirical phenomenon; in it, according to Goethe, the particular represents the universal, as a “living, momentary revelation of the unfathomable.” In the neurotic symptom, by contrast, the everyday character of reality, the real in its positivity and banality and as “nothing but,” is precisely preserved, and yet as such it is of absolute significance. Nothing opens up. There is not a transfiguration of the real, not its aural exaltedness, and accordingly also not an illumination of the person. On the contrary, the absolute (that is experienced and takes effect here just the same as in the symbol) stays firmly occluded within the banality of the real, and under its cover. The unconditional is present, but only as fundamentally invisible. Here, the metaphysical level must not become manifest; the universal and infinite is not represented, revealed; it must not reach consciousness. It is not in one’s thought, faith, knowing, felt experience, not openly displayed in religious ceremonies or expressed in one’s worship. And yet it is present, present even with compelling force, but covertly, unacknowledged, remaining beneath the niveau of the empirical manifestation of the phenomenon: in short in the status of being denied (objectively denied, not subjectively). Here the empirically real holds the absolute beneath itself, more precisely: hidden within itself, encapsulated in its sensual appearance. The metaphysical significance is not—as is the case in what we call kitsch—logically imposed from outside and above; not merely attributed. The significance is structurally not the result of an ought. On the contrary, if a neurosis exists, then the significance is in fact present as a compelling force and absolute conviction: because it has, as we have seen, always already surreptitiously been planted in the phenomenon. A priori, the real phenomenon, rather than opening up into a phainomenon, appears as inflated from within (from out of its inner) with unconditional significance, a significance that, however, is precisely refuted by the real phenomenon itself in the banality in which it is in fact experienced. This shows what is neurotic about neurosis: the contradiction as which neurosis exists. In the neurotically experienced phenomenon the absolute makes itself felt, yet thanks to its being denied, only in the mode of pathology, as a morbid symptom. In this sense, the neurotically experienced real phenomenon is, as it

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were, an upside-down or reversed symbol. The higher significance is operative, yet absolutely inaccessible. Not only are all other persons cut off from it, but even the ego or the consciousness of the neurotic itself is also. So it is not even at least his utterly private truth. It exists as an “untruth.” Neurotic experience has generally the structure of what in Marx is called fetishism (in contrast to the term fetishism in Freud where it refers to a particular symptomatology). Neurosis involves the (objective, not subjective) mystification of particular elements of empirical reality. One condition of the possibility of neurosis is that man is man (human) and not only animal. For Nietzsche, man is the nicht festgestellte (not fixated, “set”) animal, that is to say, the animal that can also turn into overman. But this is not the concept of man on which neurosis is grounded. Nietzsche’s concept points decidedly into the future. It has project or program character, yet precisely because he starts out from the definition of man as animal in a positive-factual, biological sense. Neurosis, by contrast, is based on, or falls back on, that concept of man that was valid in classical Western metaphysics: man as animal rationale, the animal that has logos, reason and language, a concept, which, upon a new level, the level of philosophical reflection and of logos, continues the prediscoursive, preconceptional mythological concept of man according to which man ultimately derives his descent and personhood from the gods (cf. CW 5 § 388). For us psychologists this points to the “psychological difference,” the difference between man and soul, between anthropology and psychology, between the psychic and the psychological. For the man as animal that has logos, it is at bottom not a question of coping with reality, of survival and well-being, of pragmatic advantages, but of something very different: of the explicit articulation, objectification, representation and the visible enactment of the logic of being-inthe-world, in other words, of culture. This was the purpose, in early times, of the shamanistic journey (in trance) to heavenly worlds, of myths and rituals, and, later, of the religion of priests and still later of metaphysics. And only because of this deepest commitment did it become possible that people would offer sacrifices to the gods and thus even slaughter human beings, indeed, at times, their own first-born children (such as in the ancient Semitic molk sacrifice). Or

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that people would stake their own lives, for example, for glory in war, for their faith, for Christ, for an ideal, for their king and their country. “Das Leben ist der Güter höchstes nicht” (life is not the highest of goods, Friedrich Schiller). As Hans Magnus Enzensberger pointed out, the principle of self-preservation does not play that fundamental role within the balances of human affects that is usually attributed to it, as again shown by the suicide attackers’ mania for death. “Outside the history of concepts, mankind never seems to have counted on the idea that one’s own life would have to be esteemed as the highest of goods.”17 This is the foundation on the basis of which neurosis must be comprehended. Inherent in neurosis is the fundamental willingness to renounce practical advantages, indeed, one’s ordinary happiness in life, and at times to bear terrible pains and suffering for the sake of “higher (ideal, spiritual) values or truths.” The most distinct example within the sphere of psychotherapy is probably anorexia nervosa, an illness in which quite obviously one’s own death is accepted as a possibility without batting an eyelid. This extreme example in particular demonstrates the neurotic’s almost absolute disdain for earthly, bodily existence, for man’s animal aspect, for practical well-being. Therefore it would be a great mistake to attempt to comprehend neurosis on the basis of instinctual drives and needs, if these are somehow conceived as biological ones, as those of the human animal. Neurosis must be understood in terms of counter-natural and (in a certain sense of the word) inhuman necessities of the soul. It is a metaphysical illness. And, to come back once more to anorexia nervosa, in it we see that in fact “the light’s fight against darkness [has] move[d] its battleground into the inner” of the human soul (CW 13 § 293, transl. modif.), and we see what this means, namely, that here, in the fundamentally confined arena of the private positivized psyche, there rages a metaphysical conflict between “Heaven” and “Earth,” spirit and matter, ideal and reality, principle and empirical existence, a conflict that once upon a time would have had its battleground in myth and the enactment of ritual, in religion and metaphysics, and in the organization of societal life. 17

Quoted in FAZ 116, 19 May 2006, p. 39, my translation.

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I follow these reflections up with a statement of the Stoic Epictetus, “What really upsets people is not the factual events, but the fixed opinions [dogmata] about the factual events” (Encheiridion 5), that Laurence Sterne had already placed as a motto at the top of his novel Tristram Shandy. Not only, but especially in the case of neurosis we must cling directly to the strict sense of the Greek word used in this sentence for “opinions,” dogmata. For the factors that perturb people in their deepest self and possibly knock them sideways are not so much lightly held opinions (which in most cases could easily be subjected to review). No, they are passionately maintained dogmas, dogmas or principles considered to be psychologically absolutely irrenunciable. Such dogmas are something intellectual, logical (“of logos nature”), which, however, as something logical is empirically real, indeed an enormous power. To be sure, Berthold Brecht thought that, “First comes a full stomach, then comes morality.” But for neurosis this does most certainly not hold true. For it, we have to reverse this dictum. Even compulsive overeating (binge eating disorder) confirms this, because it is not propelled by the natural drive for satiety, but by an (unconscious) intellectual dogma. It is precisely the concrete and literal refutation of the significance of that drive. To illustrate the metaphysical quality of neurosis and to distinguish it from in some ways similar-looking but not neurotic behavior I now want to use a little example. Sometimes there are patients who feel totally inhibited to open their mouths when it is a situation of a group discussion, such as in a seminar or when after a public lecture the audience is asked to raise questions or make comments. Their problem is not that they do not have any ideas about the topic in question. Maybe they have very strong ideas and could even contribute something quite interesting and significant to the discussion. But they simply do not manage to speak up in front of all the others. They are condemned to remain silent. The psychology of this symptom is this: such a person is under the spell of the absolute claim, prevailing in him, to actually be as someone who has been absolutely, on principle, removed from the rank and file of people and to have his place fundamentally above

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them, in other words, to be a majesty, a kind of “god.” 18 This (unconscious) ontological claim is what makes it metaphysical, and the fact that it is a dogma that rules totally independently of, and is totally out of reach for, the conscious thinking of the person is what makes it neurotic. We have to look at this symptom more closely. At first glance, one could think that this was a problem of conceitedness, of a simple error or delusion, the mistake of having a wrong, exaggerated opinion about himself. Then it would not yet be neurotic, but it would also not lead to that inhibition. The simple belief to be something special, to be superior, better than others, could show itself in his bragging, showing off, in conceited behavior and his being full of airs and graces. There would certainly be a similar claim in such a person as in the neurotic version described before, but it would be fundamentally different from it because here this claim would simply be lived, openly displayed. The person would expect and demand from the others that they recognize and respect his alleged superiority. With such a behavior he would unwittingly achieve the very opposite: he would probably make a fool of himself, appear as vein as a peacock and amuse or annoy people. He would be silly, but not neurotic. Two points are essential here. 1. His claim would remain an empirical one, his human, all-too-human belief that he is, and his wish to be, superior. It would be ego-syntonic. His claim would not be absolutely out of reach for his conscious feeling and thinking. 2. This wish exposes itself in his contact with others; it has to expose itself, precisely because his claimed superiority has to be demonstrated and requires to be acknowledged by the people around him in order to be fulfilled for the I. The superiority is only real if it actually manifests and proves itself in social reality, as his standing out over against the others. This is why he puts on this show. In both regards what prevails here is what I want to call logical horizontality. If we begin with the second point we can say that such a person only empirically or semantically lays claim to being above the others, while logically or syntactically he is on a level with them. In 18 Here we can think of Jung’s amusing report about the therapeutic case of a lady of the aristocracy who came to him because she was in the habit of slapping her employees—including her doctors—and who needed a masculine reaction: “Very well, you are the lady. You hit first—ladies first! But then I hit back!” (MDR p. 142).

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demanding from the others acknowledgment of his claimed superiority he has precisely taken his place in the social arena. He has entered the ranks of his fellow human beings and appeals to them, indirectly competes with them, which he can only do if he is on the same ground with them. That is to say, in contrast to what his claim says, by seeking acknowledgment for his claim from them he de facto places himself on par with them and precisely not above them. He has logically accepted them as his peers, his equals, indeed his judges, even though empirically he wants to be seen as superior to them. In other words, what he wants is to be primus inter pares. This phrase perfectly expresses the simultaneity and contradiction between semantic superiority and syntactical equality. With his superiority claim he never leaves the empirical, pragmatic, ordinary-social level. It is a horizontal one-layer thinking. The same is true considering the first point. The fact that his claim is not absolutely out of reach for his conscious feeling, but precisely ego-syntonic, means that it has its place on the same level as his consciousness, his conscious I. On the basis of such a psychological situation a neurotic inhibition as described before simply could not arise and cannot even be conceived. The inhibition to speak up in a group is due to the intrusion of logical verticality. That such a person is absolutely compelled to remain silent shows that what according to this symptom needs to be prevented at all cost is that he enters the social arena in the first place, that he puts himself on the same level with the other people. His claim has to be kept totally out of the practical human sphere, out of empirical reality. Not only he, but even his claim has to be and remain fundamentally “above.” His superiority is precisely not merely a social one, but absolute. His claim therefore has to remain absolutely secret, secret even from the empirical person, the I of him who has this problem. It is not at all ego-syntonic, but completely inaccessible to the I, which simply is factually (on its own empirical level) overwhelmed, if not bombarded, by its compelling force out of the blue, without itself consciously standing behind it. Far from being a wish for being primus inter pares, it is the hidden, secret claim to be something wholly other, something fundamentally out of competition, namely, as I said, a majesty or a god. Here the superiority is precisely logical or syntactical and not merely semantic. “Majesty” is the jutting of something celestial or divine into earthly

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social reality. It is for this reason that there existed in former times the concept of lèse-majesté, which, like blasphemy, is the idea of a crime of a totally different order from ordinary earthly, this-worldly crimes like theft or murder. It is a sacrilege, a crime against verticality as such, against the metaphysical. All this explains the neurotic inhibition. In neurosis, the claim must not show itself. It must not come down to earth, enter empirical reality. It can only manifest itself in empirical reality, only become present, in a fundamentally negative way, as a negation, a not, an absence: inhibition. Only by not getting tarnished through contact with the real situation, by not letting the person make common cause with the other discussants, by not letting him share his views with the group, by, on the contrary, staying absolutely aloof, is the metaphysical absoluteness of the claim preserved, the otherworldliness and sacredness of a precious soul truth or principle protected, and is the claimed superiority truly absolute superiority. It would therefore be a complete misunderstanding of the neurotic quality of this neurotic inhibition if one wanted to see it in terms of shyness or some such natural character trait. The inhibition is not the result of the person’s fear of saying something that might be considered nonsense or stupid by others, because this inhibition occurs very often in people who have excellent ideas and are fully aware of their excellence. It is not a question of the impression they would make. Something very different is at stake, something that has nothing to do with the empirical person and his or her fears and wishes. Neurosis is the work of the objective soul. To view this inhibition as an expression of character traits or personal weaknesses would be reductive, an interpretation of verticality in terms of horizontality and of the manifestation of the soul in terms of interpersonal relations, “object relations.” We would, conversely, rather have to raise the question how often what appears to be “ordinary shyness” and “fear of making a fool of oneself” is not in reality much rather only a common-place mask for the soul’s secret need to insist on “majesty,” and for the resulting neurotic inhibition. What we can also learn from this little example is that neurosis is not a simulation of the metaphysical within the modern world, a simulation in the style of Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig II tried to play in all earnest “majesty” once more. However, he could only play it.

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And because he did not mean it as mere play, but took it seriously as full reality, it came as kitsch. Neurosis is different. Neurosis does not play, not pretend, not make-believe. It is honest and absolutely serious. It truly is what it is. It is the existing contradiction between “soul” and modern empirical reality, between metaphysics and modernity. And this is why neurosis can only express itself, in our case, as inhibition and, more generally, as symptom, through pathology. In the negation that is inherent in the inhibition, neurosis gives both modern reality, in which “majesty” is impossible, on the one hand, and the soul’s metaphysical value of “majesty,” on the other hand, their due. It respects both. As a thoroughly modern phenomenon, neurosis kryptesthai philei (“loves to hide”), or instead of philei (loves) we have to say: is forced to hide what it shows and to show by hiding. Neurosis pays the full price, or rather: it lets the human person pay this price, in that currency that we call suffering, curtailment, restraint.

3. NEUROSIS AS LOGICAL ILLNESS AND THE NECESSITY TO APPROACH NEUROSIS THINKINGLY

I insisted that neurosis must not be explained in terms of instinctual drives and needs, of the biological inventory of the human organism, of ordinary, common-place desires or fears. “Survival” in the widest sense of the word, the pursuit of happiness, the urge for selfpreservation, and so on, as important and powerful as they are as motivations in human life, must not enter as categories into our attempt to comprehend the nature of neurosis. Neurosis is fundamentally contra naturam. Having thus excluded the natural, empirical, positivistic categories, one might feel induced to go over to the opposite extreme and try to make sense of neurosis in terms of archetypes, of mythic images and imaginal figures, or even “the gods.” But as common as this is in the Jungian school of psychoanalysis, it would be just as grave a mistake as the first-named one, above all for two reasons, a general historical one and one that relates to the specific internal nature of neurosis. First, as also Jung realized, already in antiquity the former gods turned into personified ideas and finally into abstract concepts (cf., e.g., CW 13 § 49). We can think here of the fundamental culturalhistorical development that had been expressed in the catch-phrase

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coined by W. Nestle, “from mythos to logos,” the transition from myth and ritual to philosophy. Zeus, once a God prayed to and honored in temples by bull sacrifices, ultimately turned into the (imaginal) concept of the highest force in the universe, etc. 19 Medieval alchemy, too, with its devious, evasive Mercurius was at heart no longer imaginal, but already conceptual, although alchemy obviously still expressed itself (its discursive, conceptual thinking) in imaginal form and sensual practical activities in the laboratory. If this process towards intellectualization began as long as 2,500 years ago, then it is all the more clear now that neurosis as a thoroughly modern illness takes place on an abstract conceptual level. Neurosis is fundamentally different from the decidedly premodern illness of psychosis, which indeed has mythical or archetypal contents. But in the case of neurosis it is a cold, abstract absolute principle that drives it. Whereas psychosis is definitely a “semantic” illness, neurosis is “syntactical.” What does this mean? In schizophrenic psychosis the specific content is important. “I am persecuted by the communists,” “other people have a direct line, immediate access, to my mind, they can control my thinking”; “I am Napoleon, or Jesus Christ,” etc. Such delusions or, another possibility, intensive visions, revelatory messages from voices of angels or other, anonymous sources, etc., always represent a substantial reality that is experienced. Psychosis is an illness circling around particular ideas, images, “dogmata.” In neurosis, by contrast, we are dealing with strictly formal structures, with logical relations. In a phobia, e.g., the issue is not a particular substantial reality, not an important content or message, not a question of the particular symbol (dog, spider, or whatever is feared), but a form of relation to what is feared, a sense of unconditional importance or absoluteness as such: absolute fear, absolute avoidance, and the object or specific content is always a sublated content, fundamentally contingent, a mere example for something to be absolutely feared. It could just as well have been something different that is phobically feared, instead of dogs or spiders maybe cockroaches or ants. Of course, it is not totally arbitrary which object is chosen by the neurosis; the objects are not 19 See on this whole topic my “Jung’s Idea of a ‘Metamorphosis of the Gods’ and the History of the Soul,” chapter 20 of my The Soul Always Thinks, Collected English Papers vol. 4, New Orleans (Spring Journal Books) 2010, pp. 531–562.

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completely exchangeable, in other words, they are usually also partially expressive; why and that they have been chosen and not something else of a similar type does have a symbolic meaning, however only in a reduced sense, namely with respect to the strictly personal aspects of the neurosis. Logically, as far as the neurosis as such is concerned, however, the choice of object is contingent. It could theoretically also have been another one to which the absolute fear got affixed. At any rate, not the object itself and what it stands for, e.g., the dog or spider that is phobically feared, is the real issue: the phobic fear, the personal experience and emotional state made possible by this object, is the issue. The neurotic usually consciously and always at least unconsciously knows that the spider is harmless and that the phobia is actually (namely rationally or intellectually) not necessary (and this knowledge is even internal to the phobia itself ). By contrast, a corresponding logical distance is impossible in the case of psychosis. The insane person feels really identical with Christ or absolutely-unquestionably persecuted by the communists. He or she is differencelessly at one with his or her delusional idea. The neurotic has a neurosis, suffers from symptoms. The schizophrenic is his psychosis. His delusions are completely ego-syntonic. For the same reason it would, in the case of neurosis, be a gross mistake to ask with Hillman, “Who? Which god?” is in or behind it. This question makes sense only with psychic phenomena that belong to the semantic level. A mother complex in neurosis, for example, does not represent the Mother archetype, the Magna Mater with the richness of her multiple, ambiguous, even contradictory mythical features and with her true person quality, but the meager concept of goodness and care in abstracto—ultimately nothing but the absolute egoic demand to be unconditionally loved and provided for by the real mother (or other persons who take her place). Thus it is not something experienced as a substantial reality, comparable to the mythic personages or forces (the war god, the love goddess, the Potnia Thêrôn [Mistress of Animals], the thunderbolt-throwing Zeus, each with a great richness of concrete attributes and [often conflicting] traits). It is not an “epiphany” of “Mother,” but only a strictly subjective (inner) and abstract notion and ideal with which one faces experienced reality.

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Neurosis is a logical, an intellectual illness (even if it of course secondarily also avails itself of imaginal narratives, theatrics and images of real persons and occurrences in order to unfold and display the inner complexity of the respective purely intellectual principle that it is governed by in each case, much as did alchemy). But this is then only an external form. “Gods” and other mythological names are here merely metaphors, rhetorical devices. That gods and mythic or archetypal contents do not belong to neurosis can also be shown from the side of the experiencing subject. Neurosis is the illness of the modern I, the essentially isolated (cutoff ) subject. This subject is on principle not capable of grasping something mythic. Mythic elements can exist for it only as mere metaphors, or as cultural reminiscences (especially as elements of higher education), or as subjective felt experience. Gods and myths are, however, something totally different: they are truths. Jung published a short treatise about The Content of Psychosis.20 For psychosis, the emphasis on content is appropriate. But after what has just been said it is clear that a similar title would be impossible for neurosis, although, I must admit, even Jung talked occasionally expressly also of “the content of the neurosis” or “the content of a neurosis” (CW 16 § 196f.). But this was a mistake, resulting from his misunderstanding of the very point and particular nature of neurosis, a mistake which in turn is the result of Jung’s general one-sided fascination with contents, his substance-centered, substantiating style of thinking and (at least often) a corresponding disregard (if not blindness for) structural relations and the logic of things. We could also express the same idea by saying that by and large (not solely) he had eyes only for the semantic and not for the syntactical. Thus, as we can see from the paragraph from which the cited phrase about the content of neurosis is taken, Jung tried to understand neurosis in terms of complexes, conceived like psychic things or entities, namely as affectcharged, feeling-toned “nodes” in the unconscious, “knots” of unconscious feelings and ideas and equipped with an autonomous 20 The Collected Works (vol. 3) translate Jung’s title, Der Inhalt der Psychose, as: The Content of the Psychoses. An interesting shift from the singular, i.e., from the concept or essence of psychosis as such, to the plural, i.e., to all the various empirical, positivefactual instances of psychosis. This is more than a translation. It is a translocation from one type of thinking into a wholly different one.

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power to take, temporarily, possession of the personality. Jung even believed that deep inside or behind each personal complex there was an archetypal root or core, which would give additional boost to the substance or content character of complexes: their ultimately imaginal core. I cannot agree with this explanation of neurosis on the basis of complexes, because this explanation overlooks that complexes, at least those relevant for neurosis theory, are themselves neurotic structures, indeed they are nothing but concrete instantiations of a prevailing neurosis (in the structural, syntactical sense). For this reason, concerning the attempt to understand neurosis on the basis of complexes we can ask, with words from Nietzsche in another context, “But is this—an answer? An explanation? Or not much rather a mere repetition of the question? How does opium put to sleep? ‘By virtue of a virtue,’ namely the virtus dormitiva, answers the doctor in Molière, quia est in eo virtus dormitiva, / cujus est natura sensus assoupire.”21 Jung wrote: When an insane person says he is the forefather who has been fecundating his daughter for millions of years, such a statement is thoroughly morbid from the medical standpoint. But from the psychological standpoint it is an astounding truth [...]. Freud would say: “an incestuous wish-fantasy,” because he would like to save the poor patient from a bit of obnoxious nonsense. But I would say to the patient: “What a pity that you are too stupid to understand this [your] revelation” (Letters 1, p. 266, to Anonymous, 22 March 1939).22

A delusional idea, Jung suggests, does not merely possess significance, it has a meaning, a Sinn. It is potentially a revelation. A soul truth. It requires the person’s understanding, and if this occurred, there would be an illumination and exaltation of the mind. Neurotic feelings or ideas, by contrast, only possess (heightened, indeed absolute) significance: compulsive power. No truth, no meaning, no possibility of becoming illumined. While I agree with Jung that delusions have a soul meaning and an archetypal dimension, I think it is an error to think that it would 21 Friedrich NIETZSCHE, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, # 11, in: Werke vol. II, ed. Schlechta, München (Hanser) 1958, p. 576. My translation. 22 I left out the last word in the English translation, after “revelation,” namely “properly,” because it is neither in the German original nor implied. In fact it weakens Jung’s statement. It is a clear-cut question of understanding, yes or no.

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be important (especially also therapeutically important) for the insane person to understand this meaning hidden in his delusional idea. And although I would disagree with Freud concerning the “incestuous wish” nature of the delusion, I would also hope that the poor patient is freed from this bit of obnoxious nonsense. It would not do the patient (insofar as he is patient and a modern private person) a bit of good to understand the deep mythic, archetypal meaning that this fantasy of his indeed has. It does not make any sense to claim that the idea cited is a “revelation.” Especially in our modern context it does not reveal anything to us. It has no possible bearing on our modern being-inthe-world and our self-conception. It is an archaic soul truth erratically appearing in a modern mind. Jung’s mistake was to believe that the addressee of this delusion is the conscious mind of the individual patient and that it should become a revelation for him. But in reality it is the consciousness of the psychologist, nay of psychology, and only of psychology, which ought to understand 23 the soul meaning of the delusional idea, but of course precisely not as a revelation, but as a piece of psychological archeology. As such it can be treasured in Mnemosyne: not, as Jung suggested, as a present reality or truth, but as a historical presence.24 23 Here we have to remember that “understanding” is in itself a mode of leavetaking. The moment you understand a revelation it has ceased to be a revelation in the sense of a present reality or truth because by understanding, consciousness, or the I, has risen above the revealed idea and integrated it as a sublated content (insight) into itself. Understanding is inevitably a mode of historicizing that which is understood. By wishing that the patient would “understand this revelation” Jung unwittingly promotes Freud’s dictum: Where there was “It,” there “I” shall be. 24 It was Jung’s mistake to take the individual as the alpha and omega of psychology. He thought that psychopathology, psychosis, and neurosis had to be seen in the light of the individual, as if they were aimed at, were meant for, and had a teleological purpose for, the individuals who are smitten by them. But this, I believe, is the case only rarely, and generally only to a minor extent. For the most part, such psychic illnesses occur in particular individuals, but are actually cultural phenomena. They say something about the culture as a whole. Jung invented the concept of the objective psyche, but he viewed even the objective, even the archetypal, psyche ultimately within the horizon of the individual and the latter’s individuation. He could not see that individuation in this sense is a fundamentally private, subjective affair. Breast cancer is not about the breast, but the illness of the whole human being. The “Identified Patient” in family therapy does not merely display his or her strictly personal problems, but also and mainly expresses the problems of the family nexus. In a remotely similar way (but in a much more subtle, indirect sense and on a strictly conceptual, not a practical, therapeutic level) the phenomenon of neurosis is not only and mainly about the individual in whom it occurs nor for his or her benefit. Its actual addressee is psychology as the consciousness of the objective, cultural soul. The individual, by contrast, merely has to overcome his neurosis. But neurosis has no message or meaning for him.

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Psychosis (schizophrenia), I think, has to be seen as a psychic, not a psychological illness. It seems to be based on a psychic deficiency, namely, on a lack or insufficiency of the psychotic’s I’s solid rootedness in a sense and concrete feeling of the unquestionable realness of its own body experience and of its stable sensorimotor relation to the experienced surrounding physical reality as well as social reality. It is not due to the I’s being overwhelmed by intruding archetypal, mythological soul-truths. It is not a Work by the soul at all. Rather, due to the loss or weakness of the contact with bodily reality and the social context, the I drifts away from the real world and ipso facto lays itself wide open to delusional ideas, which, naturally, follow archetypal patterns. In contrast to psychosis, neurosis does not even come with a substantial, meaningful content that at least the psychologist ought to try to understand, let alone the patient. There simply is no archetypal depth to it. Now I come to the second reason why the thought that neurosis has to do with mythic patterns, archetypal images, important messages for the personality is a misunderstanding. The reason is that neurosis in particular is in itself a sly contrivance and no longer an innocent, natural self-expression of “the soul” (as myth once was). The neurotic soul is devious, tricky. It is deceptive. Neurosis, I pointed out, exists as self-contradiction. It is a very complex, complicated reality. We also know already that the neurotic absolute claim can only become present as an absence. In psychology, to do justice to it, it will therefore not do to approach it with an imagining, pictorially thinking mind, that is to say, a mind that simply wanders along the impressions that the phenomenal manifestation gives. One must not be misled by the contents that neurosis, too, has to offer in order to represent itself, and get fascinated by their imaginal quality, taking them seriously at face value. One has to focus on the logical structure that is represented by means of whatever contents, on the maneuvers, the logical operations, on the mise en scène itself and not on what is staged. In other words, here the point made in the Introduction (“Thinking neurosis”) is confirmed once more, namely that one has to think neurosis, in the sense of strictly conceptual, discursive thought; one has to learn to cut through appearances, see through the imaginalsensuous impressions that it gives, to the devious logic behind it; one

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has to learn to think around a few corners, in order to do justice to neurosis as existing self-contradiction. Otherwise, psychology will, as Jung said reproaching Freud, take “the neurotic conjecture at face value and thereby fall for [or walk into the trap of ] the neurotic complication” (CW 10 § 365, transl. modified). A neurotic complex like the mother complex is a cold, abstract concept. What is the difference between an abstract concept, on the one hand, and a “concrete concept” like a symbol or archetypal idea (which are concepts, too, even if concepts in pictorial form), on the other hand? The abstract concept is something like a tool, an instrument with which one wants to comprehend the world, the events and phenomena in it. It belongs to the subjective mind in its form as “instrumental understanding” and has reality as its object or referent outside and vis-à-vis itself. A mother complex, e.g., is primarily applied to one’s real mother. It means that I insist, I demand, that my real mother (or a person to which a mother transference occurs) be the way my abstract concept says she ought to be. Secondarily the mother complex can turn into a perspective that determines my entire perception of and reaction to reality.—The concrete concept, by contrast, such as the mythic-archetypal mother, for example, is a self that has its reality and truth strictly within itself, as its own property. It is self-sufficient. It cannot be applied, is not merely an instrument, because if that were the case it would have lost its self-character: it would have an external Other, a referent. To think the neurosis and each particular neurosis is also essential for therapeutic reasons. Only if one approaches it thinkingly with a focus upon the logic of the operational structures behind the phenomenal appearance of the neurosis is there a chance of dissolving the neurotic structure—this, in contrast to what usually happens, which is that the patient’s neurosis is merely lifted from him as person and transferred into the terms of the respective psychological theory by his slowly and imperceptibly being trained in understanding himself psychoanalytically. The personal suffering from symptoms disappears because the neurosis has then successfully been raised from the behavior and body level to the general intellectual level of a (structurally neurotic) psychological belief-system and been absorbed by the latter, whereby it does not matter whether this beliefsystem is a Freudian, Adlerian, Jungian one or what have you. The

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person is relieved because the transpersonal psychological mode of interpreting things now carries the burden of the unresolved neurotic structure for him. Doubtlessly, it is a welcome result of therapy if a patient is relieved of his neurotic symptoms. But therapeutically this kind of relief is nevertheless not satisfactory. Therapy ought to dissolve the neurotic structure as such.

4. THE LOGICAL GENESIS OF THE NEUROTIC “THE ABSOLUTE” I showed that neurosis establishes what I called a surplus value. It is a metaphysical illness that, within the world of modernity with its horizontality and positivism, and in defiance of it, upholds the sense and idea of unconditional significance, of verticality, of The Absolute. But now I have to emphasize that the fact that neurosis is a metaphysical illness does by no means imply that it is itself a metaphysic or religion. It is neither a disguised belief or belief-system, a distorted form of a metaphysical world-view or philosophy, nor a weird sort of a religious way of life or cultic, ritual enactment. The Absolute which is the innermost core and purpose of neurosis is not venerated or worshiped. Paradoxically I now have to state that The Absolute is not really the highest value of neurosis. Rather, the ultimate concern of neurosis is the immediate factual presence (of The Absolute); it is that The Absolute BE a present reality. This needs to be explained, and we can explain it best by comparing and contrasting neurosis with metaphysics and religion, on the one hand, as well as once more with psychosis, on the other hand. Metaphysics and religion are characterized by two features of relevance in our context. 1. What metaphysics and religion offer can typically be expressed in the form of sentences, statements. In sentences something is said about the sentence subject. “X is this or that (or is this or that way).” Sentences describe or explain the subject, provide some additional information about it. Or they make some feature that is inherent in the concept of it explicit. Metaphysics and also religion have this “about” structure. They assert or teach something. There is a doctrine. There are (alleged) insights and convictions. Religion has beliefs, a creed, and dogmas. It preaches, has a message, spreads “the word of God.” That is to say, both operate within the opposition or difference of

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consciousness, the internal difference as which consciousness exists (the difference of subject versus object; consciousness itself versus the content that consciousness is concerned with; preaching/teaching versus the message that is preached or taught). Within themselves, consciousness, metaphysics, and religion each distinguish themselves from what they are about. 2. In addition, there is also at work in metaphysics and religion, namely in their logic or structure, another difference, one that we could call the metaphysical or religious difference. It is the (for metaphysics constitutive) difference between the infinite and the finite, the absolute and the relative, the other world (the world of the Ideas, Heaven, paradise) and this world of contingency, imperfection and sin, the difference between eternal, atemporal, unchangeable truths, forms, principles, on the one hand, and the empirical world that is subject to time, history, and thus to change, on the other hand. On both counts, the opposites are held neatly apart, even while they are at the same time conjoined and mediated with each other. And the other way around, precisely this mediation guarantees and maintains their difference. The sentences in which metaphysics and religion express themselves have therefore ultimately the logical form of the judgment, the abstract formula of which is “S c P” (“subject copula predicate,” i.e., the subject is the predicate) or “the particular is the universal.” It is the copula that holds the opposites apart and as such nevertheless at the same time conjoins them. This is only possible if the particular is mediated with the universal, or the finite with the infinite, that is to say, if the particular, without losing its particularity and finite character, nevertheless represents the universal or infinite. Coming from here to psychosis and, for sake of its clarity and simplicity, taking again only the above mentioned delusional idea cited by Jung as our model to work with, the idea that “I am the forefather who has been fecundating my daughter for millions of years,” we immediately see that the second (the “metaphysical or religious”) difference has been obliterated, whereas the first difference is still intact. There is a claim that can be expressed in sentence form. It is a belief, a firm, indeed unshakeable conviction. It could possibly be built up into a whole system. And it could theoretically be preached. However, the second distinction, the one between the infinite and the finite, between the otherworldly absolute truth and earthly

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empirical reality does no longer exist. I, as mortal, imperfect, sinful man AM the metaphysical truth, the forefather. “I AM Napoleon.” The absolute truth is—just like that—immediately real here and now, in this empirically real me. No mediation. I do not represent the absolute. I AM it. The copula has taken on the function of an equal sign. Whereas linguistically, syntactically, formally, there is indeed a difference, namely the difference of consciousness that reveals itself in the sentence structure of this delusion, semantically there is an absolute identity. A = A. The form of the judgment prevailing here is no longer “The particular is the universal.” It has much rather the form: “The universal is the universal.” In psychosis the I has itself a priori become the universal. But this means, conversely, that the I is no longer a real, empirical I. It has become absorbed into the “archetypal” sphere as just one of its contents. It is a floating, drifting, pliant I, the mere idea or word “I.” In general we could say that in the syntax of psychosis the clear and reliable order existing in empirical reality has been lost: the irreversibility of time, the fundamental distance and separateness between different things and persons in space, the form of irreducible and clear-cut identity that belongs to everything that exists (or is imagined) and gives it its definite outline and shape. The disappearance of all this is in turn due to the absence of the logic of I (in the empirical sense), the loss of subjectivity, a subjectivity that in its experience of the world not only retains its identity with itself as a firm recipient and a self, but also actively grasps and clearly structures its imaginal or sense impressions, rather than being passively and directly influenced, swayed (not overwhelmed!25) by them.26 This is what makes it possible for the world experienced by psychotics to be so weird and uncanny and possible that in psychosis mythological, archetypal ideas are distancelessly taken at face value. A religious person and a metaphysical philosopher have a religious or philosophical faith and proclaim what they believe in their faith and are convinced of it as their faith, inviting others to let themselves be convinced by the inner truth of their respective faith and to start 25

“Being overwhelmed” would precisely presuppose a strong I. This is a result of the fact that psychosis is a psychic illness, an illness rooted in a deficiency concerning the sense of the unquestionable realness of the person’s own body experience and of its stable sensorimotor relation to physical as well as social reality. 26

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to believe themselves. In them consciousness establishes, is aware of, and respects, the difference between itself and its content. The psychotic is incapable of conceiving of his idea as his personal faith. He cannot say or feel: “I believe, I think that ....” He cannot differentiate between himself and his idea. His idea is absolute fact, and he is identical with this fact. But, because the opposition of consciousness is somehow still valid and effective, in other words, because this “my directly BEING the absolute truth” is nevertheless a conviction of mine, a human claim, a belief, a mere assertion and qua assertion evidence of my particularity and earthly, finite nature, I am insane. For I contradict myself. As consciousness and while making use of the sentence form expressive of the opposition of consciousness I deny the opposition of consciousness, treating my idea as absolute natural fact. And at the same time, concerning the second difference: as finite subject I claim to be the infinite (the forefather who has been fecundating my daughter for millions of years). Here we have to add: despite the fact that the idea “I am the forefather ...” IS the absolute truth (as Jung rightly realized), my assertion that I, just like that, AM this forefather is an untruth, simply crazy. In the case of psychotic delusion the phrase “absolute truth” has to be understood as in fact meaning the real truth that has been “absolved,” “abstracted,” completely cut off from its connection to the earth, so that it is like a free-floating balloon. But that I, as mortal man here on the earth, nevertheless directly and totally claim this absolute truth for myself means that psychologically I myself as consciousness have become identical with this free-floating balloon and have cut myself off from my tie to the world. Jesus said to one of the malefactors crucified with him, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise.” Here the metaphysical or religious difference is obviously observed. Not: you are, but: (after your death) you shall be ... A short span of time and above all death separate the subject from the predicate, while death is at the same time also its connection to or union with the predicate. But the insane person does not first have to die. He is already now “in Paradise (or, in other cases, in Hell),” as the empirical “malefactor” that from a Christian perspective he by definition is. Of Elijah we hear that he was lifted up into Heaven without first having died. The insane person does not need to be lifted up. His delusion states that he is in

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Heaven while still being alive on earth. The standpoint from which psychosis thinks and speaks is Paradise. The insane person did not even, like Elijah, have to be lifted up from the earth and be transported to heaven because psychosis has simply eliminated empirical, finite reality as such. But along with this one side of the metaphysical difference, the difference as such, which in the stories of being transported and uplifted is still maintained, is for the schizophrenic altogether gone (in favor of the metaphysical, heavenly, eternity pole as the only standpoint that is left). The elimination of the “metaphysical difference” in psychosis has the effect of also undoing the “opposition of consciousness.” The latter is, as we have seen, retained in the sentence form still constitutive for psychotic delusion, but the sentence form has become selfcontradictory by being construed as absolute fact when it ought to be an articulation of a personal faith or conviction. The two differences require and enhance each other. They are not two separate things, independent of each other. They can only work if they interact and define each other, because the first term of the “consciousness – content of consciousness” or “subject – predicate” difference has to have the value of the first term of the other difference, namely the finite or the particular, and the second term the value of the infinite or the universal. But this requirement is precisely violated in psychosis. Both positions of the first difference (subject and predicate) have the same value, that of the universal. This is what makes the delusional equal sign possible. To avoid confusion I must stress that I am speaking here about psychosis (the logic, the concept, of psychosis itself: what it does) and not about actual psychotic patients as real people (and what they do). The reality of insane individuals can be very complicated. Their psychosis may be only a part of their total psychical life, leaving other moments or areas free from the delusional convictions, moments or areas in which the individual therefore may full well know that he or she is a human being here on earth. But what he knows or thinks is of no consequence and import in our context. We are concerned here exclusively with the individual in so far as he is psychotic. And the essential point in this regard is that his psychosis, that the delusion, does not know this, nay, that the very difference (the notion or category of a difference as such) between the absolute and the empirical is not available to it.

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We also should not introduce the concept of the unconscious into the discussion of psychosis. This illness is precisely a problem of consciousness. Consciousness as a whole has lost its rootedness in the logic of empirical reality and is helplessly exposed to the impressions coming from the sphere of soul truths, of the metaphysical. It has become sucked up into Paradise, as it were. Not only the first difference that we found at work in metaphysics and the subject-object relation, the “opposition of consciousness,” concerns consciousness. Both differences referred to in my discussion of metaphysics and religion (the “opposition of consciousness” and what I called the “metaphysical or religious difference”) are consciousness-internal differences. The latter difference is consciousness’s internal self-distinction, selfexplication or self-division into (a) itself as empirical reality and (b) its own other as its inner truth or depth (itself as the dimension of soul, of soul truths). This difference (and this means consciousness’s capacity to perform the logical act of distinguishing itself from itself, from its infinite truth, that is to say, the capacity to hold its place as itself, as an empirical reality, vis-à-vis that infinite truth) has disappeared in delusion. (The other difference, the “opposition of consciousness,” was not consciousness’s distinguishing itself from itself but its distinguishing itself as subject from the objects or contents that it entertains. One might be tempted to call this latter difference consciousness’s “extraverted” difference, in contrast to its selfdifferentiation as “introverted” or intensional difference.) Against the backdrop of the two foregoing analyses we can now look at neurosis. Neurosis is fundamentally different from psychosis in that it precisely presupposes a reliable I (a solid subjectivity) and is firmly situated on the earth, in the logic of empirical reality. This it has in common with metaphysics and religion, because the latter two are fundamentally upward-looking, which indicates that they have their place down here. But neurosis is also fundamentally different from metaphysics and religion because it works without the “metaphysical difference,” having one-sidedly given up the higher metaphysical dimension altogether that is constitutive for religion and metaphysics and their upward-looking. Just as psychosis totally eliminated the “metaphysical difference,” so neurosis, too, does not make any difference at all between this world and another world (or dimension). However, whereas in psychosis consciousness lost its

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earthly roots and is completely enclosed in its inner depth, the soul or Heaven, in neurosis consciousness lost precisely this inner soul depth altogether. It is irrevocably and totally stationed in empiricalfactual reality, indeed, it is fundamentally positivistic. The phobically feared dog is a perfectly ordinary dog in the sense of biology, a mere positivity, a fact. It is precisely not feared as an apparition of an uncanny dimension of reality, of a mystery, of something divine or numinous. It is not epiphanic, no revelation. Neurosis is thoroughly and exclusively grounded in the secular world. There is no other world or dimension for it. The cancellation of the metaphysical difference is what neurosis and psychosis have in common and what radically sets the two of them off from metaphysics and religion. However, in how they differ from metaphysics and religion they are exact opposites, mirrorimages of each other. But neurosis is also fundamentally different from psychosis in another regard, namely as far as the first difference (“the opposition of consciousness”) is concerned. The sentence form so essential for delusions (“I am Jesus Christ,” etc.) has disappeared in neurosis. There is no “I am ...” or “This is ...” in it. The difference between subject and predicate is short-circuited. The two, subject and predicate, the particular and the universal, which in a sentence are held apart (but at the same time also connected) by the copula and which through the simultaneity of separation and union are mediated with one another, have collapsed into the copula (and in it into each other) so that only the copula, the IS or AM, remains. However, more than “remains.” Through this having become loaded with the short-circuited oneness of the two opposites (the particular and the universal) within the copula, the latter has also logically been charged with an excess of energy, which phenomenologically results in the absolutely compelling necessity or conviction inherent in a neurotic symptom, that is, in the naked absoluteness of The Absolute in its positivity or bare factualness. And from here we can now identify “The Absolute” as that isolated, self-sufficient copula that has completely absorbed the opposites (subject and predicate, the particular and the universal, the real and the ideal) into itself and short-circuited them within itself. Psychotic delusion is fundamentally linguistic. It avails itself of the form of judgment. But since it does not mediate the particular with

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the universal, the real with the ideal, the empirical with a higher meaning, by means of a third (the copula) that preserves their difference, but rather flatly and abstractly identifies them, it semantically contradicts the linguistic form it uses and thus is insane. In neurosis, by contrast, the linguistic form is altogether lost. Or we had better say: not lost, but decidedly and purposely eliminated. Neurosis is extralinguistic. It does not make a (quasi-)metaphysical or (quasi-)religious claim (in the form “I am ...” or “This is ...”). It does not assert anything. The psychotic could not say, “I believe that I am the forefather ...” because he did not differentiate between himself and his idea, between consciousness as such and the content it entertains. The neurotic cannot say, “I think that dog is terribly dangerous” because his fear is not a conscious thought in the first place. It does not have statement character. Other than psychosis, which is an illness of consciousness, but of an insane consciousness, neurosis is not an illness of consciousness. It works precisely through the systematic negation and exclusion of consciousness. 27 There is for it no (quasi-)metaphysical belief or conviction, no higher meaning, no deeper insight into a soul truth, no message, no feeling of worship. Nothing intelligible. There is only the banal fact of the terror evoked by this everyday type dog, or by this ordinary plaza, this practical-technical elevator, or there is the fact of the absolute necessity to wash one’s hands again for the tenth time, etc. It is precisely not an intrusion and appearance of an other-worldly ideal or numinous dimension into this earthly, profane, dull reality. No, it is just a fact of nature. 27 This is why during the late 19th and the 20th century psychoanalytical psychology came up with the concept of “the unconscious” by way of an explanation of neurosis. Psychology fell for the neurotic “arrangement” and mise en scène, took it literally, at face value. The product and purpose of this stage production, i.e., the fundamental mindlessness (of “The Absolute”) was believed in and hypostatized as the neurosis’s cause and origin. This is clear evidence of the neurosis of psychology. It is a point where psychology’s fraternizing with the neurosis becomes obvious. It would be wrong to say here that psychology made a virtue of necessity. What it did was rather to elevate the neurotically produced mindlessness to the higher level of a theoretical concept and thus not only give it the dignity of a lofty place in theory, but also legitimize it as an unquestionable truth of nature. Psychological theory, qua theory, is not itself mindless and extra-linguistic. In this sense it is not neurotic in the same way that a neurotic patient is, namely on the level of symptoms and pathological behavior (although it can not be excluded that certain standard behaviors and techniques of psychology may upon closer look prove to be pathological). But it is neurotic (neurosis-syntonic) in that it, of course unwittingly, harbors within itself and celebrates the neurotic structure.

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Nevertheless this banal natural dog in its banality has the effect of evoking an absolute fear, a fear that is “absolved” (freed) from reality (that is to say, that is greater and fundamentally different even from the truly terrifying fear of a presently erupting volcano or of an exploding nuclear bomb). This fear is “out of this world.” The event, here and now, of the appearance of the positive fact of a dog IS the immediate presence of The Absolute. This contradiction between the positivity of a decidedly natural fact or event and the Absoluteness of the fear is what makes this reaction neurotic. The surplus effect of The Absolute is not borne out by the phenomenon that evokes it, and obviously so. The phenomenon of the dog, precisely the way it is in fact seen and known in neurosis, does not corroborate this additional excessive value that neurosis, against its own better knowledge, adamantly attributes to it, because it is, after all, precisely not apperceived by the neurosis as a sacred animal, nor as a monstrous one, a creature from hell. Even for the neurosis it is just a dog, nothing but an ordinary dog. A dog in just the same sense as for people without a dog phobia. The Absolute does not manifest itself in or as the dog. It does not manifest itself at all, does not become a phenomenon. It merely avails itself of the dog (or whatever other thing, event, theme, feeling) as a means to elicit itself. The dog as such is not important. It (in its essence, its truth, its inner image) does not enter into the neurotic experience. It is no more than a trigger for it. And each type of neurosis (and each individual neurosis) freely chooses one or several objects, topics, or situations as those things that have to serve for it as triggers. The Absolute itself, however, is not in those things nor represented by them. It is distinct from them. It is, after all, truly absolute. It is a self-sufficient, self-serving present reality, a soul experience happening as a literal fact (a real event here and now) in and as the fear or felt compelling necessity. If it were not something distinct, indeed independent, it would not be absolute. And it would not be neurotic either, because then the sentence structure (“This is ...”) and the opposition of consciousness would have returned and through them the

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contact with reality would have been restored. The phobia would have dwindled into a Realangst (realistic anxiety), even if it were perhaps one based on a mistaken perception. But neurotic phobia does not come about through a faulty perception of the dog that could be corrected through a realitytesting. It is independent of empirical reality. It is a free fabrication by the soul. The loss of the sentence structure, the loss of any “about,” has two aspects. The first is that The Absolute in neurosis has no content. It is Absoluteness per se, in abstracto. Just sheer overwhelming power or necessity, the mere facticity of this power. There is nothing semantic left, nothing mental, noetic, intelligible, no concept. There is no display of any truth, no representation, no idea or wisdom (that would be comparable to the psychotic’s idea of the forefather who has been fecundating his daughter for millions of years). The Absolute has been reduced to total poverty as far as image, meaning, or content is concerned, indeed absolutely reduced to its zero stage, the empty abstract contentless form of absoluteness as such (rather than the absoluteness of this or that truth, God, or higher meaning). In contrast to psychosis in which the sentence form is crucial, the difference between, and apartness of, subject and predicate has collapsed into one, into an extensionless point. The second, but related aspect is that The Absolute now merely happens, just like earthquakes happen. It is a factual occurrence, a positivity. As fact it happens without involving consciousness. And as fact it is fundamentally occluded, shut up within itself. The human person, that is, the mind, is excluded from it, insulated and thus blind over against it. The Absolute, when it happens, does not require an understanding, a feeling, an insight. There is no illumination and no personal creed or conviction (as in the case of the psychotic). Neurosis is independent of all this. The very point of The Absolute is precisely that it simply factually happens and does not “mean” anything. It is. It is an objective event, objective fact, and as such extra-linguistic. Consciousness does not know about “The Absolute,” does not see and acknowledge, appreciate it as such,

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in its metaphysical character. Consciousness is merely factually hit by its absolutely compelling effect and, of course, it has to suffer from it, while itself remaining blind, unconscious of it. In other words, The Absolute has become ontologized, physicalized (qua physical event), and automatized (“triggered off”), a senseless, mindless occurrence that merely reels itself off without the participation of consciousness. The human subject as mind is entirely circumvented, dodged. It drops out. The metaphysical nature of what happens in the human person does not happen for it, but remains entirely behind its back. The character of intelligibility is excluded from “The Absolute.” Concerning his neurosis, the neurotic person is not, and does not even give the mere appearance of, a homo religiosus, the way the psychotic person at least could seem to be in his or her delusion. The person figures only as the place in reality in which The Absolute happens. This means that in neurosis The Absolute (the former Heaven or Paradise, the realm of eternal ideas and ideals and principles) has finally itself become absolute and objective, freed from the dependence on being received and entertained by a conscious awareness, an understanding and deeply feeling mind, as well as freed from the dependence on the apparition of a particular numinous or sacred content in a phenomenon. The Absolute has been interiorized into itself. It is no longer the attribute of something, of a God, a truth, a message. It has been sunken into mindlessness. And thus it simply happens of its own accord as a meaningless, usually even absurd, natural fact—but nonetheless as the triumphant immediate presence and present reality of The Absolute. Heaven, Paradise, the Platonic Forms, the eternal principles of metaphysics, the Absolute as the God of Christianity and metaphysics used to be “out there” somewhere. They were objects and contents of consciousness and objects of its veneration. They were, as we say in psychology, “projected” out. In neurosis, “The Absolute” is empirical fact, right here in this real world of ours—but the price for this positivistic presence is its totally neurotic character. “The Absolute” in neurosis occurs as the particular in its abstract singularity, devoid of that universal character that all conscious thoughts and linguistic statements have.

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So in neurosis both differences that we saw were characteristic of metaphysics and religion have disappeared— the “opposition of consciousness” (which expresses itself in the linguistic sentence form, the “about” structure) and what I called the “metaphysical difference.” 28

5. MORBUS SACER After my having disposed of the archetypal interpretation of neurosis (not to mention the explanation in terms of instinctual desires or factual events), it may seem that with this new title, “Morbus sacer,” it comes in again through the back door. Jung had called neurosis a morbus sacer (CW 11 § 521) precisely because he ultimately saw at work in the individual life of neurotics “a special will of God,” “a veritable will of God” (§§ 524f. transl. modif.). He even was able to claim that “patients force the soul doctor into the role of priest” (§ 532, transl. modif.). He said, “... inasmuch as you attain to the numinous experience you are released from the curse of pathology” (Letters 1, p. 377, to Martin, 20 August 1945). By the same token, Jung submitted the thesis that “A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as 28 Since I compared neurosis with psychosis and both with metaphysics and religion, I might as well make a brief comment about the “borderline syndrome” and what in Japan is called “developmental disorder.” Both neurosis and psychosis have a specific all-important content, certain soul truths in the case of psychosis and the zero-stage of content, namely, absoluteness per se, in neurosis. The other two psychic illnesses have no unconditional truth or content anymore. They happen on the level of form, as a purely formal play in total Beliebigkeit (indifference, “anything goes” attitude). They are illnesses of subjectivity, of the self-presentation of a person as subject (not of the mind). They are the psychic equivalent of medial modernity, with its non-committal shows, advertizing, art as “installations,” etc.—Neurosis invites yet another comparison, the comparison of “The Absolute” with the popular term and idea of numinosity. The numinous is, it seems to me, the sublated version of the neurotic “The Absolute.” Just as with the term “the unconscious” something neurotic (the decided mindlessness of The Absolute) was raised to the level of psychological theory, so the idea of “the numinous” uplifted the neurotic surplus significance from the wretched sphere of actual personal illness to the universal level of theory and thus gave it higher honors, indeed, the honors of supreme dignity. However, in truth “the numinous” is a cheap, unworthy version of the neurotic “absolute significance”: just idle talk, empty simulation. The neurotic’s “The Absolute,” which has its real place in his symptoms, has a much higher, namely a real dignity because he dearly pays for the absolute significance achieved through his neurosis in hard psychic cash: in his suffering from his symptoms and the severe restrictions they impose on him. The neurotic has a balanced budget. The illegitimate boon of his having “The Absolute” is perfectly offset by his personal misery. The modern cult of the numinous in psychology, of “personal myth,” of “gods/goddesses in every man and woman,” by contrast, functions via crass overspending, buying on credit.

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the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning” (CW 11 § 497). If we approach our new section title with this sort of idea in the back of our minds, then we are indeed back in the archetypal, mythological, or religious interpretation of neurosis. But all these preconceived Jungian ideas have to be cleared away. There is not, deeply hidden in neurosis, a dignified sacred content, not a numinous substance, a higher meaning. Nor does neurosis have an essential function within the individuation process (in Jung’s sense), a function perhaps in some distant way analogous to a shaman’s initiating illness, the way Jung says that the neurotics are “actually human beings of a ‘higher’ type,” the chosen few, because they are “driven towards higher consciousness by an irresistible urge” (CW 7 § 291, transl. modif.).29 And here let us continue to bear in mind that such ideas betray that psychology is conceived as the psychology of people rather than as the psychology of the soul, here particularly: of neurosis as a self-expression of soul. Neurosis is not about us, not at all about “higher consciousness,” nor is it (which would be another, much more modest possibility of a constructive function) “nature’s attempt to heal” the individual (CW 10 § 361) by forcing upon the person “the values which the individual lacks” (CW 7 § 93). No, no healing, compensation or correction function, not even implicitly. On the contrary, neurosis per se is simply neurotic, sick, without any redeeming value. Our thinking must not get stuck in this old rut. Here, at the beginning of this new topic, my phrase “morbus sacer” must be conceived as not yet having any specific meaning. We need to comprehend it in an entirely different, fresh sense. For the time being it is just an empty shell. How it is to be understood and what its definition will have to be cannot be anticipated. It will have to be slowly derived from our further examination of the phenomenon of neurosis. There are two separate regards in which neurosis can be considered a morbus sacer, first, with respect to what is its ultimate 29 This idea of Jung’s is only possible because Jung had a wishy-washy concept of neurosis, a concept that subsumes very different psychological phenomena under itself. There may of course occasionally be individuals who are indeed driven towards higher consciousness by an irresistible urge and in whom this urge shows itself in its first immediacy in the form of symptoms. Where this is in fact the case, it is not a question of neurosis proper. But Jung speaks here expressly of neurosis (§ 290).

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concern (i.e., “The Absolute” per se), and secondly, with respect to the meaning that his suffering from his neurosis has for the human being who is neurotic (i.e., with respect to the relation between “The Absolute” and the person). I will begin with the origin of the sacred. Historically as well as logically, “the sacred” originated in a primordial act of sacrum facere (“making sacred”): sacrifice, i.e., sacrificial killing.30 The ruthless killing blow with the axe by the sacrificer into the animal or human, and thus into the intactness of life, logically opened up a difference, that difference, open space, clearing (Lichtung, Heidegger), that we call mind or consciousness and that was mythologically expressed in the image of the space opened by the separation of the world parents Heaven and Earth, who before had been engaged in an eternal embrace. The act of killing itself which created the clearing found its mythological depiction, for example, in the story of the Greek god Kronos, who with a sharp-edged sickle cut off the male member of his father Uranos (Heaven), thereby violently ending his divine parents’ eternal gamos. Together these two mythological images show us what logically happens in the ritual of sacrifice. The sacred is “made” (sacrum facere) through a sacrilegious act. Only a sacrilegious act can produce the sacred. There is no transition from something totally nonsacred to the sacred. The higher category cannot be derived from nor produced by the lower category. The soul works uroborically, and this means through a literal petitio (and generatio) principii. It only creates what it itself pre-supposed, presupposed in the sense of its having been inherent in it all along. Self-generation. The movement from implicit to explicit. The result of the killing blow is the clearing (Lichtung) in which we as soul, mind, or consciousness live. What mythologically is the separation of Heaven and Earth is linguistically the apartness of subject and predicate, the “about” structure of language (consciousness as that “clearing” is in itself fundamentally linguistic). The copula is the linguistic representative of the behavioral (ritual) killing blow with the axe or of the mythological cut with the sickle, in other words, the opening up of the clearance, the distancing of the 30 Cf. my “Killings,” Chapter 5 in my Soul-Violence, Coll. Engl. Papers, vol. III, New Orleans (Spring Journal Books) 2008.

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“at first” indistinguishably stuck-together psychic opposites from each other. Just as in mythology Atlas—another image for the same idea that was depicted in the primordial culture-hero’s brutal severing of the eternal sexual embrace of the divine world parents— permanently heaved and held up the vault of heaven and thus maintains the separation of Heaven and Earth, so the copula holds subject and predicate apart. The sacrificial priest’s ritual deed, the mythological hero’s acts in the mind’s representation or imagination, and the copula’s linguistic achievement bring about the same result in different media. Now, the neurotic “The Absolute,” as we have seen in the previous chapter, was precisely generated through the collapse of subject and predicate into each other in the copula. At first glance this might appear as the revocation and undoing of the sacrificial blow with the axe. After all, the (be it spatial or temporal) apartness of Heaven and Earth, subject and predicate, is annulled. The opposites merge together and the difference and distance between them vanishes in the absolute occludedness of the copula. The clearing disappears and unconsciousness is created instead. It would be a mistake, however, to interpret the caving in of the sentence structure into its center point, the copula, as the undoing of the primordial killing blow that severed the previously amalgamated opposites, or the undoing of the copula as its linguistic representative. Rather, what happened with the creation of the neurotic “The Absolute” through the collapse-into-one of subject and predicate, of the particular and the universal, is the involution of the sacrificial blow into itself. What in that ritual blow in archaic times was a literal behavior in sensual reality, what in the sentence structure is a literal performance in time (the temporal succession of the predicate after the subject), this has become inwardized into the concept or logic of the blow itself, that is to say, into the soul’s atemporal logicity. Thus the blow, the sacrum facere, has become absolute—independent of any behavior or act, exempt from the limitations of space and time and a physical substrate, independent even of any human awareness about it. Whereas the ritual of blood sacrifices externalized (enacted and thus acted out) the soul’s truth, visibly displayed it and unfolded it, and whereas, furthermore, language expressed (“uttered”) it in the form of its sentences, this the soul’s truth has now come home to its own

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territory. It has returned to the interiority of the soul’s logical life, into its absolute negativity. This interiority, this logical negativity, which in all forms of enactment (ritual, speech) remained merely implicit, has become explicit (precisely because it is no longer enacted, displayed, made visible. In its logicity the soul’s truth can only be thought, not seen in physical reality, imagined in narrative form, acted out in behavior. “Becoming explicit” and “becoming occluded” therefore paradoxically go together because the one refers to the achieved absolute-negative interiority or logicity, the other to the loss of external display). Far from being undone, through the collapse of the opposites into each other the severing sacrificial blow was purified and elevated to a higher sublimated, distilled form of itself. Their involution into the copula merely undid the externality and positivity in which it had formerly appeared. The collapse of subject and predicate into the copula did not mean that they canceled each other out so that entropy would result (interestingly enough the word entropy literally refers to a “turning in [on itself ]”). On the contrary, the involution of subject and object into each other in the copula means their short-circuiting, a kind of electric shock and thus a heightened energy charge, not their mutual leveling ending in uniformity. It is that enduring electric shock that phenomenologically appears as the power of the compelling necessity or conviction experienced by the neurotic and that I named “The Absolute.” Here we see how the sacrilegious killing blow with the axe, far from having disappeared, is still very much present in the absolutized copula, but precisely not in the crude “material” form of a behavior or act in sensual reality and in time and space, but in the absolutely sublimated and distilled form of a logical, and this means absolute-negative, background happening that remains empirically inaccessible and only manifests itself in empirical reality through its effect, its result, namely the absolutely compelling force of “The Absolute.” The Absolute is an autonomous, spontaneous, absolutely immediate presence, an immediate reality. In itself, the killing blow means the immediate separation of the opposites. That is what is inherent in the blow character. But the sacrificial blow with the axe just as much as any speech act was itself still mediated by the human persons’ performing the act. The neurotic “The Absolute,” by contrast, is not produced or

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enacted by a human subject, by the neurotic. It is not his doing. Rather, it is suddenly immediately there in the neurotic, all of its own accord. Indeed, it is the production of immediacy. The purpose of neurosis is, after all, the fabrication of the immediate presence and present reality of The Absolute as occurring fact, as positivity. This is what neurosis is all about. The new “sacrificial blow” (in the copula) happens behind the back of the neurotic who suffers from it. Just as Heidegger said, Die Sprache spricht (“language speaks,” rather than people), so we have to say that “the soul” performs this blow within itself, on its own home territory, in the remoteness of its own logos. The short-circuiting of the opposites and their immersion and disappearance in the copula are the interiorization of the killing blow into itself. But if the killing blow is still present in the absolutized copula, then its sacrum facere and “the sacred” are also still present. In fact, the absolution of the copula through the collapse of what, before, the copula held apart outside itself and through the opposite’s clash and short-circuit within itself, is merely the home-coming of “the sacred” from its exile in externality, its coming home to itself, to “the soul.” Thus it is “the sacred” pure and simple. In this sense, neurosis is the end of the sacred, “end” both in the sense of the last form and as its telos, finis, its culmination, the sacred in the ultimate state of distillation. The absolute copula IS the neurosis, or the neurosis is that logic (that logical constellation or logical dynamic) that is expressed in the concept of the collapse of the opposites subject and predicate into the copula. But as long as it is a logical constellation in absolute-negativity, it is empirically or phenomenologically inaccessible. It remains totally in the background, totally invisible, taking place in “the soul” and not in experiential reality. In order to make itself felt and present in human reality this absolute copula or this logic needs to attach itself to or become projected upon particular things or events. Only when it is affixed to specific real behaviors, things, facts, fantasies as concrete exemplifications for this logic does neurosis realize itself and obtain a positive presence.31 This realization of the absolutized 31 There must, of course, be a twofold attachment: (a) to a human being in which it can live itself out and (b) to concrete things or events in reality.

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copula is to a large extent contingent, serendipitous, that is to say, the specifics of the neurosis, its particular symptoms and mechanisms, do not directly and completely derive from the inner logic of neurosis. What type of neurosis, what particular pathology, which symptoms, defenses, etc., are chosen is (not totally, but largely) arbitrary as far as the absolute copula is concerned. For the most part this choice of the particular form of The Absolute in a concrete neurosis is dependent on empirical conditions, on the particular character traits, gifts, shortcomings, body and health condition of the person concerned, as well as on data of his or her life history or the circumstances of his or her present social environment, etc. The absolutized copula, itself bodiless and absolute-negative, avails itself of such empirical circumstances to give itself through them a noticeable, “embodied” presence in reality and a material filling, but it ipso facto loses its logical purity and generality, exchanging them for particularized limited versions of itself. If The Absolute as it appears in neurosis is the ultimate distilled form of the primordial sacrificial, sacred-making blow with the axe, then “the sacred” is still present in neurosis. It is its real content and ultimate concern. But, and with this I come to the second aspect of our morbus sacer topic, it is the very point of this neurotic “the sacred” that it is not for him, the neurotic, nor for a congregation, for the people around the neurotic. It cannot, must not reveal itself as “the sacred.” The fact that it is “the sacred” must shun the light of day. It cloaks itself in the occludedness of the dead facts of positive behavior of the human organism (literal behavior as well as emotions, ideas that pop obsessively into the mind), on the one hand, and in an absolutely unworthy, undignified, absurd, silly, even disgusting form of this behavior, as neurotic symptoms, on the other. Its appearance, manifestation, contradicts its essence, a situation which is of course inherent in the nature of neurosis as self-contradiction. “The sacred” does realize itself, but since it realizes itself neurotically, it hides itself in its opposite so that it is received without understanding, appreciation, acknowledgment. It remains strictly unintelligible. What is for him (for the neurotic) is only the suffering from the symptoms and restrictions, the burden that his neurosis imposes on him. It is a suffering in the flesh. Just unintelligible misery. What stands out is the mindlessness of the suffering and the absolute

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blindness for the meaning, surplus value, the dimension of the sacred that is the very content and purpose of the neurosis. The neurotic is nothing but the tormented creature in its creatureliness, not gifted with a trace of the divine mind that could see, and he is this although his torment is nothing else but the mode in which the higher meaning, the surplus value, the sacred can achieve for itself an immediate presence in reality. Neurosis is not only self-contradictory, but also an existing dissociation in the sense that what in archaic times was the bliss of sacrifice (that is, the unity of bliss and brutality, the sacred and loss/ renunciation) has come apart into two separate aspects. Within the neurosis, The Absolute, the sacred itself, as incorporated in the symptoms, on the one hand, and the neurotic himself who suffers from it, on the other hand, stand, as it were, back to back to each other, indeed, move away from each other in opposite directions. There is the triumph of the present reality of The Absolute and the sacred on the one side and, completely separately and alienated, naked mindless misery on the other side. The modern figure of “the neurotic” 32 thus proves to be an embodied representative of the concept of the suffering God-man in the shape of a servant 33 (Kierkegaard, alluding to Phil. 2:5-8 34), so essential in modernity (industrial modernity, 19th and first half of the 20th century) in philosophy, literature, and art, being the emphatic determination of the essence of modern man (prior to the phase of medial modernity in which we now live). For Kierkegaard, Christ is the “absolute paradox”: “God in time” or “in the shape of a servant,” as such a stumbling block for reason and exclusively accessible to faith, 32 I speak of the figure “the neurotic” in order to distinguish this whole logical (and phenomenological) configuration from the particular empirical human individuals who are neurotic. 33 See Claus-Artur Scheier, Ästhetik der Simulation. Formen des Produktionsdenkens im 19. Jahrhundert, Hamburg (Meiner) 2000, especially the chapter, “Marx: Die neue Produktionsweise und der Gott-Mensch in Knechtsgestalt” pp. 5–14, and K. Ruhstorfer, “‘Der Gottmensch in Knechtsgestalt.’ Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger – drei maßgebliche Negationen metaphysischer Christologie,” in: B. Babich, A. Denker, H. Zaborowski (eds.), Heidegger & Nietzsche, (Elementa. Schriften zur Philosophie und ihrer Problemgeschichte) Amsterdam (Rodopi) 2012. 34 “... although he originally existed in the form of God, / did not cling to his beingequal-to-God as his inalienable privilege, / but emptied himself [of it] (ekenôsen, from which we get the key term kenôsis), / took the form of a slave, / having been born like a man / and living like a man, / he humbled himself / and was obedient to the point of death, / indeed, [a criminal’s] death on a cross.”

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only to be attained in a “leap.” The exemplary man is conceived during the 19th century as the God-man in the shape of a servant. Man in his concept has become identical with the suffering Christ, and in this sense he is the slave shape of himself as the absent God. This motif is widespread, both explicitly and implicitly. In the “Aufschrift” of his “Algabal” (1899) Stefan George dedicates this work of his “to the memory of Ludwig II” (of Bavaria), apostrophizing him as, “o verhöhnter Dulderkönig” (“O mocked patient sufferer-king”). One chapter in Baudelaire’s Les paradis artificiels (1860) is entitled, “The God-man.” Courbet, according to Franz Zelger, compares his own fate with Christ’s Passion. 35 Alexandre Dumas likewise presents a suffering Christ-figure in his Le Comte de Monte-Cristo36 (however in such a way, typical for light fiction, that in the end the omnipotence fantasies of the age of Imperialism are predominant). Nietzsche had signed several postcards in January 1889 from Turin with “The Crucified.” These are merely a few references that indicate the general potency of this motif. Claus-Artur Scheier writes, “Kierkegaard’s God-man in the shape of a servant is with respect to his societal reality Marx’s and Engels’s wage laborer and proletarian, and the latter is with respect to its historical pathos the Kierkegaardian God-man in the shape of the servant.”37 According to Marx the truth about man as laborer is, that his activity therefore appears to him as a torment, his own creation as an alien power, his wealth as poverty, the essential bond linking him with other men as an unessential bond, and separation from his fellow men, on the other hand, as his true mode of existence, his life as a sacrifice of his life, the realisation of his nature as making his life unreal, his production as the production of his nullity, his power over an object as the power of the object over him, and he himself, the lord of his creation, as the servant of this creation.38 35 Franz Zelger, “Begräbnis als Selbstinszenierung. Courbets ‘Enterrement à Ornans’ – eine Neuinterpretation,” in: Neue Zürcher Zeitung No. 283, 5./6. December 1998, p. 53. Quoted in Scheier, op. cit., p. 13, footnote 30. 36 W. Giegerich, “Dumas’ ‘Le Comte de Monte-Christo’ und Wilhelm Raabe,” in: Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft 1971, Braunschweig 1971, pp. 49–71. 37 Scheier, op. cit., p. 13, my translation. 38 Karl Marx, Comments on James Mill, Éléments D’économie Politique (1844), transl. by Clemens Dutt for the Collected Works, quoted from http://www.marxists.org/ archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/index.htm, my emphases.

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Whereas most of the time exemplary man, that is, the truly productive man, is seen in the figure of the artist, for Marx the laborer is the truly producing, and therefore the exemplary, man. But the figure of “the neurotic” is probably the logically most convincing and consistent representative of this notion39 since it brings both sides, indeed, the dissociation itself, perfectly together in one, without needing to distribute the two dissociated sides, the God and the man, the misery of the slave and the triumph of “the sacred,” upon two different persons. Neurosis is, we said, existing self-contradiction and self-dissociation. Just as Christ sacrificed himself for the salvation of the world, so the figure of “the neurotic” sacrifices himself, his ordinary human happiness, well-being, full self-unfolding, for the immediate presence and present reality of The Absolute as the sacred. It is a real person’s self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of his self, his intelligence, and his human dignity, and it is a sacrifice for the higher glory of the immediate presence of The Absolute. It is a real sacrifice in the flesh. It is, and this is another distinction and merit of neurosis, not merely an inner belief or feeling that the neurotic has, not a doctrinal content, not either an idea or motif in the minds and books of thinkers and artists, a literary or philosophical conception, an interpretation of the role of modern man.40 Nor is it one particular behavior performed by a person among all his other behaviors, like a special ritual performance.41 No, it occurs as the actually lived life, his life itself in 39 This advantage of neurosis is due to the fact that it is primarily a personal psychological phenomenon. The modern individual is the hermetic vessel in which its entire logic has to play itself out in its entirety. The societal embodiment of the suffering God-man in the shape of a servant, namely the figure of “the proletarian laborer,” by contrast, has its other side outside itself in the objective sphere of commodities into which his true (“divine”) essence has disappeared. The two sides of the dissociation or alienation (the suffering versus the true essence) is thus distributed onto two different realities. 40 Doctrine, idea, motif (in philosophy, art, or literature), interpretation—all this would belong to the sphere of intelligibility and universality (generality). But the neurosis is totally locked (a) into the singularity of individuals and (b) sunken and frozen into the status of the positivity of natural fact. 41 And yet it is not a ritual, since a ritual presupposes the difference between the human person who performs the act and the ritual act itself. But the neurotic does not perform the ritual act of his self-sacrifice. It happens to or rather in him. It happens compulsively and mechanically-automatically just as if it were a natural occurrence rather than a soul ritual. Within the neurosis as a whole, the neurotic is merely a pawn in its game, one might here even think of a programmed robot. It is the very point of neurosis that the neurotic has to be sunk into that very status of “dumb fish” (MDR p. 220) that Jung in another context refused to be.

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its entirety, in material reality (in fact in the neurotic’s body), and with unquestionable force and real (objective, not subjective) relentless commitment. A neurosis claims the personhood of the neurotic person for itself. Thus it is a real immediate present reality. We will return to this topic in Part 5, chapter 2 in a different context. Within the neurosis as a whole (the societal or cultural institution of neurosis), the neurotic himself, as person, has obviously the part of the slave form of the God-man, the part of nothing-but-victim, senseless victim (rather than “sacrifice” in the religious sense), the way in Kafka’s Penal Colony the officer who at the end sacrifices himself in the penal apparatus is merely brutally and senselessly stabbed to death by the (at the same time self-destructing) machine without the transfiguration and radiance that in former times used to appear on the face of the condemned person and to bring bliss to the whole community.42 But the part of the God, The Absolute, the sacred, the glory and triumph, is played by the pathology, the symptoms, however in such a way that it is safely encased, locked, and totally concealed therein, obscured and concealed, concealed even from itself. It is a triumph without triumph, a ritual that is enwrapped and deeply hidden in meaningless factual occurrence. Invisible, inaccessible, but nevertheless real. We know the suffering God-man in the shape of a servant also from Jung’s description of his father. Quite in keeping with this powerful conception stirring in the depths above all of 19th century thought, Jung saw in his father “a sufferer stricken with an Amfortas wound, a ‘fisher king’ whose wound would not heal” and viewed his suffering as “the suffering of the Christian man in general.” Jung states that his father “had literally lived right up to his death the suffering prefigured and promised by Christ ...” And “Christ is the suffering servant of God, as was Job.” Just as Christ had been deserted by God, so Jung says about his father: “He wanted to rest content with faith, but faith broke faith with him.” (MDR, pp. 215f., transl. modif.). His father was a victim of a betrayal. 42 I discussed Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony” at some length in Part II of my “The Alchemy of History,” in: W.G., Soul-Violence, Coll. Engl. Papers, vol. III, New Orleans, LA (Spring Journal Books) 2008, pp. 353–414, here pp. 382–414. Originally in German as “Die Alchemie der Geschichte” in Eranos 54–1985 (Frankfurt/Main, Insel, 1987) pp. 325–395.

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Jung’s fantasy about his father and what I said about the neurotic are obviously very close. And yet there is a fundamental difference. Jung’s father (in Carl Gustav’s fantasy of him) was still concerned with his Christian faith. His suffering was not absolutely meaningless, absolutely senseless inasmuch as it still had a sacred content. This content was known to his father. His orientation was towards this content as the absolute truth, and even if “faith broke faith with him” so that this truth became inaccessible for him, it was still faith that betrayed him. Furthermore, his suffering was prefigured and promised by Christ. On both counts, this suffering still has a great dignity and a worthy substance. For the neurotic, by contrast, it is not faith that betrayed him. There is not a meaning structure or frame of reference at all, nothing whatsoever, within which his suffering would be contained. True, in the neurotic a self-sacrifice is taking place. But it is one that only factually happens, that happens without the participation and understanding of that self that is sacrificed. A sacrifice that lacks the ethical or religious quality of a sacrifice. It does not even happen to the person the way a mishap or catastrophe happens, to which the subject can relate by moaning and mourning. It is totally occluded, irrational, absolutely alienated, and yet it is also totally captivating and compelling, using the subject himself for its, the sacrifice’s, ends so that the subject cannot even blame fate or life for its misery. It is its own and yet foreign to it, remote. Not only ununderstandable, but a priori mindless, senseless misery. Furthermore, the neurotic is not merely stricken with suffering. It is much worse. His is a suffering from totally silly, absurd, pointless, ridiculous, or even disgusting and despicable symptoms. (It can be silly, ridiculous, disgusting because it is not simply dreadful like human suffering from natural catastrophes, which is never silly or disgusting. Neurotic suffering is one coming from the soul itself, a psychic production—and yet totally unintelligible, as unintelligible as if it came from a natural catastrophe.) In other words, here the suffering bemocks itself and humiliates the sufferer (which was not at all the case in Job’s, Christ’s, Amfortas’s, or Jung’s father’s sufferings, which had their own dignity). And because of this derision and humiliation inherent in the neurotic suffering, the slave form of the suffering God-man has become absolute. The neurotic represents

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the slave form of himself as the absent God. The figure of the suffering God-man in the shape of a slave has entered the totally secular man. The kenôsis (Phil. 2:7) is complete. But precisely as such, as the full concrete realization in empirical human individuals of the grand religious vision of the kenôsis and thus fulfilled immediate presence of the suffering God-man in the shape of a servant, neurosis proves to be a morbus sacer. Morbus sacer, however, obviously in a diametrically opposite sense from that which this designation had in Jung’s naively religious scheme.

PART 2

The historicity of neurosis. Its historical enabling conditions

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eurosis is not simply a possibility given with the nature of man. It is nothing natural. Rather than being, as a potential, an anthropological constant, it has only become possible through a long cultural-historical development. It is a product of history, the history of the soul or consciousness. The mere fact that neurosis in its innermost structure is a sly contrivance suggests that it must be a decidedly modern phenomenon, that is to say, a phenomenon which saw the light of day no earlier than during the 19th century (or perhaps, to be more generous, the end of the 18 th century). Before that century, the times during which “the soul” expressed itself in, and was sustained by, myth and later by religion and metaphysics, the times when the arena for the soul’s logical life was out there, in nature, in the cosmos, were psychologically (not “semantically”) too innocent, too guileless and straightforward to allow for neurotic dissociation or self-contradiction. But in them, there also did not exist yet a need for (or a feeling of a lack of ) that which neurosis is supposed to achieve. Neurosis has only become possible since—I quote a description in the highly mythologizing diction of Jung for something that amounts to the very opposite of a mythological mode of being-in-

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the-world—“the struggle of light against darkness transferred its battleground into the interior [of the psyche]” (CW 13 § 293, transl. modif.) and since “For the first time since the dawn of history we have succeeded in swallowing the whole primordial animatedness [ursprüngliche Beseeltheit] of nature into ourselves” (CW 10 § 431, transl. modif.). The work of the psychotherapist “is accomplished in a sphere in which the numen immigrated only recently and into which the whole weight of mankind’s problems [Menschheitsproblematik] has been translocated” 43 (CW 16 § 449, transl. modif.). Jung is talking about revolutionary changes or ruptures: he speaks of immigration, a translocation, a transferral of the battleground, a swallowing, in other words, of a fundamental change of location, that change through which man’s inner for the first time becomes the place where the “essential decisions” happen. And that which is translocated and swallowed in each case is by no means just some individual phenomena. It is much rather always existence as a whole and “the ultimate” that is at stake: the problem of human existence as such, the struggle of light against darkness, the numen, the primordial animatedness. The historical processes that Jung alludes to must be described in a little more detail, and this will be the task of the following exposition, although I must say right away that what I will offer within the scope of this book on neurosis can, by comparison with the circumference and proportion of the issue, also be no more than a few exemplary glimpses and hints. But before I come to that I have to make the following additional comment, which is of fundamental significance. We have to rise to the insight that the emergence of neurosis and the emergence of the modern field of psychology (and therapeutic practice) are simultaneous. Simultaneous in the deeper sense of their equiprimordiality. They bring each other into being and originate from out of the same “ground,” the same historical situation. They are twins.

43 Menschheitsproblematik: not particular problems that might come up, but something like the problem of human existence as such.

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1. CRITIQUE OF THE IDEA OF THE RELIGIOUS DEPTH OF NEUROSIS In addition I also have to express a caution. About the so-called neurotics of his day Jung said that many of them would not have been divided against themselves, i.e., have become neurotic, if they had lived in a period and in a milieu in which man was still linked by myth with the world of the ancestors, and thus with nature truly experienced and not merely seen from outside ... (MDR p. 144). Whereas I can agree with the wording of this view, at least to the extent to which it also confirms the thesis of the historicity of neurosis, the meaning that Jung probably connected with it is problematic, just as problematic as the following thesis of Jung’s in which this meaning becomes explicit. We read about the gods, “Today they are called phobias, obsessions, and so forth; in a word, neurotic symptoms. The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room ...” (CW 13 § 54). This idea, which certainly was characteristic for and very dear to Jung, could of course also be seen as an exemplification of the historical shift that Jung pointed to in the earlier quotations with which we began this chapter. And for Jung it certainly belongs together with the earlier ones about the interiorization into the human individual of the (formerly cosmic) battleground, on which the struggle between “light” and “darkness” once upon a time used to be fought out. However, the conception emerging from the last quotation both sets us on the right track and leads us astray. It sets us on the right track because it indeed confirms the notion of the enormous historical change that is the condition of the possibility of neurosis and psychology. We get a clear idea of the swallowing Jung had alluded to. That which once was gods and had its life out there on Olympus, or high above us in heaven or beneath us in the underworld, has been swallowed, as it were, and now rages in the solar plexus or in phobias, obsessions, neurotic depressions, etc. But precisely this idea also shows us why it tends to lead us astray. Jung’s underlying error is that he suggests that in the swallowing of the gods these gods survived this translocation, that they had merely changed their place of residence (as well as the name under which they are usually apperceived today). The neurotic symptoms are for Jung,

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to be sure, the “sunken” former gods, but nevertheless in truth still those gods. It is, even if, of course, only metaphorically speaking, still Zeus who produces the curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room! This is also why Jung could add to this observation the following remark: “It is not a matter of indifference whether one calls something a ‘mania’ or a ‘god.’ To serve a mania is detestable and undignified, but to serve a god is full of meaning and promise ... When the god is not acknowledged, egomania develops, and out of this mania comes sickness” (ibid. § 55), thus implying that we simply ought to acknowledge and serve the gods in order not to have neurotic symptoms. “God,” on the one hand, and our clinical terms for symptoms and disorders, such as “mania,” “phobia,” or “obsession,” on the other hand, refer to the same reality, only under different names and from different points of view. The ultimate psychological reality is the same. By the same token Jung believed that, “A psychoneurosis must be understood, ultimately, as the suffering of a soul which has not discovered its meaning” (CW 11 § 497). However, it is the other way around. The idea that we should discover our, or the soul’s, “meaning” and that neurosis is due to the absence or loss of “meaning” is itself a manifestion of the neurosis that this discovery is alleged to cure. This idea is a trap, a neurotic interpretation of neurosis. Neurosis, I claim, has nothing whatsoever to do with the issue of meaning or lack of meaning. It has nothing to do with the topic of gods and serving a god. Neurosis is concerned with an entirely different issue. I think that one reason why it was possible for Jung to have those ideas about neurosis is his confounding two things. He rightly diagnosed the phenomenon of a radical historical change and translocation. He had become aware of the fact that history as a whole is ruptured (in this context) into two different phases corresponding to two very different psychological states. This is the one thing. The “substance” that underwent that change is the other thing. It is clear that the former historical state was one that can rightly be described as characterized by the “primordial animatedness” of nature, the presence of gods in the world, or, later, by the religious-metaphysical createdness of the world by the one high God and the world’s containment in God’s eternal Plan of Salvation. These conditions can be interpreted anachronistically,

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from our modern point of view, as having provided “meaning” to life in the world. But neither this animatedness nor the gods or God were the substance that changed, i.e., changed in such a way that it precisely persisted in this altered form; it was not Zeus who came down from Olympus and turned into a psychic or psychosomatic symptom in modern individuals. Rather, the “substance” that changed was the soul. It (not he, Zeus) changed from one state that was characterized by the soul’s previous need to express itself in the sense of an animatedness of nature and in the fantasy (and the corresponding experience) of gods or God as presences, to a new state in which the soul no longer felt the need to express, and indeed was no longer capable of expressing, its highest truth in the fantasy of gods or God. The soul had different needs. That is to say, Zeus (to stay with this example) simply dropped away altogether at the point of transition, and the symptoms in the solar plexus are something new, a new “fantasy” needed by the soul to express its highest value according to the new logical status that it had meanwhile reached. Homer’s Iliad or Sophocles’s Antigone did not change into Dante’s Divina Commedia, and the latter was not transformed into Goethe’s Faust tragedy and later into Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Each of these works is an independent original creation. Each one is rooted in, and expresses the truth (or an aspect of the truth) of, its own time. Each one is the (partial) self-display of the soul the way it was constituted at the respective historical locus. No doubt, there is a metamorphosis of the soul and its truth, a metamorphosis which leads to the emergence of different dominant images and ideas and symbolic (cultic) behaviors as manifestations of the soul truths in the course of historical time. But it is not a metamorphosis of particular ones of those manifestations or products themselves of former times, such as “the gods,” as persisting “substances,” into the manifestations of the truth of other ages. Zeus simply died (left the world) when that time of whose truth or soul depth he had been the expression was over and yielded to another symbol. The form change is not a mere costume change or name change, or change of place, that the same content or element undergoes. It is fundamental. It amounts to a reconstitution and redefinition that encompasses the entire “world” and everything in it.

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Jung’s mistake, so we can now say, was ultimately that despite his basic and invaluable insight into the fundamental form change of the soul he eternalized one positive form of manifestation of the soul’s life, that form that we call “god(s)” and that was relative to one (very long) historical epoch, and treated it as if it were not just one form of manifestation of soul, but the soul itself, the underlying substance that in its history undergoes form changes. He exempted this one form (the gods) from having, in the process of the soul’s metamorphosis, to be immersed into the absolute negativity of the soul itself, to be remelted therein and thus precisely to give way to other forms of manifestation of the soul. Thus what once had been a living form of manifestation unwittingly turned, in Jung’s thinking, into a sort of positivity, into the sum-total of existing (ultimately) “metaphysical” invariant structures (“archetypes-in-themselves,” which by definition are not exposed to the course of time and its changes). The form and name change that was acknowledged by Jung, such as the change from “Zeus” into “neurotic symptom” and the change of location from “Olympus” to “plexus solaris,” was only a superficial name and costume change of what remained the same, a change on the level of the “archetypal images,” the human, all-too-human conceptions, not on the level of the “archetypes-in-themselves” or the soul. But the moment that the soul is understood to be absolute negativity, we no longer have any invariant positivities or substances that, despite any external change of their looks or names, remain the same, immune to historical time. The soul must not be imagined like water or wine that can be filled in different vessels (bottles, vases, buckets, cups, flat bowls) and nevertheless stays the same. Rather, the soul IS itself historicity, IS itself time, IS life, the process of its manifestations, the unfolding of its form changes, and only that. It exists only in its manifestations—with nothing behind it (nothing of which they would be the manifestations). Along with the form and name change and the translocation (correctly observed by Jung) we also get a fundamentally new soul reality. “Old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new.” Neurotic symptoms are not, to stay with Jung’s example, “Zeus” in disguise, “Zeus” incognito (or whatever other unrecognized god or archetype). Nor can neurosis be cured by lifting this incognito so that the god can become consciously known again behind his modern form

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as neurotic symptom,44 nor, more generally, by a reconnection of the patient with the gods or by his finding “meaning.” If the patient were to succeed in an attempt of his to take shelter in such a belief-system, he might, of course, indeed be subjectively relieved of the neurotic symptoms and his former suffering (which is something whose value I don’t want to underestimate), but the neurosis itself, the neurotic structure, would nevertheless not be dissolved. 45 He would have successfully deceived himself.

2. THE HISTORICAL EMERGENCE OF THE DEFINITION OF MAN AS SINGLE SOLITARY INDIVIDUAL

After this caution and clarification we can return to the description of this change in history that is so decisive for the comprehension of neurosis: the emergence of “the inner” in the human “individual.” The “self,” the inner, or the so-called unconscious of the individual person had not always been the battlefield on which what (in order to avoid Jung’s high-faluting and mythologizing phrase of “the struggle of light against darkness”) we could call the essential decisions were made, where “essential” means that which concerns the deepest issues of the soul and of the form of man’s being-in-the-world (which is why Jung also spoke, e.g., of the Menschheitsproblematik). The battlefield for these essential decisions had formerly been the decidedly public societal life with its values and norms, on the one hand, and the cosmos, on the other. The individual human being had fundamentally been placed into these two spheres. But this must not be modernistically understood in the sense that he, primarily living in his private subjectivity, only secondarily also lived in his social and natural (cosmic) environment. According to our modern view (which is more than a mere view that is up for discussion, 44 It is interesting that with the “Zeus” – “neurotic symptom” relation the opposition between latent and manifest meaning appears in Jung’s thinking, an opposition that he emphatically rejected when it was a question of dream interpretation. The difference to Freud’s thinking nevertheless remains, since, after all, “latent” and “manifest” were seen by Freud in the context of “repression” and distortion by a “censor,” whereas Jung thinks much more neutrally in terms of the unconscious vs. cognition, of “seeing through” (as Hillman might have said) the incognito. 45 It would merely have been displaced from the person to the belief-system, the theory, i.e., from his individual embodied subjectivity and personal identity to something universal and objective (mental constructs).

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but an unquestionable conviction and feeling), the ultimate unit is the isolated, atomic individual, and larger units, e.g., a people, a society, are accumulations of these individuals, which constitute the larger whole’s building bricks. During archaic, ancient, and medieval times, this was exactly the other way around. The larger whole came first, logically, psychologically, socially. It was the higher reality. The Middle Ages spoke of the ordo naturae into which man, too, had been embedded. Logically, the Particular was (to say it in the appropriate terms of neoplatonic philosophy that determined early medieval thinking and adequately expressed its life experience) a mere emanation from the Universal, the individual person fundamentally only an integral member of the whole. And this whole was the only true reality, whereas the human individual, just as all particulars as such, was logically and ontologically essentially secondary, derivative. Man had his being and essence in this Universal, that is to say, in the idea, the concept, of man, and not in himself, in his particularity. He was not autonomous. Only the Universal was substance, the Particular and the individuals were in essential regards only accidents or modifications of the substance. The societal context and the ethical life, the traditional customs, and the whole of meaning and values established by society and authorized by the ancestors possessed priority. This was the one aspect. The other equally important one is that it was the cosmic order established by the mythic gods, or, in the Middle Ages, by the one high creator God, which possessed priority and superiority. The fact that man had his being and substance in the Universal means concretely for practical reality that in essential regards he did not so much live his own life and that he was not constituted as an autonomous person; we could perhaps even say, he “was lived” by the customs and ritual necessities of his culture and felt himself, if I may be permitted to use an anachronistic metaphor, a cog in the machine of the cosmos, the decrees of the gods and of fate. I want to take a look at both (the societal and the cosmologicalreligious) aspects, but, as I said, I can of course only do this in rough outline and by means of a few more or less arbitrarily selected observations as examples. First I will turn to the topic of the Universal as it manifests in the societal sphere. During antiquity, the Middle Ages, and “early modern times” (Neuzeit) prior to the beginning of modernity, nobody would have searched for hidden reasons and motivations within himself in order

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to understand his personality and his behavior, as we are wont to do as a matter of course. The idea of one’s having an “authentic self ” or an “internal core” of one’s “personality” within one’s subjectivity was unfeasible. Similarly, nobody would have imagined himself (or his “true self”) to have been corrupted by traumatic experiences and deformed by having been forced into a corset of social roles. It is unthinkable that people would have tried to understand their personal character and peculiarities in terms of their “inner” or of their early childhood experiences. In fact their was not even a concept of one’s “true self.” By contrast, we today carry a deeply hidden and hardly accessible mystery as our core and our deepest truth within ourselves, “the unconscious,” which is why we look inwards and why there is such a thing as psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. In former times, dominant ways to understand oneself were to look in the opposite direction: instead of into oneself and one’s early history, one looked up to the stars as the true dominants of both one’s personal character and one’s fate, or, for example, up to the gods or the one God who had endowed people with their personal gifts and faults before they were born, and who during their lifetime assigned their lot to them. Misfortunes and illnesses were interpreted religiously in terms of personal sin, or one’s neglect of the sacrifices or obedience due to the gods. Concerning all important decisions—e.g., if and when to marry a particular person, if and when to start a battle— one relied in early times on external signs (omens), such as the flight of birds, the way yarrow stalks fell during one’s (or a priest’s) consultation of the I Ching, on astrological advice or, more recently, perhaps on the verse selected by one’s blind opening of the Bible and pointing to a passage on the page. One did not feel as a free, autonomous agent. Rather, one felt that one had to be obedient to the dictates of fate or the “will of God.” Now one could object here that we today, too, know that our decisions should comply with the conditions of the real situation. In this sense we are not free either and have to be “obedient” too. But the difference is that as autonomous agents we make our decisions on the basis of (1) what we empirically know (or believe to know) about the facts of the situation and (2) on the basis of our own interpretation or assessment of these facts. And thus we ourselves alone have to, and are ready to, take full responsibility for our decisions: not only for how

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we decided and behaved, but also for the reasons for our decisions. We have to produce these reasons in our own minds and on our own account. Omens and divinatory techniques, by contrast, allegedly delivered to people the right assessment of the respective situation irrationally and thus delivered even the reasons for their actions as a finished product, thereby relieving the human person of any responsibility for actions that were based on obedience to them. Such decisions were not really the person’s own decisions. Nor were the reasons for such decisions truly people’s own reasons. The use of omens and other divinatory practices, on the one hand, and the fact that persons were embedded in the customs, standards, and concepts of their society, on the other, have one thing in common: people were logically and metaphysically provided for. They did not, completely subjectively, have to find out or invent for themselves all alone by themselves who they were, what they wanted to be, how they had to live. They did not have to ask: what do I really feel? What are my true interests? Is my being in love with this other person really the true love and will he or she be the right husband or wife for me? People were born (or at least placed by their society or family) into their identity, into their profession, into their marriage. No free choice. From our modern point of view (freedom; biological individuality = logical and psychological individuality): terrible. The office (and stigma) of executioner or hangman during the Middle Ages frequently stuck to a particular family; it was hereditary in the sense that the son of an executioner inevitably had to become his father’s successor, with no way out. In archaic cultures it might at times even be found that momentous ritual obligations rested on certain families, such as the obligation to provide one person from among their members as a sacrificial victim when particular situations of tribal predicament occurred. Even initiation rituals (which we today tend to connect with very personal inner experiences) in initiating cultures initiated into preordained experiences, statuses, and roles. We view such former life conditions in terms of the subjective categories of individual freedom versus societal compulsion or constraints. Another, more psychological way of understanding them might be to say that this world of constraints made it a psychologically civilized world. People moved within a differentiated, complex cultural infrastructure (which allowed for a continued deepening and

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refinement of those roles), whereas the free modern individual lives in a psychological jungle. An infrastructure inevitably means constraints; just think of our road network, which forces our movements into the corset of a system of pre-established paved roads and regulates it by means of numerous stoplights and road signs at every corner and all sorts of traffic laws. We are not free to walk and drive just wherever we please. But all these constraints are precisely what allows for a relatively quick and smooth flow of traffic and ipso facto frees us from wasting our time with having to clear a path for each movement of ours all by ourselves. A good infrastructure allows us to travel incredibly long distances in a short time. In the jungle, by contrast, we would not be subject to any regulations imposed upon us. We would not be forced into the channels of established roads. We would be totally free to follow any course we like. But: the price for this freedom and autonomy would be that each time we wanted to go somewhere we would have to laboriously fight our way through the jungle. This is how modern man lives in psychological regards. In external reality, modern man has, of course, left the jungle. But psychologically each individual modern person has, as it were, to personally invent “the alphabet” of life for himself once more all by himself. He has to create out of himself his own infrastructure, find his personal “polar star” and his own compass more or less from scratch. He is burdened with the task of having to invent “himself ”: his identity, his sexual orientation, his true feelings, and choose his profession and his personal world view, belief system, orientation in the world. With all his freedom and all his opportunities (or because of them), modern man is metaphysically all on his own, which is why we have the modern phenomenon of “self-help” books and a huge market of competing meanings and role-models. And like the man in a literal jungle he cannot get very far psychologically; much time needs to be spent for the paving of his way through the psychological jungle and for his trial-and-error movement through life, i.e., on building his own infrastructure, before he can really start to think of reaching any deeper psychological and cultural differentiation. All this the individual in the former ages did not have to worry about. There were numerous culturally established ways to the goals of the soul, initiation rituals, monasteries, and other institutions. Roles (including those of man and woman), into which one was born, placed,

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or into which one chose to be initiated, were clearly defined and obligatory, because they came as unquestionable truths, so that one did not need to waste a thought on them, but could concentrate on one’s cultural refinement within them. 46 The same applies to the psychological infrastructure in the more general area of world view, myth, religion, and traditional knowledge. People in those ages did not live in a system of constant innovation and the constant multiplication of the available knowledge, as we do today, which meant that they were free to devote themselves to the deepening of the inherited modes of life and roles in which they found themselves and the deepening of the already available traditional knowledge, both in the sense of a more fundamental psychological integration of all this into themselves as individual persons (and thus their personal maturation) and concomitantly in the sense of its continued sophistication and cultural refinement. In that world condition, one therefore did not need to worry about whether one was “authentic” or not, nor about one’s “personal identity.” Such ideas would not have made any sense at all. Also, there was not yet a notion of “human dignity,” that utterly abstract dignity independent of race, sex, social class, family, rank, profession, belief, achievement, which each individual, simply qua human being in his particularity and on the basis of the positive fact of having come into the world, possesses as an inalienable right. Rather, in former ages one’s dignity consisted in the dignity of one’s social role, position, social and financial status, descent, in short: in the general CONCEPT under which one was subsumed and by which one was referred to. We today say: “worthy of this position.” The Romans said: “worthy through this office” (dignus officio). The universal, the genus or species, came first. One’s self was always a public reality. First one was, quasi-ontologically, a member of this family, this clan, this tribe or nation, of this class, social status, office or profession, and only thereafter also an individual. And one WAS (i.e., had one’s Being in being) man or 46 This is particularly visible in traditional Japan, which comprehended various disciplines or modes of life as dô (Chinese tao) and thus as ways to go (to go where? Not to some literal destination, but simply into the depth, into ever more sophistication and differentiation, cultural refinement): kendô (the way of the sword, i.e., the martial art of sword-fighting), budô (the way of warfare), sadô (the way of tea, i.e., the tea ceremony), bushidô (the way of the warrior), kadô (the way of flowers, i.e., Ikebana), kyûdô (the way of the bow, i.e., archery), shodô (the way of writing, i.e., calligraphy), etc.

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woman, maiden, wife, widow; orphan or bastard; peasant, knight, carpenter, priest, minstrel, beggar, slave, hangman, etc. etc. These were not like external and on principle exchangeable cloaks that one happened to wear and that covered one’s inalienable true core. One of the first questions asked of an unknown person was: “Whose son (or daughter) are you?” He or she had to be “placed” into a family or clan in which resided their true identity. How little there was an idea of the dignity of the human individual and how much this shows to what degree the Particular was in practical reality subsumed under the Universal can be seen from the fact that in archaic times human sacrifice was a completely unproblematic possibility and that, way into the Middle Ages and beyond, torture was a normal and regular procedure in the judicial system and nobody saw anything wrong in the institution of slavery. The individual person per se did not count. Similarly, to what extent the individual was subsumed under the family, clan, Sippe can be seen from the fact that in some early societies the slaying of a man could be recompensed by the payment of weregild to the clan of the killed person, or through blood revenge. What ultimately counted was, so to speak, the sum-total of the “honor,” “worth,” or “substance” of the clan as a whole, not the individual in his irreplaceable singularity. The loss of one member could be offset either against a certain fee (the amount of which depended on the social rank of the victim, i.e., his “worth” for the clan) or, conversely, by weakening the clan of the killer by depriving it of one of its members that was of equal rank. The balance between the clans had to be restored. They were the true subject or substance, not the individual. By the same token, religion was not a matter of an individual’s personal belief. It was a public affair. In the early days of Christianity it was possible that along with the head of a household all his family and all his dependents, serfs, were baptized. He “believed in the Lord with all his household,” we read in Acts 18:8. What they subjectively thought and felt, was no issue. The private individuals had no say in the matter. And when Christianity came to the pagan Germanic peoples, whole tribes had to follow suit when their chieftain became converted. In Iceland, in the year 999 or 1000, the Althing (national assembly) decided, for the whole Icelandic Commonwealth, to adopt

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Christianity. In the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and after the Thirty Years War in Germany, the principle, cuius regio, eius religio, was instituted that regulated that the ruler’s religion determines the religion for all his subjects in his whole territory. In a similar way it was frequently decided by a family that one of their children had to become a monk or priest, not because of this particular child’s religious fervor, but for the benefit of the family as a whole. If one member of the family lived a life solely devoted to the service of God, he contributed to the salvation of the whole family. We might even say that despite the Christian doctrine of the soul of the individual it was, in practical reality, ultimately the family that had a soul and not so much the individual member. Individuals were only part of a whole, “accidents” of the real “substance.” This is why it is to be assumed that in most cases this having to go into a monastery was not experienced by the person as a brutal dictate coming from outside, a violence done to him and his free will, as it would be in the modern situation. Since the individual had his own identity to a large extent in the larger whole, the needs and will of this whole was also, as we now could say with an anachronistic expression, largely “ego-syntonic.” The individual may have had other predilections, but he had not emancipated himself from the whole, neither logically, metaphysically, nor psychologically and socially, so that he did not have yet a strictly personal, subjective will of his own in contradistinction from the will of the group to which he belonged. This does in no way imply that the people of that time were weak, nondescript individuals. No, precisely because they were rooted in and supported by the will of the larger whole to which they belonged (rather than having to pull up all strength they might have exclusively from within themselves), they could possibly be powerful personalities, particularly strong, resourceful characters. Even at much later times, marriage was not so much a matter of the individuals concerned and their personal feelings and wishes, but a matter of the whole family or clan or, in the case of members of a ruling family, even of the nation. The collective has priority. An anecdote about a young man of a noble family of the 18th century highlights this very nicely. Knowing that his father intended him to marry the daughter of some other noble family, he went to him in order to beg him to allow him to marry another young woman that

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he had fallen in love with. His father’s response was: “Mind your own affairs!” That is to say, whom he, the son, has to marry is none of his business. Of course, here we see that we are much closer to the modern situation. The young man has already a will all of his own. Within himself, he is logically and psychologically already an individual in our sense, and so he experiences the decision of his father as a dictate, although probably not yet as illegitimate. Returning to the archaic situation, the perhaps most extreme example, and an example for the deepest sense of the individual’s dependence on the tribe (as the larger whole of which he was an integral part and in which he ultimately possessed his identity and soul), we find, ex negativo, in the Germanic world in a person’s fate when he had become a níðingr (Old Norse; or Old English: níðing). A níðingr was a man outlawed because of some unforgivable crime and cast out from the community of his fellow tribesmen, indeed, by extension from humanity as such. A terrible fate. Because it did not merely mean that he had to suffer from loneliness and live with the constant threat of being killed (because anyone who encountered a níðingr could, sometimes even was supposed to, kill him). These dangers refer only to the external circumstances in which he had to live. What in our context is much more significant is that he also was, within himself, wounded to the quick, even quite apart from whether there happened to be an actual threat to his life from outside or not. Having lost his rootedness in his tribe, he was like a flower that has been pulled out from its ground or cut off from its stem and now had to wither: he was annihilated in his personhood, in his metaphysical substance. On an almost physiological level his will to live, his vital strength and confidence, were gone. The archaic reality of a níðingr is the absolute counterexample to our modern idea of every individual’s “human dignity,” which is inalienable and of which nobody can be deprived, even if he has committed the most horrible crime. Each human being now possesses a metaphysical, an absolute immunity. The person’s full-fledged membership in the community of humanity is today given with his or her existence. It is rooted in the simple positive fact of their being in empirical reality a member of the biological species of homo sapiens, and it is inherent in the very definition of any such member. This is why it is on principle not within the power of a social community to

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dispossess anybody of this ultimate dignity. It absolutely eludes the control of society, or we could, conversely, say that society is now dispossessed of the authority to excommunicate an individual and to declare him, for example, a níðingr. What we just found out, however, has completely surprising, indeed paradoxical consequences. The fact that his human dignity resides in the individual’s biological existence, in his own organism, means that in ultimate regards he is defined as atomic, solitary individual. This because the biological organism is ontologically de facto an individual, an irrevocably separate existence. Even in animal species that live in herds, flocks, or packs, the individuals are ontologically separate beings and their herding together is a particular secondary behavior, although it is rooted in the animals’ instincts. In the human world, precisely the fact that a modern individual’s membership is fundamentally beyond the control of the concrete social community to which a person belongs and the fact that this community cannot possibly excommunicate him shows that the human individual has logically escaped from his embeddedness in society as its fundamental ground, its “mother.” For archaic man, the social community came first. He derived his belonging to mankind from his membership in a real society. He did not own his humanness as an a priori possession. Rather, he derived it from a cultural legal act. In the Germanic world (as mutatis mutandis with many archaic peoples), the newborn baby had to be explicitly accepted into human society by the father’s act of picking it up and giving it a name. It was culture, spirit, not nature, which made human (made human!). As long as this act of “baptism” had not been performed, the newborn, especially if it was deformed, could legally be abandoned, that is to say, simply returned to nature to which it still exclusively belonged. And inasmuch as his acceptance into the community of humans, even into the “natural” community of family, clan, tribe, came through a cultural act, this his belonging could also be revoked through another legal act, that would turn an individual into an outcast. Modern man, by contrast, is no longer absolutely dependent for his metaphysical existence and for his sense of being human on being concretely, practically, integrated into the community, because now he is born and this means: always already comes into the world, as full-fledged

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human being and possesses his human rights and human dignity a priori within his biological nature. As animal, as physical body, as a piece of nature, he is already fully human. Modern man has logically and psychologically emancipated himself from society, spirit, and culture, from soul. As such he is born man.47 But the fact that modern man has the ground of his humanness all by himself in himself, in his own body (which is his private “possession”), and not in a real social group that accepted him as a member, means that metaphysically, logically he is fundamentally alone, uprooted, alienated, ontologically isolated—even if psychically and for all practical ends and purposes he may in fact seem to be, and subjectively feel, well integrated and embedded in his group. I mentioned already (in connection with the topic of a “psychological infrastructure”) how the modern individual is completely on his own. As ontologically isolated he is himself paradoxically, as it were, a metaphysical níðingr (despite the fact that the idea of a real níðingr is absolutely abhorrent to modern man and totally incompatible with the modern idea of human dignity)! What the Germanic outlaw and outcast was in practical societal regards and experientially, that is, in his contingent empirical condition, modern man is just the same in logical and metaphysical regards, a priori, by definition and thus inescapably. The old insight is once more proved true that les extrêmes se touchent (here the archaic níðingr, on the one hand, and the man of the modern world endowed with inalienable human dignity and human rights, on the other, in their incompatibility). Since his a priori endowment with human dignity makes modern man logically alone, it is not surprising to see that there arose in the modern world, by way of a compensation for the often painfully felt lack of an authentic “belonging” to a natural community hallowed by a long cultural tradition, a cult of “relating” 48 fostered by psychotherapists, as well as the strong desire of people to seek some kind of embeddedness in radical political parties (Communists, Fascists, Nazis, resistence and liberation movements, terrorist groups) or tightly knit and often authoritarian religious sects, or also through 47 Wolfgang Giegerich, “The End of Meaning and the Birth of Man,” now in: idem, The Soul Always Thinks, Coll. Engl. Papers vol. IV, New Orleans, LA (Spring Journal Books) 2010. 48 To be clearly distinguished from traditional “friendship” and “love.”

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one’s at least temporarily melting into some highly emotional crowd at religious or music festivals, at demos, in discotheques, etc. This, man’s having turned into an individual in the strict modern sense, amounts to a veritable, indeed, extraordinary logical (or conceptual) revolution. The historical emergence of the concept of the abstract individual, the fundamentally single, isolated, that is, atomistically conceived individual as the new prevailing concept of man, is the one condition of the possibility of neurosis. And it is, of course, also what is meant by and what made possible that historical process that Jung had referred to when he spoke of the translocation of the battleground of the “struggle between light and darkness” into “the interior of the human soul” and of the swallowing of the whole primordial animatedness into ourselves. This revolution can relatively clearly be located in history, namely in the 19 th century. Before that, until way into the 18 th century the, as a matter of course, ruling concept of man was that of a communal being. Before, I discussed mainly examples of the essential communality of man taken from the archaic level of cultural development. But it also prevailed in different ways in philosophical thought throughout antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early-modern period. Already as individual, man was by definition conceived, as Aristotle worded it, a zôion politikón, a member, an integral part, of the polis. He did not merely turn into a communal being because he preferred to live in a social group and by joining such a group. Communality was inherent in his very being. And still in the early-modern period, quite clearly in Descartes, when man had become an I or ego, he was by no means an isolated individual. Up to Schelling and Hegel the I was, no doubt, verily I, true subjectivity, but not at all abstract ego, cutoff subjectivity, not a subjectivity that (precisely because of its allegedly a priori, i.e., in its very concept, having been cut off from the social community) would have been in need of being supplemented by intersubjectivity. 49 How could it have been in 49 This would be a serious misunderstanding of Schelling and Hegel, one, however, that we come across occasionally in present-day scholarship, e.g., in Vittorio Hösle, Hegels System. Der Idealismus der Subjectivität und das Problem der Intersubjectivität, 2 vols., Hamburg (Meiner) 1987. A retrojection of the modern solitary individual and of modern isolated subjectivity into Hegel as well as into classical early-modern metaphysics in general.

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need of intersubjectivity (which is fundamentally horizontal, a relationship to others) when it was a priori vertically rooted in that rhizome-like ground that was common to all, carried them all, and had always already joined them together? 50 The epochal revolutionary shift through which the isolated I— man as the from now on literally solitary individual—originated, occurred only with the beginning of the 19 th century, with the completion of metaphysics and the emergence of modernity, logically with the replacement of the metaphysical logic (the logic of the judgment characterized by the copula) by the modern logic of the function devoid of a copula—that logic that was first systematically articulated by Frege,51 but de facto already at work in Schopenhauer, Feuerbach and so on; economically it occurred with the fundamental change from the craft and manufacture mode of production to the industrial mode of production.52 However, there was, still within the sphere of classical Western metaphysics, one idea that implicitly made use of the atomic individual already prior to the 19 th century. This was the idea in political philosophy of the social contract to which the state allegedly owes its existence. After some earlier philosophers, e.g., Suarez, Hobbes, Locke, it was above all Rousseau’s contrat social (in the same-named work, 1762) that became most prominent. The derivation of the larger unit, the state, the society, is here based on an association of the individuals. In other words, underlying the notion of a social contract is an atomistic conception of the whole. The individuals come logically first. The larger whole is derivative, it is composed of the individuals as atoms. On the other hand, this atomistic view is immediately relativized by Rousseau’s distinguishing the volonté générale from the volonté de tous. Through the social contract a communal I is created, a political body that is more than the individuals each with their own personal wishes, more than a crowd or mass. By not remaining on the 50 The distinction between “horizontality” and “verticality” has already been introduced in Part 1. At a later point, when we come to the cosmic aspect of the historical change that made neurosis possible, we again will have to say a little more about “horizontality” and “verticality.” 51 Gottlob Frege, Begriffsschrift (1879). 52 For these issues and a more detailed analysis of them I refer the reader to the writings of Claus-Artur Scheier, of which I mention here only his book Ästhetik der Simulation, Hamburg (Meiner) 2000, by way of example, and to which I owe many insights.

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level of the majority, a quantitative concept, but, advancing in his thinking from the individual wills to the concept of a “general will,” Rousseau shows that he has not left the circumference of metaphysics and that the individual has not been totally released into its atomic status. The birth of man has here not happened yet. The concept of man, of the individual, is still held in, and by, something general and higher that cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, the individual wills. The modern, post-metaphysical and thus truly atomic individual is first thought by Kierkegaard. In his thinking we meet the topic of the individual no longer in political philosophy, but in the realm of religion. Previously, still in Hegel, the single individual was in religious regards, as a matter of course and inevitably, embedded in the Gemeinde, the Christian community, and stood before God only as a member of the Gemeinde or the church, ecclesia. It is the Gemeinde that is, for Hegel, the general self-consciousness. It is the copula that joins together the two extremes, the singular individual here with Christ or God over there. And the interiority, as it was thought within the metaphysical tradition and in traditional Christianity, was by no means the inner of the isolated I. For Luther, the justification of the sinner solely by faith does precisely not come about through a solitary individual’s subjective belief, an act or stance of his consciousness. Conversely, it needs to be granted by God, and this requires the community of believers. In the Large Catechism, in his comments on the third article of faith, Luther states that the Holy Ghost “leads us into His holy congregation,53 and places us in the bosom of the Church, whereby He preaches to us and brings us to Christ.” It is the Holy Ghost “who creates, calls, and gathers the Christian Church, without which no one can come to Christ the Lord.” The Holy Ghost “has a peculiar congregation in the world, which is the mother that begets and bears every Christian through the Word of God.” The solitary individual per se has no chance. In Christian 53 “Congregation” as a translation of Gemeinde is problematic because etymologically (“to congregate”) it suggests, much like “collective,” a herding together of separate individuals, in other words, an association or assembly. But what is actually meant is a larger whole that is founded by the Holy Ghost and irreducible to its members and their “congregation.” A true communion. The word-formation of Ge-mein-de is similar to that of Allmende (All-men-de), “the common(s).”

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thinking, the true counterpart or vis-à-vis of God (or Christ) is the Gemeinde as Christ’s bride. In the same spirit, John Donne (1572–1631) in his “Meditation XVII” from his Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1623) wrote the oft-quoted sentence: “No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” However, within the same Protestant tradition, but in total contrast to it and to the entire metaphysical thought tradition, Kierkegaard’s interiority is characterized by the fact that he now (in mid-19th century) thinks Christianity completely without the Christian community, without Gemeinde. “‘The individual’; that is the in Christian regards decisive category,” he stated. “‘The individual’; with this category the cause of Christianity stands or falls.” “As ‘the individual,’ he is alone, alone in the world, alone—vis-à-vis God.”54 For us today, this view seems, no doubt, to be a matter of course, because we have all along been standing on the ground that then was prepared for the first time. In terms of the historical tradition, however, this Kierkegaardian insight is a shocking revolution, something absolutely novel. Now the individual is a priori cut off, truly an island entire of itself and not a piece of the continent, not a part of the main. “The bosom of the Church” has become a meaningless phrase. The words Gemeinde and communion do not make any sense anymore. They have only an archeological significance. Man has come out of the fold, has irrevocably left the womb of Mother Church and the metaphysical stance as such, and thus he is now truly born man. We must not let ourselves be misled to think that what Kierkegaard said about the individual is merely the private opinion of one single author and voice within a concert of many voices, nor be misled by the fact that Kierkegaard speaks as a religious thinker, misled to view what he said as only relevant for the special area of religion and for the religiously minded, for Christians. As to the first point we must realize that Kierkegaard was only able to conceive of the individual as absolutely solitary individual because this had become the general truth of the individual at his historical locus. What Kierkegaard said is objectively the expression, self-representation— 54 These quotes are taken from Kierkegaard, “Gesichtspunkte für meine Wirksamkeit als Schriftsteller, Beilage” [The Point Of View For My Work As An Author], in: Gesammelte Werke (Diederich) Abt. 33, pp. 111–118, my translation.

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so to speak the “symptom”—of what with man’s entrance into modernity had logically in fact happened to the essence of man. At the same time, it is also the articulation of the for the future binding general concept and real constitution of man as such, regardless of whether a particular individual sees himself as a Christian (or as religious in any way) or not. With this last comment I have already touched on the second point made above concerning the fact that Kierkegaard spoke within religious thought. But it is precisely because Kierkegaard discusses this topic in terms of man’s relation to God, that his statement is capable of bringing out the ultimate determination of human existence in the modern situation. Only if imaginally confronted with and placed visà-vis the idea of the absolute Thou does the individual turn into “the individual” in the sense of “the decisive category.” Because only when faced with this Thou, as absolute Other, is the individual absolutely thrown back upon himself and forced, as well as enabled, to perform that solitary choice of his self through which he becomes authentic and ipso facto turns into a veritable individual in the first place. But as solitary and authentic individual he has become logically imprisoned within himself, differencelessly identical with himself, and thus a positivity. Facticity, another Kierkegaardian key notion, becomes the basic determination of human existence.55 “He is alone, alone in the world, alone—vis-à-vis God”: we see that here the copula is gone. There is no mediation anymore. We are now in the brutal abruptness of a vis-à-vis and total otherness, in the logic of a gap between man and God as well as between man (qua individual) and world, in the modern logic of the unbridgeable difference (which becomes orthographically visualized in the dash that separates in Kierkegaard’s sentence the absolutely solitary individual here from God over there). Because a copula or mediation has become unthinkable, it is obvious that and why Kierkegaard in his commitment to Christianity must demand a leap into faith, a leap which is supposed to be nothing less than the leap across the unbridgeable gap (by definition unbridgeable!), the leap over an abyss into the absolute Thou, God. This is a leap, however, which always remains (has to 55 I already mentioned that human dignity is rooted in the fact of the empirical existence of an individual of the species homo sapiens.

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remain) no more than a program, an ought, a utopia: because such a leap cannot possibly be performed, inasmuch as the difference is defined as absolute. Owing to his absolute logical isolation and uprootedness, it is now all of a sudden felt that Angst is inherent in the determination of man, Angst not merely psychically or ontically in the sense of an emotion or felt experience of anxiety, but ontologically as an Existenzial (a characteristic inherent in the very structure of existence) and thus naturally as incontrovertible. It has to be incontrovertible because there is no longer an encompassing, supporting ground which as copula would conjoin the essence of man with the infinite. This Angst (in the sense of an “existential”), which only became possible during the 19th century as a product of the birth of man (his having become uprooted from its metaphysical ground), is now frequently elevated to the status of a basic anthropological fact and, as such an alleged Urangst, it is retrojected into the first beginnings of the human race (for example, in Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung, 1908). Conversely, the thoroughly modern, post-Kierkegaardian idea that religion is a matter of the solitary individual is also retrojected into the historical past. Thus Abraham Maslow, just to mention him as one single example, believed that every “high religion” originated and had its core in “the private, lonely, personal illumination, revelation, or ecstasy of some acutely sensitive prophet or seer.”56 The Jungian idea that myths, fairytales, and religious symbols come from the unconscious suggests a similar premise, just as Jung’s connecting religious experience with the personal individuation process is, mutatis mutandis, paralleled by Maslow’s viewing peak experiences as moments of self-actualization. During the first half of the 20th century we experienced different political attempts by Communism, Socialism, Fascism, National Socialism to (artificially) resurrect the idea of a true “community” once more and to in actuality realize this idea by means of violent force. However, what emerged was anything else but a “Gemeinde,” a true community. On the one side, it was a dictatorship of the respective ruling party and at best a “collective,” not a communal whole, on the 56 Abraham Maslow, Religious Aspects of Peak-Experiences. Personality and Religion, New York (Harper & Row) 1970, p. 19.

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other side it created momentary intensive collective affects at mass rallies and not the lasting unemotional logical truth of a community. The total failure of all these political movements to bring about what they officially aimed for only shows that in truth the single individual had already all along in fact become “the decisive category”—precisely not only “in Christian regards,” as explicitly in Kierkegaard’s statement, but now in general. Because the conception, or rather logical self-constitution, of man as essentially single and solitary individual is the truth of modern man, it is no surprise that, for example, for Jung, too, the individual was “the makeweight that tips the scales” and “the measure of all things” (CW 10 §§ 586, 523) and that even “the rescue of the world” consists for him only in “the rescue of one’s own soul” (CW 10 § 536). The Gemeinde, or as he put it, “die ‘kirchliche Gemeinschaft’” (the religious community) had—already for the high-school student Jung—become something unreal, an empty phrase: “I could not connect any meaning whatsoever with that phrase” (MDR p. 75, transl. modif.). Naturally so, for real was in modernity only the individual here and, as his counterpart, the crowd (Kierkegaard) or mass (Nietzsche and others, including Jung) there. A true community, by contrast, had in postmetaphysical times become absolutely unthinkable. The now prevailing logic of difference required much rather that the essence of man on principle falls apart into the abstract individual and the mass, both in strict opposition to each other. However, the concepts of “the mass” and “the collective” paradoxically themselves only confirm once more the opposite concept of the abstract atomic individual, inasmuch as the mass is nothing but the likewise abstract aggregation of all the fundamentally isolated individuals. Jung abhorred “the mass” and put all his hope onto the individual (see in particular his essay, “The Undiscovered Self (Present and Future)” in CW 10). However, because he felt clearly enough that a withdrawal to the one half of this pair of opposites, namely to the individual cut off from the whole, was psychologically completely insufficient and definitely would need to be complemented through some form of communality, and because, on the other hand, both the way back to Gemeinde and the way forward to political mass movements and into dictatorship were blocked for him, he attempted, by way of

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a substitute for the lost community, to posit a new and different kind of communality in the depth of the individual, namely the consensus omnium, even if only as the “collective unconscious.” Jung was unable (or did not want) to see that with this “collective unconscious” the real isolation of the atomic individual is not at all overcome, but rather once more confirmed, all the more so inasmuch as the collective unconscious, precariously, is only accessible through one’s individual introspective self-exploration, and, qua unconscious, by no means represents the truth of or for consciousness. It is clear: if the individual is “the makeweight that tips the scales,” then his isolation is obviously the real truth about him. Everything essential had to happen exclusively within himself. The individual, precisely in his irrevocable logical (not emotional! 57 ) solitariness, was the sole locus at which, and the containing vessel in which, that which was of ultimate importance had to come about, if it was supposed to come about. He even was the place of “the rescue of the world.” The modern concept of the solitary individual, which became explicitly articulated for the first time in Kierkegaard, and the postmetaphysical interiority, understood in terms of this individual, are the one sine qua non of neurosis. Man had to define and actually constitute himself as having his essence in his particularity, i.e., in himself as particular, positive-factual being, in the facticity of his individual existence. How else could the inner of the individual have become the battleground of the “struggle between light and darkness”? But the emergence of the atomistic conception of the individual is the one condition of the possibility not merely of neurosis in the narrower sense, but also of modern psychology itself, which after all, as I tried to show elsewhere, is itself the neurosis. I also already pointed out above that both, neurosis and psychology, are equiprimordial. As such they are certainly not alike, but the same. This must suffice as a brief discussion of the social dimension of the problematic of the transferral of the battleground into the interior of the private individual. Now we come to the second sine qua non, which lies in the cosmic aspect. 57 What is personally felt and subjectively experienced is merely psychic, and as such psychologically neither here nor there. Our concern here is with the objective soul, i.e., with the real logical constitution of the existing concept.

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3. THE “COSMIC” CONSTITUTION OF MAN Just as it had its place in a true community, in a communal group, family, clan, tribe, so once upon a time human existence had also been placed into the world as cosmos and at the center of the cosmos. And it was its essence as intelligent or psychological existence to extend from the here and now down into the underworldly, chthonic depth of the earth, on the one hand, and up to the highest stars, on the other. Man lived spiritually in the stance of upward-looking to the gods and stars. It was his very nature to within himself exist as his extending and reaching out beyond himself and the positively existing organism (that he also was) for the stars high above himself (as well as down below himself through a possible descensus ad inferos). Physically being in the cosmos and having it all around himself “out there,” psychologically he was, however, himself the whole extent of the cosmos. This contradictory relation was in ancient and medieval philosophy expressed as the dialectic of macrocosm and microcosm and the structural correspondence in their constitution: the cosmic order returns in the constitution of man. First I present a few passages that highlight the ancient insight into man’s fundamental upward-looking-ness. From Ovid (Metamorphoses I 84ff.) we hear that “whereas the other animals stoop and look down to the earth,” the world creator “gave to man an upwardlooking countenance; he ordered him to see the heaven and to lift his face erect to the stars.” Likewise, Gregory of Nyssa stated, “But man’s form is upright, and extends aloft towards heaven, and looks upwards, and these are marks of sovereignty which show his royal dignity.”58 We see, his upward-looking is not merely man’s own doing, an achievement that he could credit himself with as his own merit. It is merely a “mark” of something, a mark that points to his higher origin and more noble inner composition. What this means becomes a little clearer in a passage from Lactantius. When, therefore, God had determined of all the animals to make man alone heavenly, and all the rest earthly, He raised him erect to the contemplation of the heaven, and made him a biped, doubtless that he might look to the same quarter from which he 58

Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man VIII, 1.

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derives his origin; but He depressed the others to the earth, that, inasmuch as they have no expectation of immortality, being cast down with their whole body to the ground, they might be subservient to their appetite and food.59

Although the animals are, of course, made by God, too, nevertheless they are made as fundamentally earthly creatures, creatures that have their essence in and derive their origin from “the earth” and derive their nourishment and their pleasure solely from earthly food and from the satisfaction of their instinctual appetites. As Aristotle explained, the reason why quadrupeds cannot go erect like man is because their psychê has not enough ethereal, rational substance in it, so that it is too heavy for the animals and weighs them down. Man, by contrast, is heavenly by nature, he lives, according to the Christian author, for the contemplation of the divine and in his (hope of ) immortality. This is what his soul draws its nourishment from. But this conception is not restricted to Christian thought alone. In his Timaios, Plato describes the creation of the head and body of man in the following way. First, then, the gods, imitating the spherical shape of the universe, enclosed the two divine courses in a spherical body, [in] that, namely, which we now term the head, being the most divine part of us and the lord of all that is in us: to this the gods, when they put together the body, gave all the other members to be servants, considering that it partook of every sort of motion. In order then that it might not tumble about among the high and deep places of the earth, but might be able to get over the one and out of the other, they provided the body to be its vehicle and means of locomotion; which consequently had length and was furnished with four limbs extended and flexible; these God contrived to be instruments of locomotion with which it might take hold and find support, and so be able to pass through all places, carrying on high the dwelling-place of the most sacred and divine part of us. Such was the origin of legs and hands, which for this reason were attached to every man ... (44 d-e).60 59

Lactantius, De opificio Dei VIII, 2 Transl. by B. Jowett, in: http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/physis/plato-timaeus/ body-senses.asp. Accessed November 28, 2012. 60

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Much as in the Judaeo-Christian tradition man is imago dei, so is for Plato the ball-like shape of man’s head an imitation or mirrorimage of the spherical shape of the cosmos. In both cases (cosmos and head) it has to be a sphere because this is the only perfect and thus divine form. But in order that the head, being spherical, would not helplessly roll about like a ball, God placed it on a body and two legs. The replication-in-little or reflection of the cosmos in man is two-fold. (1) The shape of his head is an imitation of the cosmos as a whole, and it may be of interest that Plato suggests that God’s interest was not so much to make a head and then thought of making it in the shape of the cosmos. No, the direction has to be reversed. The first thing and the true intention was to make an imitation of the spherical shape and divine nature of the universe and only we now term the resulting product “the head.” (2) The figure of man as a whole represents an imitation of the internal hierarchical order that structures the cosmos. In man, the divine and perfect soul part is on top, whereas the trunk of the body contains soul parts that from top down deteriorate successively and are less perfect, first the still rather respectable soul parts that reside in the chest and further down the desires of the belly, that man shares with the animals .... Concerning the first aspect, the head-cosmos relation, let me cite a similar view from a much later age, from Goethe’s natural-scientific writings. A brief biological piece of his, a contribution to Johann Caspar Lavater’s Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe (1776), begins with the following statement. The generic difference of humans from animals vividly leaves its mark already in the bone structure. How our head rests upon spinal-cord and vitality! How the whole form stands there as a basic pillar of the vault in which heaven is supposed to reflect itself! How our skull arches, like heaven above us, so that the pure image of the eternal spheres might be able to circulate within it! ... (My transl.)

What we see in this quote is not merely that the ideas about the direct correspondence of head and heaven sort of perennially preserved their theoretical explanatory value. We also see how deeply they touched

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people’s feelings and instilled profound fulfillment into the soul. Particularly noteworthy is also that Goethe does not talk about our mind (let alone: our brain) having the task of reflecting about heaven and the cosmos. Rather, it is heaven that—objectively—is supposed to reflect itself in our human thought! The second aspect that has to do with the fact that the hierarchical (degressively less perfect, less noble) structure of the cosmos is imitated in the shape of man implies, of course, that the contrast established in the Lactantius quote between erect man living out of his expectation of immortality, on the one hand, and the animals which are “depressed to the earth” and are “subservient to their appetite and food,” on the other hand, is actually also internal to the human soul itself. For man it all depends on which parts of the soul it is that he nourishes and cultivates, the higher, divine parts, or the lower parts. Does he draw his nourishment from “the same quarter from which he derives his origin” by taking his lead from the eternally circulating heavenly bodies above, the gods, the Ideas—or is he a slave of his desires and appetites? Does he “feed” his own divinity and thus follow his true determination—or does he nourish his own mortal animal part, thereby betraying his true nature? For in his truth man is an inverted tree, an arbor inversa, a plant that has its roots in heaven and blossoms on the earth. And we should consider that God gave the sovereign part of the human soul to be the divinity of each one, being that part which, as we say, dwells at the top of the body, inasmuch as we are a plant not of an earthly but of a heavenly growth, raises us from earth to our kindred who are in heaven. And in this we say truly; for the divine power suspended the head and root of us from that place where the generation of the soul first began, and thus made the whole body upright. (Timaios 90 a-b)61

In the same vein, we hear in the Middle Ages: Anthropos interpretatur arbor inversa 62 or Homo enim est arbor transversa. 63 This notion 61 Transl. by B. Jowett, in: http://www.ellopos.net/elpenor/physis/plato-timaeus/ soul-therapy.asp?pg=6 62 Alexander Nequam, De naturis rerum II 152. 63 Petrus Hispanus (Medicus), Questiones super libro de animalibus XI. See Theodor W. Köhler, Grundlagen des philosophisch-anthropologischen Diskurses im dreizehnten Jahrhundert, Leiden et al. (Brill) 2000, p. 112 with note 278, as well as Carl-Martin Edsman, “Arbor inversa: Heiland, Welt und Mensch als Himmelspflanzen,” in: Festschrift Walter Baetke, Weimar (Böhlau) 1966, pp. 85–109.

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of the inverted tree is prominent also in ancient India, e.g., Rigveda I, 24, 7. It occurs in Dante, in the Islamic tradition, in Finnish and Icelandic folktales, in Australia and elsewhere. 64 The point, the twist of this notion, however, is that it is precisely in the literal plants, as Aristotle instructs us, that “the root is really the upper part and head of the plant, and annuals grow downwards and towards the fruit”! 65 In other words, not man is in truth an inverted tree, but conversely the biological plants are upside down. They stand on their head! Only from the worm’s eye view is man turned around. We need to advance to the for humans proper view that the roots ought to be in heaven. When Marx said that in Hegel “the dialectic stands on its head. One needs to turn it upside down in order to discover the rational core within the mystical cover,”66 and when Friedrich Engels wrote that in Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy “the Hegelian dialectic was turned upside down, or rather put back on its feet again after having stood on its head,”67 we have to see this as their attempt to return to the worm’s eye view. Conversely, Hegel is completely in tune with the inverted tree tradition when he says, ... the element of Science68 is for consciousness a remote beyond in which it no longer possesses itself. ... When natural consciousness entrusts itself straightway to Science, it makes an attempt, induced by it knows not what, to walk on its head too, just this once; the compulsion to assume this unwonted posture and to go about in it is a violence it is expected to do to itself, all unprepared and seemingly without necessity. Let Science be in its own self what it may, relatively to immediate self-consciousness it presents itself in an inverted posture ....69 64 Some examples are given in Mircea Eliade, Patterns in Comparative Religion, Cleveland and New York (Meridian Books) 1963, pp. 273–276. 65 Aristotle, De longitudine et brevitate vitae 6 (467 b 1-2). 66 Karl Marx, Das Kapital I, in: MEW (= Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels, Werke, Berlin (Dietz) 1971), vol. 23, p. 27, my transl. 67 Friedrich Engels, “Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie,” in: MEW 21, 1975, p. 293, my transl. 68 “Science” (“die Wissenschaft” in the singular with the definite article) is in Hegel’s parlance his name for philosophy, in the sense of “true knowing.” 69 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. by A.V. Miller, Oxford et al. (Oxford University Press) 1977, p. 15.

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But both in Feuerbach/Marx/Engels and in Hegel, head and feet are not apperceived within the tree or plant metaphor, as they had been in Plato, Aristotle, and so on. Despite the difference between Hegel and Marx/Engels, they share the fact that the head is no longer seen by them in terms of the analogy to the roots of a tree. So all that is left of the arbor inversa in their use of the head and feet metaphor is the invertedness per se, in abstracto. These thinkers are here only concerned with a methodological stance to be taken by the mind, which means that the cosmic aspect (the important idea that the soul draws its nourishment directly from heaven and is a reflection of the cosmos) does not play any role in this form of expression. But whereas for Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels this loss of the cosmic connection is fundamental because they have left the stance of classical metaphysics, this is not the case with Hegel. Even if the image of the head as roots does no longer work for him in this passage, this does not mean that in his thinking man has lost his rootedness in a ground.

4. THE ISOLATION OF THE HUMAN INDIVIDUAL FROM THE COSMOS With the difference, or rather antithesis, regarding the head and feet metaphor as used by Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, on the one hand, and Hegel, on the other hand, we have proceeded to the watershed that separates the entire age of metaphysics (and all the more so the times prior to metaphysics, the times of myth and ritual and shamanistic culture) from modernity. In pushing off from and rejecting Hegel, Feuerbach inverses not only the former’s philosophy, but the metaphysical order as such. All we must do according to him is “to invert the speculative philosophy” in order to arrive at “the unveiled, the pure, blank truth,” namely the insight that “the human is the divine, the finite the infinite.”70 For Feuerbach, the divine essence has now become seen through as the essence of human reason. Previously, mankind had only been able to see its own nature as the nature of some Other, God, in other words, via projection. With Feuerbach, philosophy has thus fundamentally become anthropology, and this means that now man is the ground in terms of 70 Ludwig Feuerbach, Vorläufige Thesen zur Reformation der Philosophie, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Werner Schuffenhauer, Berlin 1967 ff., vol. 9, pp. 244 and 248, respectively. My transl.

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which everything has to be seen and explained, whereas before, man was, as we have seen, in himself the reflection or imitation of the cosmos, himself grounded in it and deriving his nourishment, his sustaining truths and reason, from it. In Kierkegaard, we witnessed the logical removal and isolation of the individual from the community, which made the individual in his conception a fundamentally solitary one. This is by no means the case in Feuerbach. On the contrary, he dreamed precisely the rapturous dream of a “Konversation des Menschen mit dem Menschen,”71 a conversation of one human with another, a conversation between I and Thou. (The term “Konversation,” however, in contrast to “Gemeinde,” implies precisely that the underlying starting-point is, here too, the ontologically solitary individual!) But despite Feuerbach’s commitment to “communication” (as we might say today) in the social sphere, the analogously same thing as in Kierkegaard nevertheless happened, in his explicit thought, to the individual, only in cosmological rather than in social regards. Man in his individuality was logically, psychologically isolated from his (logical) embeddedness in the metaphysical cosmos. He became enclosed within himself and thus in some sense an ultimate element. “Being is so variegated as the things that are [exist],” 72 Feuerbach states. Clearly, an atomistic view. This is the irrevocable truth of modernity. Its consequence is that modern man is no longer essentially placed into, and exists in, a deep logical, ontological correspondence with a cosmic order that is animated, alive, and ultimately rational, a universe created by a divine master plan, a nature at bottom well-meaning and governed by a teleological design. Man now finds himself “thrown” into an utterly meaningless universe, about whose purposes or goal nothing whatsoever can be said and that remains fundamentally alien. The fact that man is erect, characterized by an upright posture, does no longer allow one to conclude that he is a priori and fundamentally upward-looking, drawing his nourishment and his own rationality from the higher divine spheres of the cosmos. The upright posture of man is merely an empirical, positive-factual feature. 71 Ludwig Feuerbach, Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, in: idem, Kleine philosophische Schriften (1842-1845), ed. by Max Gustav Lange, Leipzig (Felix Meiner) 1950, p. 153. 72 Ibid., p. 132.

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By way of only one single example of the modern view of things concerning man’s upright gait, let us merely hear what early Freud had to say about it at the end of the 19th century, in a passage in which he tried to throw a light on repression. I have often suspected that something organic played a part in repression ... In my case the notion was linked to the changed part played by sensations of smell: upright walking, nose raised from the ground, at the same time a number of formerly interesting sensations attached to the earth becoming repulsive— by a process still unknown to me. [He turns up his nose—he regards himself as something particularly noble.]73

At Freud’s historical locus, man is, to be sure, still seen as walking upright, but this in no way signifies his having a “higher” origin, his deriving his reason from the divine reason and his being created and commanded to be upward-looking. The interpretation of the human head or skull as “the vault in which heaven is supposed to reflect itself,” which only about a century earlier was still enthusiastically confirmed by Goethe, would in the late 19th century context be absurd. The whole fundamental distinction between man and the animals that Lactantius spoke about, with the Creator having “raised man erect to the contemplation of the heaven,” whereas He “depressed the animals to the earth,” is abolished. This distinction has been reductively collapsed in favor of the second member of this distinguished pair, in favor of the exclusive existence of those living beings that have been “cast down with their whole body to the ground” and are “subservient to their appetite and food.” Man’s upright walking now has to be seen as his having (only empirical-factually) raised his nose from the ground while in truth staying the animal that he was (which is something he could not have done at all in the metaphysical tradition, because according to it man had been upright from the outset and not only empiricalfactually, but logically so). This raising himself from the ground is now an act with which man precisely departed from his true origin, the earth, for now he is, as we could put it with Jung, nothing but one of the “autochthonous animalia sprung from the earth” (MDR p. 333), 73 The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1907, ed. and trans. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, Cambridge, Mass. (Belknap Press of Harvard University) 1985, p. 279.

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or, in less flowery language, he is nothing but his biology. And whereas still for Goethe human biology (“the bone structure,” the anatomy) precisely “vividly” attested man’s heavenly origin and determination, for the modern psychoanalyst the human animal’s act of rising from, and above, its original state of being “cast down with his whole body to the earth” (Lactantius) has, in the last analysis, to be understood in the light of the theory of repression, just as, conversely, all the so-called “higher” aspirations of man, for the psychoanalyst, need to be interpreted as nothing but sublimation (sublimation in the Freudian, not the alchemical or Jungian sense), as sublimated lower instincts or desires! The formerly, i.e. “in truth,” interesting smells were merely, as it were, artificially declared to be repulsive, and as a result of this rejection man merely “regards himself as something particularly noble.” But this his self-estimation is an illusion, conceit, just as much as is religion. In his theory, in the logic of his thinking, Freud undoes man’s erect posture. Logically he pushes him again with his nose to the ground. Only physically, literally, does man continue to walk and stand upright. If we extrapolate from this Freudian reflection, we can say that the raising of the nose from the ground, i.e., the repression of the sense of smell, was in this theory tantamount to the prioritizing of the organ of the eye, and thus the sense of sight and insight. This means that “the light of reason,” on account of which man, in the metaphysical tradition, regarded himself as something particularly noble, is actually something secondary, derivative, artificial. It is not something primordial, not the reflection in an earthly creature of the divine light of the heavenly bodies, not the intra-mundane replication of the cosmic order of the world at large. In fact, the entire development of culture needs to be seen as highly precarious, indeed, ill-fated (“verhängnisvoll”), as we hear from Freud in his later years. The fateful process of civilization would thus have set in with man’s adoption of an erect posture. From that point the chain of events74 proceeded through the devaluation of olfactory 74 This term (“Verkettung”) is frequently used in literature studies to describe what inevitably had to lead to the tragic outcome in a drama.

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stimuli and the isolation of the menstrual period to the predominance of the visual stimuli and the becoming visible of the genitals ...75

The whole cosmic order with the gods, who circulate eternally in the fiery heaven, as well as man’s being created as an integral part of this divine cosmic order and as its reflection, have completely disappeared. One whole half of the former metaphysical conception of the total universe—as the opposition between heavenly light and earthly matter, between the aithêr and the sublunar world, between the by nature upward-looking animal rationale and the literal animals who are cast down to the ground—has been excised. Only the latter half remains and presents itself as the actual truth and as the whole picture, whereas what was formerly thought about heaven (the meanwhile excised half of the former picture) is now viewed to be an illusion. Heaven itself has become “earthified,” if I may say so, absorbed by the now exclusively remaining principle of “the earth,” as Jung explained: “Heaven has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were” (CW 9i § 50). And man has ceased being metaphysic’s animal rationale and now sees himself as “the naked ape,” an ape with a particularly large brain. It would be totally wrong to consider such statements and views as the ones cited from Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, and Freud as the personal opinions of these three thinkers and therefore approach them with the question of whether they were right or wrong and whether we can or should agree with them or not. Psychologically, their views are facts, not opinions. As facts, and this means facts of the soul, they expressed the truth of their historical locus, the truth of modernity. And whether we subjectively agree or not makes no difference, which is why I have to correct myself and say76—instead of man “now sees himself as”—he is “the naked ape” with a particularly large brain, a 75 Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, tr. by James Strachey, New York (Norton) 1961, Part IV, p. 45f., footnote. (Transl. modif.) 76 Earlier, when discussing the topic of the soul’s form change, I pointed out that “The soul must not be imagined like water or wine that can be filled in different vessels (bottles, vases, buckets, cups, flat bowls) and nevertheless stays the same.” In other words, we must not start out from a concept of form-change that is based on the total opposition and separateness of form and content, so that any form-change would merely externally change the shape of the content without substantially affecting the latter itself. The notion of form-change needs to be interiorized into itself. This is the insight that I pay tribute to with my present “self-correction.”

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Mängelwesen (Arnold Gehlen, following earlier authors: a “being of deficits or structural lack”), and a member of a species that raised its nose from the ground and thus ventured upon the path of a “fateful process of civilization.” Nothing comes from above. Everything about man has to be understood in terms of the human body in its physicality. Man has his very ground, the exclusive ground, within his own animal body. As long as man had been ontologically released into the cosmos and had his ground not within himself (in his body), but above in Nature, i.e., in an animated cosmic order, and ultimately in God, in the Ideas, in the divine light of reason, a neurosis would have been impossible. It required the self-constitution of man as logically or ontologically solitary individual, that is to say, as fundamentally selfenclosed atomic I, for neurosis to become possible, because only then was the individual himself in his bodily concreteness “the battleground” of the struggle about the ultimate decisions, the venue or arena in which the opposite forces of the soul could rage and spend themselves. Neurosis requires a situation in which the decisive issues are not fought out on a spiritual level, as cosmic, metaphysical, or mythological struggles, but “in my inner.” So far we have witnessed, of course only with a few glimpses, the emergence of the concept of the solitary atomic individual, and, to be sure, “concept” in the sense of an existing concept, a reality (rather than abstract concept). In other words, the “battleground” has been established. But we have to realize that this is not sufficient as an explanation of the historical preparation of the conditions of the possibility of neurosis. It needs more than the fact that the individual has, as enclosed within himself, become a venue for whatever struggle. It also needs something worth fighting about, a psychological substance that makes a struggle upon this battleground (i.e., in the bodily existing individual) and a decision about it indispensable. What we have discussed so far, the self-conception of man as animal that “regards himself as something particularly noble,” is at most able to explain a possible occurrence in people of conceitedness, illusion, error, but not neurosis, not the ultimate issues, the “surplus value,” without which neurosis cannot exist, not “The Absolute” that is at stake in neurosis and in it needs to be defended at the cost of one’s personal well-being and happiness, in extreme cases perhaps even

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one’s life. In order to better understand where the metaphysical surplus value or “The Absolute” in neurosis, for which the neurotic stakes his whole psychic existence, comes from, we must discover the second enabling condition of neurosis. For this we need to have a look at the notion of “the fall of the stars.”

5. THE SINKING OF THE STARS INTO THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE CREATION OF THE “INNER” We have seen that metaphysical man was ontologically embedded in the cosmos as a rationally ordered structure, furthermore, that this cosmic order and the heavenly light of reason were reflected in his own nature, and that he was inevitably an upward-looking being, objectively, qua soul and reason, extending beyond the limits of his body into the cosmos. What has not been covered in our description so far, but is also essential, is that his ontological embeddedness in and his extending into the cosmos to the celestial spheres had in addition to its ontological also a psychic side in the sense that it expressed itself in a passionate feeling or desire or longing, in the soul’s emotionally, experientially reaching out for heaven with all its fervor. Lactantius had already mentioned man’s “expectation of immortality” (which the animals lack). In even more archaic times, the shaman’s soul departed from his body and soared ecstatically into the cosmos; in the Old Testament we hear, for example, that “As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so panteth my soul after thee, O God” (Ps. 42:1). In late antiquity, the soul of the Gnostics set out on an ecstatic Himmelsreise (ascension to the heavens). Even in newer, early-modern times (1596) one Johannes Kepler was still able to exclaim in an enthusiastic hymn to God,77 ... Ast ego, quo credam spacioso Numen in orbe: Suspiciam attonitus vasti molimina coeli, Magni opus Artificis, validae miracula dextrae; ...

(... But I, in order to discover Your divine mystery in the vastness of the cosmos, look up in raptures at the splendor of the enormous 77

Closing hymn of his early work, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596).

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vault of heaven, this work of a great Builder, the miracles of Your almighty hand ....) Again we find here the soul’s reaching out into cosmic space, and more than this: an expression of the soul’s deep passion and enthralment in view of the starry heaven. I come to another example. In 1643, deep in the catastrophic Thirty Years War, Andreas Gryphius published his sonnet, “To the Stars,” in which he addresses the stars directly, calling them torches, sparkling diamonds, flowers that adorn wide heaven’s leas, saying that in looking at them he simply cannot get his fill here on earth. They are the guarantors of his delight, and many a beautiful night he spent awake watching them. Here (on earth) he cannot forget them. It is they whose love ignites his heart and his spirits. The poem ends with the question: When will it be that I [the poet], freed from other [i.e., worldly] cares, will be able to contemplate the beloved stars under me? Gryphius’s sonnet is only a single one of numerous examples from the times of the metaphysical tradition that give expression to the soul’s delight in reaching out beyond itself for the stars and its deep longing for that immortality which Lactantius had mentioned. This is of course not a utopian, idle, deluded reaching out beyond itself! It is not deluded because the soul is nothing else but this reaching out beyond itself. And through such a reaching out, it precisely arrives, comes home to itself. It realizes and fulfills itself. The soul is not an entity, a substance. It does not exist. It is performative, is pure actuosity,78 is this action of reaching out beyond “itself.” And only through this action, the soul makes itself for the first time. Gryphius is the author of this poem. But it is really the soul that expresses itself through the poet, rather than the poet himself as I, as egoic person. There is here not a human individual who, many a beautiful night staying up all night, like a hobby-astronomer observed the stars for his entertainment and pleasure. It was, conversely, the soul’s need and fervor that made the human person wake through the whole night. The human being is here still completely enveloped in the soul, much like the earth is enveloped in an atmosphere. He is still set in motion, set vibrating, by it, without being able to 78 On the soul as not existing, but making itself, and as actuosity see my What Is Soul? (New Orleans, LA, Spring Journal Books, 2012) , especially chapters 1.3 and 1.4.

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distinguish himself from it. Its longing is immediately his. Or conversely, his feelings are in all essential matters still immediately the soul’s feelings, not the feelings of a modern I. The I’s emancipation from the soul has not yet taken place. Gryphius still lives within meta-physics as his true element. For the stars are here not positive facts of physics, but primordial witnesses of and pointers to God, the source of all light. In the stars, Gryphius possesses and celebrates his own a priori. We also have to take note of the solid, indissoluble connection and mutual relation between man here upon the earth and the stars up there. In the phrase, “whose love ignites my heart and my spirits,” “whose” must be read as both subjective and objective genitive. It is the human love of the stars and at the same time the stars’ love of man. The stars, as it were, speak to man, they respond to his upward-looking, just as conversely his upward-looking is his response to their speaking to him. We are here in the sphere of the logic of synthesis, of the copula (or what in alchemy was called vinculum or ligamentum), a uroboric logic. 79 The cosmos, nature, is here still a caring nature, not the absolutely indifferent nature (as pure facticity) of modernity.80 The fervor of this upward-looking and the foreignness for us today of this (at that time absolutely real) relation to the stars allow us to gauge the extent to which modern man has fallen out of the soul, out of meta-physics. Today man is himself as empirical I the true substance. He lives in his thing-like body (and no longer in the soul that extends far out to the stars). And ipso facto he has the world, the universe, visà-vis himself as something infinitely separate. “As ‘the individual,’ [man] is alone, alone in the world, alone—vis-à-vis God,” Kierkegaard had said. Man lives without garment, naked within himself, in his positivity, as merely-empirical human being, and thus on principle as fact to be explored a posteriori. What he does and what happens within himself is now of highest importance. And so he has become psychological, and for this to have become possible we have to understand that man’s having fallen out of the soul is the condition of the possibility, and at the same time of the necessity, of his becoming 79 The fact that thought moves here within a uroboric logic is also the reason why the soul’s longing for the stars, discussed a few paragraphs earlier, is not a deluded one. The longing can arrive, has always already arrived, because the circle is closed. 80 But it is also not the modern sentimentalized nature, neither in its nostalgic nor in its ecological variety (for example, the neo-pagan New Age Gaia religion).

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psychological (and of psychology as such). Having become psychological, man is not moved by the soul, but by his feelings, emotions, drives, ideas, and for his lust and pleasure,81 or, inasmuch as constant lust and pleasure are not possible, at least for his passing the time. I will return to this topic of psychological man later. It is self-evident that under the conditions of that soul situation that expressed itself in Gryphius’s poem, a neurosis could not possibly have arisen. Man was here not at all egoically centered and caught within himself, but released (ausgelassen) into Being as a whole, and this releasement (Ausgelassenheit 82) is what we call soul. But in Gryphius’s sonnet we do not only have a fundamentally meta-physical orientation to the stars. The concluding lines also bring a completely surprising reversal of the direction of vision. The poet (or, better, the lyrical I) longs, in anticipation of his death and his eternal salvation, to behold the stars beneath him, in other words, from on top. In retrospect (but only in retrospect), this seems to point to future historical developments. It is the question of when his in-ness in the cosmos and the time of his upward-looking will have been overcome and he will really, and then exclusively, be that which encompasses the cosmos itself. Now I come to my next example. In 1788 Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason appeared. In the “Conclusion” he wrote the famous 81 I disregard here the other, dark side of a being moved and motivated (namely, by fear, desperation, etc.) because we are in the present context only concerned with the soul’s delight. 82 To avoid confusion, let me point out that my term Ausgelassenheit or Ausgelassensein is something very different from Heidegger’s Gelassenheit, which, however, is also frequently translated into English as releasement. Heidegger means a certain personal spirit or attitude, a spirit that man as philosopher can show and practice and that consists in his “letting things or events be,” freely and calmly allowing them to be the way they are, without getting nervous or anxious or feeling called upon to get active. It is a releasing them, the things, into their being. Ausgelassenheit in my parlance, by contrast, does not refer to a personal attitude, but to an “objective” character of the soul itself, a description of its nature and being, its precisely not being self-identical, staying within itself, selfenclosed, but always already having let go of itself, having released itself into its own space, and thus its being out there in the world and even being with the farthest stars. It suggests unrestrained, uninhibited self-abandon (and, mind you, not as an activity or practice of an already existing substance named soul, let alone of a human being, but as the very character or logic of soul) and finding itself in its other, coming home to itself “out there.” In everyday language, the word ausgelassen means exuberant, boisterous. This is not what I mean here, but on the other hand, this sense must not be altogether censored, because my term Ausgelassenheit refers also to the soul’s free roaming through the world, a roaming through which the world and the things in it receive their animatedness, their capability to speak to us.

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statement that two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing admiration and reverence the more often and the more persistently one’s contemplation occupies itself with them: the starry sky above him and the moral law within him. This, too, is a testimony for the soul’s releasing itself into the infinite expanse of the cosmos and to the stars, and thus to infinity itself. In this statement by Kant, Goethe’s word is once more proven true that the human head is “the vault in which heaven is supposed to reflect itself!” But just as in Gryphius the glance upwards suffered a reversal in the end, so here the originally single concern is split into two. Evidently, the upwards glance that still exists here is no longer capable of expressing the complete concern of the soul. It is joined by a second and opposite, but equally important, concern: the introspective glance. “Introspective” is the cue that takes me to my last example for episodes in the soul history of the stars, this time an example from the 20th century. In 1934, Jung tells us that “the stars have” once and for all “fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled”; heaven “has become for us the cosmic space of the physicists, and the divine empyrean a fair memory of things that once were” (CW 9i § 50). Today, “in the cold light of consciousness, the blank barrenness of the world reaches to the very stars” (ibid. § 29). “We are absolutely convinced that even with the aid of the latest and largest reflecting telescope ... men will discover behind the farthest nebulae no fiery empyrean; and we know that our eyes will wander despairingly through the dead emptiness of interstellar space” (ibid. § 31). The stars do not speak any longer. Nature is no longer a caring one. The possibility for the soul of soaring to the stars, the possibility of upwards-looking (which still prevailed at the time of Kant in undiminished strength), has in modernity been taken from us. In its stead, only the second possibility that Kant pointed out, the gaze into ourselves, remains for us (although in an altered sense from his). For, here I can quote Jung again, “since the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled, a secret life holds sway in the unconscious” (ibid. § 50). Jung’s view of things is the sign or symptom for the fact that a radical about-turn in man’s fundamental orientation has taken place

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over against all previous ages. In the metaphor of the fall of the stars this about-turn is imagined in substantiated form as one that happened to things (or contents of consciousness), namely, the stars. But it has also an exact equivalent in Jung’s basic epistemological, methodological position. Through Kant, he says, a “barrier across the mental world” was erected. “For our time it is, however, no longer Kant in direct succession, but much rather natural science and its de-subjectivized world that represents that wall at which human inquisitiveness turns back” (CW 18 § 1734, transl. modif., my emphasis). The way to the world outside, to the object, is, at least as far as all essential knowledge is concerned, once and for all closed. The soul’s highest interest must do an about-turn. According to Jung, the highest object of human interest—this was once upon a time the contemplation of the stars and of God—can now only be striven for by means of introspection: “the statements about the object end in triviality and the loss of meaning [Bedeutungs- und Sinnlosigkeit]. This is why we seek the meaning in the statements of the subject ...” (ibid., transl. modif., my emphasis). Already one century before Jung, the soul had performed a structurally similar, although, as regards the specific content, not simply comparable about-turn, an about-turn that articulated itself in the shape of Goethe’s Faust (Faust II, First Act, “Anmutige Gegend”). After the psychological annihilation that the Gretchen tragedy (Part I) had meant for him, Faust was purified from the tormenting self-reproaches by the healing forces of Nature and returned to life, to “the sacred light.” Now following his deepest longing, his highest wish, he awaited the “most solemn hour” of the sun’s rise. However, when the sun has actually become visible, he must, feeling blinded and pained in his eyes, turn his back on the sun. In terms of everyday experience, this is an understandable, even self-evident reaction. We cannot directly look at the sun. But from the standpoint of soul and of the entire Western tradition this motif in Faust appears in a totally different light. Already for Plato and the thinking and longing inaugurated by him, the soul’s aspiration had always been to rise from the darkness of the Platonic Cave to the light and at long last to the gaze at or into the sun. In Dante’s Divine Commedy, to which our Faust scene clearly alludes through its verse form and through citations and to which it stands in an internal contrasting relation,

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Dante is guided by Beatrice into the fiery heaven and, since he, too, feels pain in his eyes, is given by Beatrice the capability to gaze into the sun through her eyes, so that he is not blinded. The about-turn that Faust performs is therefore made conscious by Goethe precisely through the intertextual contrast to Dante’s work. Of course, Faust does not yet turn to his inner. He does not yet, like Jung did, “seek the meaning in the statements of the subject.” Even if with his back to the sun, he nevertheless still continues to gaze out into the world: “So that we turn our glance again towards the earth, / to seek protection in a pristine, youthful veil.” As a man who has his place at the end of the early-modern period and at the threshold to modernity, it is for Goethe no longer possible, as we see, to look into the highest light itself. He can participate in the light only through some earthly mediation. For him an access to the highest light can be achieved only dialectically after first having turned away from the highest light; but in this way it is nevertheless still possible to actually achieve it. There is fulfillment. “In the colorful reflection83 we have” (my emphasis) the true life (i.e., visibly before our eyes). We are here reminded of a passage from Kant in his short paper of 1796, “Of a recently expressed noble tone in philosophy.” Kant remarked (A 410), “To look into the sun (the supersensible) without getting blinded is certainly not possible; but to see it in the reflection (of that Reason that morally enlightens the soul), the way the older Plato had done, is quite expedient ....” With this, Kant is obviously pointing to the “moral law within me,” but we also see that through that moral law at which he is looking within himself he is, in the last analysis, still seeing it, the sun itself, only now as a reflected one, in Reason, the moral law. The sun itself has by no means been dethroned, the stars have not at all fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have not paled, so that now a secret life would hold sway in the unconscious. The Kantian position is, in formal regards, similar to that of Faust.84 Only once we come to Jung (at least as far as the number of the few authors chosen by me is concerned), do we find that the aboutturn has finally even interiorized itself into itself, so that the highest 83

Faust sees a rainbow in the mist of a waterfall. But obviously, in Kant the meaning of “the sun” has by comparison with the tradition been reduced to the narrow moral aspect. 84

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object—the highest goal of the soul—is now decidedly, and in itself, an inner, private experience of the “Self,” namely the Self in the Jungian sense, as a substantiated self. The real sun, by contrast, has paled inasmuch as it has become the positivistic sun of the physicists.85 Why does Faust need his turning away from the highest light? What has been portrayed in the figure of the Faust of this particular scene is the situation of the completed early-modern subjectivity. The latter is no longer, as medieval man still was, naively-immediately and an sich (implicitly), even if certainly not für sich (explicitly), identical with the soul and directly captivated by it, absorbed into and taken prisoner for its, the soul’s, point of view. As a result of such a state of captivation, medieval man was capable of himself, i.e., also für sich, in fact beholding “the sun,” of course only under exceptional conditions, that is to say, only when he had reached the highest stages of a long initiation process, and when he used not his own but “Beatrice’s” eyes, that is, the eyes of the anima, the soul. This is why in Dante’s Divine Commedy a (semi-)direct contemplation of the highest Truth, the actual gaze at God, at transcendence, at the highest light, could occur. The completed early-modern subjectivity, by contrast, has stepped out of the unmediated oneness with or captivation in the soul the moment it left the historical age to which it used to belong and began to enter the truly modern era. The modern subjectivity is fundamentally für sich. It has reflected, interiorized, itself into itself, i.e., into subjectivity 85 In contrast to his insight into the fall of the stars, Jung, inconsistently and rather unconvincingly, indeed, helplessly, frequently tried to argue along the following lines: “... when I say as a psychologist that God is an archetype, I mean by that the ‘type’ in the psyche. The word ‘type’ is, as we know, derived from tÚpoj, ‘blow’ or ‘imprint’; thus an archetype presupposes an imprinter. ... The competence of psychology ... only goes so far as to establish ... whether for instance the imprint in the psyche can or cannot reasonably be termed a ‘God-image.’ Nothing positive or negative has thereby been asserted about the possible existence of God ...” (CW 12 § 15). A clear petitio principii in combination with a simultaneous washing his hands of it. Psychologically, Jung’s not committing himself betrays his psychological truth, namely, that there is no God for him anymore and we are stuck with nothing but images in the soul, images about which we are not allowed to say anymore that they reflect the sun, the metaphor for the soul’s highest light (since the sun is now only accessible to physics, no longer to psychology). His toying with the idea of an “imprinter” and an at least “possible existence of God,” on the other hand, is exposed as sheer ideology, as the fabrication of a smoke screen. According to Jung we are neither like Dante seeing the sun, nor do we like Faust or Kant see it through its reflection in the veil of earthly experience or the moral law, respectively. We only see an image (a separate image in ourselves, not, like Faust, the refracted light itself in the real world), and to suggest that it might be an image of something is totally illegitimate.

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as such (surely not into the I, into empirical man!) and has in this way become “uroboric” and this means become a self, a self, however, that ipso fact has its truth, the soul, as something alien vis-à-vis itself and for this reason can reach it only indirectly, as a reflected or remembered one, only in Mnemosyne. The fact that for Jung the soul’s highest goal can no longer be objectively beheld in the real world, in real life, but is only conceivable as a separate, special literal experience within ourselves, the experience of “the Self,” is one point. A second point to be made is that whereas Faust, despite his about-turn, remains with the contemplation of the sacred light (even if a tempered and mediated contemplation and a contemplation merely of the visible “colored reflection” of the true light of the sun in a rainbow), in Jung the soul has completely renounced the light as such and fundamentally espoused itself to the unconscious. In other words, it has, as it were, once more withdrawn into the Platonic Cave (or a modern subjectivized variety of a Cave), into the world of shadows, of images, of dreams, instead of merely seeking protection in Faust’s “pristine, youthful veil.” This movement into a commitment to the unconscious has recently been raised to its peak, through the intelligent and deep work of Stanton Marlan that devotes itself to sol niger, the black sun of the unconscious, and immerses itself in the “alchemy and art of darkness.”86 Now that the stars have fallen from heaven and a secret life holds sway in the unconscious, we understand what it means that the gods have become diseases and that the struggle between light and darkness has translocated its battleground into the interior of the human soul. We no longer have the gods, the stars, outside in the cosmos, no longer at an infinite distance above us. Having fallen from heaven they have fallen into us and we now have them within ourselves. We are all around them. Now we also understand what Jung meant with his statement (and what this statement involves and why it is correct): “For the first time since the dawn of history we have succeeded in swallowing the whole primordial animatedness of nature into ourselves” (CW 10 § 431, transl. modif.). With the emergence of the concept of “the unconscious” this swallowing (into ourselves) of “the whole primordial 86 Stanton Marlan, The Black Sun: The Alchemy and Art of Darkness, College Station (Texas A & M Press) 2005.

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animatedness” has been completed. For this reason we no longer, as Gryphius still did, have to anticipate a situation in which we could behold the stars under us and defer such a possibility to a postmortal beyond: even without being dead we already are—logically—at that point where Gryphius had still had to long to be at some day in the future: at a position up there where we are “able to contemplate the beloved stars under” us. For from the outset, and inevitably, we look introspectively from the height of consciousness down upon the fallen stars in our unconscious. The stars, the gods, God are encircled by consciousness. The solitary individual has them in his “unconscious,” but of course, this is the drawback, no longer as gods, but only as sunken cultural assets, mere images in our inner.

6. “THE FRONTIER IS CLOSED.” THE END OF THE SOUL’S SELF-RELEASEMENT INTO ITS OWN INFINITY Jung’s image of the said “swallowing” makes it obvious that he had a clear consciousness of the unheard-of historical rupture, that shift from the metaphysical tradition to the logical, psychological situation of modernity. In different forms, which changed according to the respective historical loci, the metaphysical tradition had existed from the times of Plato or even the Presocratics to Hegel and Schelling, but had also, although of course only in a pre-reflective mode, been prevalent much earlier in the times of myth, ritual, and shamanism. For the metaphysical stance, the soul had its true place in heaven, or, the other way around, “the soul” was this reaching out for heaven (which in turn was first created through this reaching out for it), it was this the soul’s extendedness and releasement into its own infinity. The thinking of metaphysics was characterized by verticality. As shown above by means of a few examples, man as constituted in the metaphysical tradition was essentially upward-looking, which in this context does of course not simply mean an empirical raising of his head. It means—anachronistically explained, namely from the point of view and expectations of our modern soul situation—the logical breaking out of one’s being oriented towards the facts and objects of the empirical-positive environment and, so to speak at right angles to this orientation, the commitment to a completely different (not positive-factual, not physical, and in this sense meta-physical or

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logically negative) dimension: to verticality. In mythological parlance we could say it means an awareness of heaven (in contrast to “the earthly,” the merely human-all-too-human practical survival interests). In this sense, upward-looking and verticality mean the same thing. Now, in modernity, by contrast, horizontality prevails. It is, logically, the gaze forward to the object in its empirical givenness, its positivity. The subject stands vis-à-vis the object; the human as I visà-vis the other human as Thou (and as “the Other,” quite clearly already in Feuerbach and now, in extreme form, in Lévinas); consciousness is vis-à-vis the unconscious—tertium non datur. A connection, union (copula, synthesis) of the opposites, a ground in which they both would be rooted does not exist. The (previously speculatively understood) soul has become strictly anthropological (Feuerbach). Thus it turned into the positive-factually understood human psyche, a functioning psyche (the psychic apparatus), and the only remainder left of what once was “soul” has been relegated into and castrated as “the unconscious,” in other words, as the horizontalized verticality, the horizontalized metaphysical. 87 As a consequence the modern version of the story is that the gods of former ages had actually been projections from the unconscious, projections that in earlier ages people had merely not been able to see through. The concept of projection (as early as Feuerbach) has the function of making sense of the verticality prevailing in the thinking during previous times within the now inevitably ruling horizontal way of thinking and in a horizontal style.88 87 With the term “the unconscious” modernity attempts to invent for itself something like an empirical-factual analogue to the beyond, the underworld (quite clearly in Freud’s Virgil quote, Flectere si nequeo superos, Acheronta movebo, a quote with which Freud obviously tries to claim verticality for himself ). The phantasm of “the unconscious” is necessary for the purpose of once more creating an appearance of verticality within the downright positivistic thinking. 88 Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, § 5 (Haffmann edition of the works, vol. 1, p. 46, my transl.) accordingly says about the principle of sufficient reason, that it “binds, to be sure, all ideas, of whatever kind they may be, mutually together, but by no means connects these with the subject, nor yet with something that is neither subject nor object ....” In much the same sense it is without difficulty possible by means of the functional concept of “projection from out of the unconscious” to establish a causal connection between “the unconscious” (i.e., an idea or concept of consciousness) and a second idea (that of gods), but this is no more than a “horizontal” or internal connection between ideas that consciousness or the subject entertains within itself. But both ideas themselves, the one of “the unconscious” and the one of “gods,” remain ungrounded.

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The horizontal logic and way of explanation of the gods that becomes explicit in Feuerbach had been prepared by a mighty psychological-cultural development during the second half of the 18th century, namely, that more and more the place that religion used to have in the soul’s economy was taken by aesthetics. The former authentically religious impulse immanentized and horizontalized itself as a kind of religious devotion towards art (“Kunstreligion”) and a (secular!) sacrilization of art, and of the artist as “creative” (i.e., Godlike!) genius (“Geniekult”). During the Romantic period this art enthusiasm spilled over to nature, with the consequence of the slow emergence of the ardent, even pious, aesthetic appreciation of natural scenery. The training in this subjective enthused feeling through the devout appreciation of art (and, later, of scenery), a training that the soul went through in the late 18th century, prepared also the way for the general cult, during the 20th century, of intensive personal feeling (Erleben), the longing for “highs” and peak experiences. An observation by Niklas Luhmann highlights in a most illumining way the radical historical shift from verticality to horizontality with respect to a particular topic, the logical constitution of time. He pointed out that as soon as in history it becomes evident that already during one single life span [...] almost everything essential changes, then the difference of past and future (which of course had also already been known before) enters into the position of a guiding difference [Leitdifferenz] for the understanding of time and here replaces the distinction between ever-present eternity and time. The consequence of this is that the present is defined by the difference of past and future, that is, that it turns into a now-point of time (that it previously had only been on the level of the temporality of events), a nowpoint of time that “between” past and future makes possible the constant switching from the one time horizon to the other, but itself is not time. [...] With this, the present turns itself into the paradoxy of time: into the unity of the difference of past and future, into the third excluded by it, but included within it, into the time in which one does not have time.89

89 Niklas Luhmann, Die Wissenschaft der Gesellschaft, Frankfurt a. M. 1992 (1st ed. 1990), p. 613 (my italics, my translation).

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Luhmann conceives and explains what I call verticality and horizontality as two different guiding differences for the understanding of time. The former guiding difference, the distinction between everpresent eternity and time (i.e., the temporal, the saeculum), used to determine the understanding of time since time immemorial, from the oldest ritualistic and mythological cultures onwards through the age of Christianity and Metaphysics. The worldshaking shift to the new horizontal, that is, itself temporal, guiding difference along the timeline occurred during the 19th century. Verticality as a category or mode of thinking has disappeared, become impossible. Most clearly this shift is exemplified in the replacement of the conception of the animal and plant species and of man as having their origin directly in God, in His creation, by the theory of Darwinian evolution in strictly functional terms of natural selection, adaptation, survival of the fittest, and mutations. But it determines even our immediate felt experience of time in everyday life, as Luhmann’s last-quoted sentence makes clear. Modern man generally feels stressed. He lives in the time in which he does not have time. The reason given by Luhmann for this fundamental shift is people’s experience of the speed of innovation. This makes sense. I wonder, however, if we could not also turn this causality around: the enormous tendency to innovations in modernity has come about, and become possible in the first place, only because the ever-present eternity had already lost its power over the soul and the soul had in the depths already come under the spell of the new horizontal guiding difference of past and future. Is the phenomenon of this self-propelling pull towards innovation not a sign of an unleashed soul? The shift from verticality to horizontality has other momentous consequences. There simply is no space anymore into which the soul could extend and ecstatically release itself.90 That which once used to be this space has now long been encompassed by the soul. The soul as subjective consciousness has reached beyond, and overtaken, sublated, this space and now encompasses it within itself. The soul now has reached a position where it—logically—inevitably looks down upon “the stars” from the height of consciousness. This means that the 90 When modern man nevertheless tries to “ecstatically release the soul” he is therefore forced to use drugs: a positivistic, fundamentally mindless, soulless, hopeless simulation of the soul’s self-releasement.

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former space has ceased to have the form of space around us, a space within which we have our place. Again we can see more clearly what Jung meant with his statement (and what it involves and why it is correct): “For the first time since the dawn of history we have succeeded in swallowing the whole primordial animatedness of nature into ourselves” (CW 10 § 431, transl. modif.). The soul as consciousness now having itself become that which absolutely encompasses “the fallen stars,” is shut closed, locked into itself. It has defined itself as atomic individual. It cannot release itself anymore into the vast extent of the cosmos, into the openness of a space: into infinity and eternity. These two have become meaningless words. “The (psychological, the soul’s) frontier is closed.” What psychology offers instead, “the journey within,” “the inner quest,” “the individuation process,” is nothing but a kind of a “storm in a teacup.” For the objective soul and its logical life the disappearance of soul space must not be explained in terms of a “swallowing.” The space simply disappears because heaven falls onto the earth. They collapse into one. Thus the difference between (imaginally speaking) the sublunar and the supralunar worlds, too, is canceled. There is now only one world, the universe of physics and astronomy; only the one level of positivity is left, the empirically real. And the cosmos that once upon a time used to be soul space, into which the soul would release itself, has turned into the technical ego’s “outer space,” which has the nature of a literal fact and is literally-practically explored by high-power telescopes and spacecraft. As far out into outer space that we may indeed gaze with our telescopes or travel with our spacecraft, the soul, nevertheless, does not get anywhere. It always stays put, locked into the ego-personality and its irrevocably earthliness. The cosmos of old, inasmuch as the soul had a priori released itself into it and its infinity, was not an “external world of facts” (a Faktenaußenwelt, Arnold Gehlen), in the radical sense of the word, not totally “out there” and “vis-à-vis,” as are the universe and the natural world at large for modern man. The cosmos of old was filled with and permeated by soul. It was the soul’s own world and fundamentally

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animated. Rather than a Faktenaußenwelt, it was what we might with a Rilke word call Weltinnenraum. We have to see the dialectic that prevails here. The cosmos could only be soulful and the soul’s own “property” as long as verticality ruled and as the soul had not encompassed it, not swallowed its whole primordial animatedness, in other words, as the world presented itself as a space around the soul into which it could release itself. The moment the soul has “the cosmos” logically under itself and within itself because it now encompasses it, the cosmos has lost its soul-space character and ipso facto its animatedness, and modern man has lost his “intimate in-ness” (Inständigkeit) in the world and instead feels “thrown into existence” and confronted with a radically alien nature or universe or outer space (that absolutely can no longer be cosmos, but has to be a physical All that needs to be explored strictly positivistically in terms of the Schopenhauerian “principle of sufficient reason,” that All that Jung had described as “the blank barrenness of the world” and “the dead emptiness of interstellar space”). Man’s intimate in-ness in the world presupposes the soul’s Ausgelassenheit into the whole of the world. Conversely, the swallowing (incorporation) of the animatedness of the world into the inner is ipso facto the creation of the natural world as a radically external and positive-factual one, as fundamentally “other”! But what happened to space and infinity does not only affect the nature of the universe at large. The logic of the latter, as a matter of course, imparts itself also to everything and every event in it: they all become positivized, locked within themselves—facts. Devoid of an inherent infinity, they are no longer capable of being symbols, presences, manifestations, embodiments of soul. They now have the character of being radically “other.” This comes out in most extreme form in the character of nature as raw material for industrial production and of modern things as “commodities” (Marx), “throw-away” commodities at that. The same, naturally, applies to man himself in his very being. He is absolutely shut with himself. He has also become fact, when before he was animal rationale, soul, Geist. Soul has shrunk into psyche as the behavior of the human organism, into man’s “inner,” his emotions, feelings, impulses, fantasies, ideas, images, etc. Only because he has logically turned into isolated individual and nothing but product of biological evolution, modernity has to preach “intersubjectivity,” “interpersonal communication,” and “relating” as

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highest values. What logically is no longer true and real has to be compensated for by empirical efforts or a special “ethics” of behavior— in its most radical and terrifying (totalitarian) form, of course, in Lévinas. All this interpersonal relating amounts to horizontalized and behavioral substitutes for the lost ontological connection and sense of belonging through verticality. And narcissism could perhaps be understood as a pathological psychic attempt to restore the vertical direction on the level and under the conditions of the modern isolated I (or at least to opt out of modern horizontality). At the other end, the “fallen” former stars that in the case of neurosis are now in the unconscious of the solitary individual have, despite their image-character, also become hard psychic facts, archetypes, positivities: space-less, self-enclosed. As unconscious images they are now contents of the unconscious (or of consciousness, respectively). Deprived of their cosmic space, their infinity, they now wreak havoc in the consciousness and the literal body of the individual, as factual “dominants” and “archetypal perspectives” creating symptoms in the “plexus solaris,” as Jung had said by way of example. “The gods have become diseases.” “They” have become literal, i.e., positivities, fixations, rigid, hard symptoms (not: we have literalized them!).91 And as contents of psychological theorizing the images and “metaphors” have become commodities (including the commodities fetishism).

7. ABSOLUTE NEGATIVITY It was in this situation, in the course of the 19th century, that “the soul” invented neurosis for itself. Neurosis is the ingenious work created 91 From here we can understand and appreciate Hillman’s passionate retrograde attempt to restore a sense of space and infinity to the modern soul’s contents by reinterpreting “the collective unconscious” as “the imaginal” in Henri Corbin’s sense and those contents themselves as fundamentally poetic metaphors (and also, for example, by trying to move back from the modern “universe” to “cosmos”). As sympathisch (and practically fruitful for the specific limited purpose of widening the horizon of a consciousness totally identified with modern positivism) as this attempt undoubtedly is, it is of no avail. That poetic space and the imaginal practice have themselves all along been overtaken by “the universe” and modern positivity. They have themselves the character of “fallen stars.” As such their status is that of a niche and pastime (something one can do if one happens to be so inclined) or a private belief-system within the undisturbedly prevailing modernity of the world, inescapably contained within the “universe” of physics and the technological world. How could they possibly be more, once the shamanistic, mythological, metaphysical cosmos is gone?

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by the soul in which it procures, after all, a positively real existence for “The Absolute” within the absolutely closed earthly phenomena. As we learned earlier, in each symptom the soul celebrates unconditionality. The symptom serves the representation of the metaphysical dimension under the conditions of the encapsulated empirical reality. It is not instinctual desires, instinctual conflicts, and early wounds which cause neurosis. Rather, such desires, conflicts and wounds of the soul are partly the locus minoris resistentiae, partly, however, the very gate of entry that “the soul” takes advantage of for the purpose of pursuing its longing to procure for itself a positive presence of “The Absolute” in life after all, even if it is fighting for a lost cause. It utilizes the instinctual needs and wounds, but they in their own right are not its concern. The inflation of something empirically real with absolute significance is the purpose that “the soul” of the 19th/20th centuries pursues with its grand project of the production of neurosis. Inasmuch as this is the concern behind neurosis, we see again why neurosis is to be comprehended as a metaphysical illness. But where does the enormous surplus value come from that gives neurosis its incredible power? How is it to be explained? If we view Jung’s diagnosis of our modern situation in the light of what has been said about the soul’s soaring into the cosmos probably during all historical ages up to the time of Kant, on the one hand, and in the light of the closing of the psychological frontier, on the other hand, I think we get into a position where we can comprehend that inflation of elements of empirical reality with metaphysical significance (indeed, with absolute significance) that takes place in neurosis. The soul is (the act of ) upward-looking. The soul’s releasing itself and ecstatically soaring beyond the positivity of its own existence had been the very soul movement that had articulated and expressed itself as the experience of meaning, as metaphysical significance, as the awareness of gods and God. In myth, in the gods, in metaphysics the logical movement of the soul’s ecstatic reaching out and looking up had become objective and “visible” (imaginable) to itself. This is what myth, gods and metaphysics were all about. However, if the soul as now locked into itself (and absolutely locked at that, inasmuch as it is itself that which does the encompassing) nevertheless still insists on its upward-looking and on having what it had previously obtained

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through its reaching out and releasing itself (as it does in neurosis), then it becomes in principle comprehensible how inflation with metaphysical significance can come about. What happens to the upward-looking and reaching-out now that (a) there is no longer an open soul space into which the soul could release itself and now that (b) “the stars have fallen” is that this, the soul’s deepest need has become an in itself fundamentally frustrated upward-looking, an upward-looking bereft of its object to which it could reach out. It is not that it has only been deprived of a particular object or particular objects, to which it was accustomed to. No, the condition of the possibility of being directed to some object, the very idea of an object, has, with the loss of soul space and its being absolutely locked within itself, been taken away from it. The neurotic “The Absolute” is the internal contradiction of this absolutely pointless, hopeless, futile, but nevertheless absolutely powerful, upward-looking that is stuck in itself. It is stuck in itself because it is logically encased by that “wall at which human inquisitiveness turns back.” As an upward-looking locked into itself, “The Absolute” is a “storm in teacup” (or better: a storm in a sealed bottle). Like a motor idling at highest speed, it creates a free-floating, disengaged energy that can attach itself to all sorts of in themselves contingent and depleted empirical purposes and behaviors as its (in psychological regards more or less arbitrary) vessel and thus impart to them, fill them with, blow them up from within with, an irresistible compellingness, with that “must” and absolute conviction with which neurotic symptoms present themselves. This is what makes obsessions, compulsion, phobias and other symptoms possible, but also on a more intellectual level ideologies and fundamentalisms. From here we are also put into a position where we can understand why neither Freud nor Jung were capable of really doing justice to neurosis. In Freud’s thinking, “the soul as fundamentally upwardlooking into its own infinity” had no place at all. Seen from the point of view of Jung’s idea of the fallen stars, we could say that Freud took the stars’ having fallen, their absence in modernity, i.e., their negation, simply literally: “The stars,” the gods, simply did not exist in his scheme (and so he could not even, the way Jung did, think of a fall of the stars in the first place). The stars and gods (and along with them any upward-looking, any reaching out into infinity) were an illusion

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from the outset. So Freud had to explain neurosis solely from below, positivistically: in terms of cause-and-effect, of the almost mechanical functioning and reacting of the psychic apparatus, and of the human psyche’s biologically-based desires. “The Absolute,” the inflation of empirical reality with metaphysical significance and the resulting absolutely compelling force of neurotic symptoms, which are the indispensable trademark of neurosis, could on this basis not be accounted for, indeed, not even sighted. Jung’s view of neurosis, by contrast, started out precisely from “the stars” and “the gods,” and he also gave due credit to the characteristically modern event of “the fall of the stars.” His mistake with respect to this fall was, however, in exact opposition to Freud’s mistake, that he did not allow for the fundamental negation, the negation that through this fall happened to the stars, to the gods. He positivized the fall as a mere change of locus, from up there, “Olympus,” down into the unconscious of the human psyche, believing that the stars and gods had survived this fall unharmed as eternal and “ever-present” archetypes. Therefore the soul’s upwardlooking to the stars, the gods could according to him still take place, and, if there was to be psychic health, definitely had to take place, now above all in the psychologized form as an upward-looking to the Self as the God-image in the soul. Neurosis ultimately was driven by the soul’s religious concern. It was, in the last analysis, a numinous phenomenon and thus a morbus sacer. Its pathological character needed to be explained in terms of its being a merely imperfect, as yet unsuccessful attempt of the psyche to heal the general problem of the modern soul. Thus Jung, too, was unable to account for and appreciate that which made neurosis neurotic, sick. He refused to see that for modern man, i.e., born man, the upwardlooking itself had become impossible and, if the soul nevertheless attempted it, in itself pathological. The stars, the gods, God could in Jung’s scheme escape their fundamental negation that is inherent in Jung’s own “fall from heaven” idea because of a logical blunder that Jung committed (or that, be it consciously or unconsciously, he had his recourse to). It is a metábasis eis állo génos. The counterpart to heaven is the earth. But Jung surreptitiously switches to something totally different as counterpart, the human individual that in actuality does not figure in the “fall of

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the stars” metaphor at all. Jung’s is a category mistake. The fall of the stars, that is, of the fiery heaven as such, means that heaven falls onto the earth, that the mythological separation of the World Parents is undone, that the difference and distance between them disappears, is collapsed into one. It means the shift from a metaphysical stance to a positivistic stance of facticity. In other words, it is a strictly logical or syntactical change and strictly objective. But Jung changes it into a semantic and from the outset psychologized change, tacitly shifting in his interpretation of his metaphor to the personalistic and experiential inner-outer category difference. Through this trick he offered the gods an asylum in the thereby created “the inner of man” or “the unconscious,” and only in this way was he able to illegitimately protect them from that very negation that is the inherent consequence of his own metaphor. So whereas Freud positivized the negation in the sense of seeing nothing (only an illusion), Jung positivized it as a (metaphoric, imaginal) event, as a fall, a mere locomotion. He thus ignored precisely the logically negating, cancelling character of the negation. By interiorizing (swallowing) the metaphysical or imaginal space as a whole (together with all the stars and gods it once contained) into the inner, he preserved it as space and thereby managed to escape the idea that the “fall” (that he had rightly become aware of ) amounted precisely to the negation of that space itself, the real negation of the realm of “the imaginal,” 92 its being collapsed, dissolved, distilled, evaporated—reflected into itself as “nothing but” logical form, in other words, into the no-space of absolute negativity. Jung still believed in “the gods” as an immediate present reality (and thus as fundamentally “[logically] positive” elements) in the psyche. To be sure, the fall of the stars from heaven did mean for him that the gods are dead. But his reaction to this was to say: the gods are dead, long live the “archetypes of the collective unconscious”! Jung’s life-work circles around the goal of “immediate or primordial experience” (Urerfahrung) of numinous archetypal contents and thus around the goal of the immediate present reality of the archetypes. This insistence on the “present reality” character is what Jung’s theory shares with neurosis, whereas his clinging to archetypes as positive, fundamentally 92 The imaginal (and along with it Jung’s “collective unconscious”) is itself a fantasy of space, of something fundamentally spatial.

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substantial contents radically separates him from neurosis. For although “The Absolute” of neurosis is the insistence on present reality, or more than that: the actual realization of the immediate present reality of upward-looking, it is nevertheless precisely absolutely contentless, an upward-looking to nothing, upward-looking as an end in itself, present reality for present reality’s sake, as a kind of “l’art pour l’art.” “The Absolute” of neurosis is logically negative, the sublation of all imaginal contents. No stars, no gods as the Absolute anymore to which upwardlooking could look upward. The upward-looking has absolutized itself, that is to say, it is now itself “The Absolute.” And the latter is pure logical form, totally abstract “absolute importance” per se, pure “will.” Only secondarily does it inflate certain contents. The philosophy in the West, with the Presocratics, became possible through the condensation (collapsing) and sublation of the whole richness of the mythological imagination, i.e., of myth as such, into one concept, the concept of “Being,” thereby catapulting the “battleground” for all essential decisions from the level of mythos to that of logos. Similarly, almost one and a half millennia later Hegel sublated the entire semantics of Western metaphysics into its syntax, into the fluidity of logical form, thereby concluding the entire age-old opus of metaphysics, but also releasing thought into an entirely new field. Neurosis towards the end of the 19th century performed a similar and yet fundamentally different act. Being essentially retrograde, an attempt at the regressive restoration of “metaphysics,” of upwardlooking, and verticality, after the irrevocable end of metaphysics (let alone myth), it is the stubborn upholding of the metaphysical stance as a real presence, a positive-factual, concretistic reality (in contrast to a mere ideology), i.e., painfully real neurotic symptoms; neurosis occurs in the flesh, as actually lived life, not merely as ideas or beliefs. But under the conditions of modernity it could uphold this stance as a reality inevitably only by paying tribute to the real negatedness of metaphysics, to the historically reached logical status of absolute negativity and logical form, in which it too, as a decidedly modern phenomenon, inescapably found itself. It entertains a substance, a positive content, as its ultimate concern, namely “The Absolute.” However, this its content or substance itself has to partake of the negativity inescapably prevailing at the logical status in which neurosis is invented. And so its substance, “The Absolute,” is a metaphysical

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content or substance absolutely reduced to its zero-stage, an empty slot, a mere placeholder of “content,” we could also say it is reduced to the mere form of content—to absoluteness per se. As such “The Absolute” is the contradiction of an in itself contentless content, a substanceless substance, an in itself absolutely negative positivity. Neurosis regressively restores a sense of metaphysical upward-looking, but one that is reduced to the empty form of upward-looking per se which has nothing to which it could go upwards and is locked into itself. As such it is in itself the opposite of itself, frozen into rigid, hardened, even cemented fact. It is stuck and locked in the tight material reality of a concretistically enacted pathology (when as upward-looking it was actually meant to be the soul’s releasement into its own infinity). “The Absolute” of neurosis as the “storm in a tea-cup” exists only in and as particular symptoms. Neurotic symptoms are a storm that is locked in itself. Freud saw the contentlessness of the “contentless content,” its negativity, and therefore he explained neurosis in strictly functional terms and as mechanisms. Jung took the content-side of the “contentless content” for real and therefore believed to see the ultimately religious substance in neurosis, the gods in the disease. Neither approach does the particular logic of neurosis, the contradictory logic of “substanceless substance,” justice. By the same token we can say that, to be sure, the inner of the modern individual has, as Jung maintained, become the battleground, but precisely not the battleground of “the light’s fight against darkness,” or of the essential decisions. The inner, that which happens in the modern individual, is not the place of the real action (real soul action). In neurosis the inner is a battleground of the fight for more darkness, and outside of neurosis the life under normal conditions that goes on in “the inner” is of only private significance, that is, does not concern the essential questions. The essential life of the soul, as always so also today, takes place on the battleground of the whole culture, in its further development. That the inner is the locus of the light’s fight against darkness is the result of what I call psychological (indeed, neurotic) illusory appearance. 93 93 Cf. the different, but analogous ideas of “transcendental (illusory) appearance” (Kant) and “mythic (illusory) appearance” (W. Giegerich). See my “Mythic Illusory Appearance – Blindness to Logical Form” = Chapter 10 in my The Flight Into the Unconscious, New Orleans (Spring Journal Books) 2013.

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This appearance is, however, a powerful reality! Most of the time we live in it. On the basis of this appearance, the modern individual feels he has to take what goes on within him as absolutely essential. Most of psychology has fallen for this appearance. The similarity of the move performed in neurosis to the moves made by early philosophy with the sublation of myth into conceptual thought and by Hegel with the translation of the metaphysical semantics into syntax consists in that in neurosis the rich and specific content of metaphysics disappears in the abstract conceptless concept of The Absolute, much as at the inauguration of philosophical thought the manifold concrete images of myth disappeared in the philosophical concepts of Being and logos and as in Hegel the semantics of metaphysics dissolved into the fluidity of syntactical movement. The crucial difference is that neurosis is not, like the two other developments, historically a forward move, logically amounting to the conquest of an entirely new status of consciousness and an increase in mental freedom, but, on the contrary, both historically retrograde and logically a pushing the soul downwards into its imprisonment in literal fact.

8. “THE ABSOLUTE” AS WILL AND DESIRE Above I said, “The upward-looking has absolutized itself, that is to say, it is now itself ‘The Absolute.’ And the latter is pure logical form, totally abstract ‘absolute importance’ per se, pure ‘will.’” The dissolution of all mythological or metaphysical contents, that once upon a time were what was absolutely important, i.e., of “ultimate concern” (Paul Tillich), into the empty form of The Absolute as pure will amounts to a clear break with a millennia-old tradition. This break becomes visible for the first time, and was right away fundamentally thought through, in Schopenhauer’s “Will” and received an enormous impetus through Nietzsche’s new conception of the concept of will. Already more than a century ago, Georg Simmel insightfully characterized this historical break as the axial rotation within the concept of man: that Reason is no longer his deepest, even if perhaps covered, reality, but merely a content, or, if you wish, a form. ...

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NEUROSIS If man is a rational being, then he feels values and purposes, and because he feels them as such, he wills them. The evaluated and posited ultimate aim arouses his desire ... For Schopenhauer, however, the purpose that we value and consciously strive for emerges only from the Will as the primal fact. We do not will because our reason establishes values and purposes, but we will, continuously, incessantly, from out of the ground of our essence, and this is why we have purposes. ... But now the intellect is only the light that falls on the process of the Will welling up from out of itself ... Only from here does that earlier assertion become completely translucent: that we always know, to be sure, what we will in each given moment, but never what and why we will in the first place and on the whole.94

Understandably so, because the Will inaugurated by Schopenhauer is blind, defined as blind. The “metaphysic” (note the quotation marks!) of the Will, first made explicit by Schopenhauer, is the background of the role that instincts, drives, desire, and sexuality play as fundamental concepts in the theory of man. Desire and instinctual wishes are the psychologized (if not biologized) version of the strictly philosophical concept of the “Will.” In time, the Schopenhauerian Will was translated into experiential, behavioral, and emotional terms and into empirical phenomena within the human subject as individual biological organism. Thus sexuality has ceased being simply the empirical way in which the human being objectively and ritually enacted, although on a quite personal level, his logical essence as existing copula, as a copulating one. No, now it had become emphatically his sexuality, his desire, whereby “his” means actually nothing else but his biological organism’s desire to which he as subject and consciousness was exposed or whose victim he was. With respect 94 Georg Simmel, Schopenhauer und Nietzsche. Ein Vortragszyklus, München and Leipzig (Duncker & Humblot) 1907 (here: “Zweiter Vortrag: Schopenhauer und sein Wille”), my translation, my emphases. – To what I have quoted here we must add by way of elucidation that there is certainly for Schopenhauer, too, a “reason,” but that this Schopenhauerian reason is something totally different from that Reason that Simmel focuses on, namely the metaphysically understood speculative reason (noys, intellectus) in the sense of the tradition.

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to the 20th century we can even speak of an (implicit) sacralization of sexual desire, a sacralization which, however, has long before Freud been prepared by Schopenhauer and by Nietzsche’s emphatic affirmation of Life. “Desire” as the foundational concept of most 20 th century psychological theory is set up and functions as an a priori. As an a priori and “first cause” it does not, it cannot, know what it wills. It has to be blind. If it had already a purpose, it would be secondary, dependent on it. And being in itself blind and completely empty, content- and aimless, a l’art-pour-l’art-type willing (logically) absolutely unleashed, unhitched, free-floating, it must receive its possible goals necessarily only secondarily, a posteriori, and contingently. Its goals are on principle, even though not always in empirical reality, exchangeable. Theoretically it could attach itself to any purpose whatsoever. Jung’s theory is, of course, different. His is not a psychology of desire. Desire is not a basic concept in his thinking. Already very early, Jung left behind the definition of “libido” as sexual desire or any other specific instinctual dynamis once and for all in favor of its redefinition as psychic energy, quite abstractly as the energy or degrees of intensity with which psychic contents, when they show themselves, are equipped. Jung’s psychology is one of contents (“The Content of the Psychoses,” “the content of the neurosis”) and as such noetic, focusing as it does on soul truths (archetypes, Urerfahrung). And as far as sexuality is concerned, he viewed it precisely as a symbolic expression of genuinely spiritual concerns of the soul. Also, he even spoke of a Reflexionstrieb or Instinkt der Reflexion (CW 8 § 241 ff. has “reflective instinct” for both expressions), which means that he turns the naturalistic way of thinking upside down. Nevertheless, despite his emphasis on contents and on the experience of soul truths, he, too, has to pay his dues to the logic of modernity and the unleashedness of the Will, even if on a very different, less obvious level. For one thing, what is “the search for meaning” other than a form of manifestation of desire, a greed to get something, even if what it wants to get is something noble, “meaning”? The structure or logic remains that of modern desire. What the aim of desire is makes no difference. And secondly, just as the Schopenhauerian Will is blind, so is also the life of the soul, as conceived

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by Jung, essentially a secret life in the unconscious. This life can, certainly, possibly be “made conscious,” as Jung would have put it. However, this means no more than, as we can say with Simmel, that a light falls upon the process of the irrevocably unconscious impulses or images welling up from out of themselves, out of “the unconscious.” It is an illumination from outside. What results from having been made conscious is in the deepest sense not a knowing, but only a kind of “having gained information about ...” In the concept of “the unconscious” the spiritual-intellectual dimension of the spiritual or reflective instinct is a priori abolished and subjected to a naturalistic perspective (for which reason Jung emphatically claimed to be an empirical natural scientist). Despite all this, Jung is an exception and stands outside the mainline psychology of his century dominated by the positivistic and nihilistic concept of desire. The instinctual drives and desire are the post-metaphysical successor concepts to the metaphysical upward-looking. They are its totally horizontalized version. While representing the zero-stage of any “upwardness,” they nevertheless preserve the directedness as such and reaching out for ... of the former upward-looking and translate it into a strictly horizontal scheme, into psychic, experiential-emotional terms. Desire certainly also means reaching out for ..., trying to release oneself into .... But since “the stars have fallen” this reaching-out has nothing for which it could reach out, and, more than that, even the very space into which this reaching out for could possibly extend itself, has disappeared. “Desire,” as I pointed out, is the psychologized version of the “Will.” But the modern “Will” does not only appear in psychologized and experiential form. There is also a strictly theoretical (logical and epistemological) version of it, and this is the modern notion of “intentionality” in Husserl’s sense, consciousness’s fundamental directedness at an object as the basic act that constitutes consciousness. Metaphysical man’s “reaching out” turned, on the theoretical level, under the conditions of modern horizontality inevitably into man’s intentional world-relation. The revolutionary turn from a willing that only came into being in the first place by being aroused and sparked off by highest purposes or by the ultimate purpose (such as God, eternal salvation, freedom, in earlier cultures that which Jung referred to under the label of the

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“symbolic life”) to that blind Will, i.e., the Will that is no longer guided by (or rather first aroused by) purposes of reason, is that groundshaking historical event that Jung had in mind when he intuitively used his metaphor of the fall of the stars, without being able to express this event adequately and explicitly. It is the revolutionary turn from Reason as ultimate ground to the Will as ultimate ground, within psychology we could also say: from the ultimate purpose to drive or desire. The Will qua drive or desire is now the primary and irreducible reality of our being. But as this primary reality it is still blind and empty, aim-less. In order to become real Willing in a practical sense at all, it must first, in a secondary act, take up this or that goal. The difference between a willing evoked by purposes of Reason and the modern Willing as desire is crucial. For the former willing its ultimate purpose has always already been given to it. The purpose attracts of its own accord. All love and passion as well as all awe that the soul is capable of feeling spontaneously and naturally flow towards it, and thus a human willing is aroused for the first time. “Desire,” by contrast, is in the last analysis nothing else but Schopenhauer’s “continuously, incessantly, from out of the ground of our essence” having to will and as its own starting-point first needs to seek something that could become an object or purpose for it. This difference has a logical ground. The revolutionary turn that we talked about could also be described as a turn in the prevailing logic, from the metaphysical, decidedly reflexive logic of the copula and the judgment to the modern intentional logic of the Satz (statement, proposition) characterized by the unbridgeable difference between “function” and “argument.” Frege, who can be considered as the father of this modern logic of the function (although, as I noted earlier, implicitly it had already been at work in and since Schopenhauer), explained that, “just like equations or analytical expressions, one can conceive declarative statements in general as dissected into two parts, of which the one is self-contained, the other one in need of complementation, unsaturated. Thus one can dissect, e.g., the statement /‘Caesar conquered Gaul’/ into ‘Caesar’ and ‘conquered Gaul.’ The second part is unsaturated, it brings an empty slot with it, and only through the filling of this slot by a proper name, or by an expression

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that stands in for a proper name, does a self-contained sense [Sinn] come about. I call here, too, the meaning [Bedeutung] of this unsaturated part function.”95 In logical terms we can say with Frege’s terminology that the Will, in its psychologized form qua desire, is merely a fundamentally “unsaturated” function which as such is characterized by an empty slot, into which, in each case, whatever purposes, qua argument, can and have to be secondarily and contingently inserted as the respective ominous “object of desire,” through which alone it receives a determinate direction. Husserlian intentionality is similarly a function whose empty slot needs to be filled by whatever object or content it can advert to. Psychology’s concept of desire is the soul’s abstract, naked “reaching out” discharged from the soul and from Reason.96 It is a “reaching out” per se that ipso facto is on principle désir infini (Lacan) in the sense that it is by definition unfulfillable, even if empirically its particular purpose should seem to find a momentary literal fulfillment. For that in which it finds such a fulfillment is something that has the status of no more than a “supplement” (Derrida). The psychologically-conceived “desire” is going forward on and on, in an endless vector-like straight line: the unsaturated is also on principle insatiable. At bottom, this “desire” or “desiring” is therefore nothing else but that “empty slot” itself, a blank that craves (namely, to be filled), but is nothing but this endless craving.97 In the last analysis, the “empty slot” is the lacuna left by the disappearance of metaphysics, of heaven, Reason, verticality. As being gone it is, qua lacuna, present, real. That is, the disappearance is not yet total. It is only semantic, but has not yet become syntactical, not come home to itself. The former basic metaphysical orientation or expectation is, as this lack or lacuna, still preserved. It has merely dwindled to its zero-stage, but not fully been overcome. The entire first phase of modernity (“industrial modernity,” most visibly that of the 19th century) with its decidedly 95 Gottlob Frege: “Funktion und Begriff” (1891), in: Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung. Fünf logische Studien, edited and with an introduction by Günther Patzig, Göttingen (Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht) 31969 (11962), p. 29, my translation. 96 Because the desire has been dismissed from soul and Reason and because heaven and verticality have disappeared, its aims or purposes can only be “earthly” ones. 97 The greed is the empty slot’s greed, not that of the people in whom it shows. It is a logical greed or craving, not a greediness as psychic behavior, emotion, or passion.

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utopian character bears witness to this open negation of the metaphysical stance that, however, has not yet been able to negate itself and thus has not yet come into its own. It has been expelled from the tradition, but is psychologically still stuck in it. We have to contrast this modern craving with the kind of “reaching out” that we found, for example, in Gryphius. The metaphysical longing was always already fulfilled, the desire had always already arrived, and only because it had arrived was this longing aroused in the first place. Empirically, for the human subject, it was a longing, and as such a “not yet.” But an sich, implicitly, indeed, “in truth,” the soul was already at and with those stars for which it longs, because the stars are in this case the visualization of the soul itself, of its own inner infinity and its light nature. In the deeper sense there is no transcendence for the soul! This is so because the soul is transcendence (a reaching out). The human person’s longing was a moment in a uroboric soul movement, and as such human existence was fundamentally contained within it, carried by it. I already pointed out that in Gryphius’s sonnet the relative pronoun, “whose,” in the clause “whose love ignites my heart and my spirits,” must be understood as both subjective and objective genitive. The longingly reaching out for the stars is only possible because it is the result of the stars having reached the human heart and evoked this longing in the first place. 98 Quite similarly, the metaphysical desire for knowledge must be contrasted with modern intentionality. The latter cannot catch up with itself. It has to go forward endlessly. To use the Husserlian idiom, consciousness’s act of noêsis can only reach, and be conscious of, the 98 This is much like what is said about prayers, namely that they are only true prayers if it is already God who is speaking in the prayer (to God). In both cases, there is a freely reaching out into an imaginary distance and returning to itself, whereby a closed imaginary circle is created and within it an imaginary space, a space which is nothing else but psychic space as such or the soul itself. (The soul invents itself through its reaching out and returning to itself, but in such a way that it did not exist as an entity or substance prior to its self-invention, self-creation.) The thus created imaginary space within the closed circle is what we call “the world of man” (in contrast to the environment of animals). It is the space for all human experience (as human, soulful experience). In Greek mythology the closed circle that was the condition of the possibility of “world” was known as the river Okeanos, Father Okeanos, who at the outermost edge encircled the world and whose waters returned into itself.

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noêma (the content of its noêsis), but never of itself.99 But metaphysical consciousness was capable of returning to itself, thereby becoming veritable self-consciousness, just as human reason was from the outset a reflection of the divine intelligence. In the world governed by the metaphysical logic, the circle was closed. In modernity, it has been pulled open into a straight line,100 ultimately a line that moves endlessly from nowhere to nowhere, a fact that corresponds to the horizontality prevailing in modernity. From the Mass of the Roman-Catholic Church—a relic of the past that extends into our time, and doubtlessly the heart of RomanCatholic piety—we can see how far man’s being-in-the-world once upon a time was removed from what today we call desire. Likewise, the man of the ritualistic and initiating cultures did not desire. He celebrated the truth. Christian man did not either desire, but lived in the certainty of faith (“I know that my Redeemer liveth”). Thinking man during the age of metaphysics lived in the knowledge of the metaphysical truth. At any rate, we would succumb to “psychological illusory appearance” if we believed that psychoanalysis, by raising the concepts of “desire,” “sexuality,” “drives,” and “libidinal structure” to highest principles, had discovered or uncovered the true inner nature of man that before had only been seen through a veil. The “natural” impulses and desires, and that means in this context the desires rooted in human biology, provide merely an empirically real underpinning for the craving of the emptiness of the empty slot to be filled, comparable to the fuel for an engine. The “engine” is nothing natural. What we today call “instinctual aims” (Triebziele) are by no means the intrinsic aims of the biologically understood drive. Those aims have much rather the character of being posited and are essentially abstractions. Imposed, not inherent. They derive their specific determination from the mind, from ideas, which as “arguments” are inserted into the empty slot of 99 Only in a second act, a second noêsis, can consciousness become conscious of the previous noêsis by turning its attention—its intentionality—to it and making it the noêma of this second noêsis. Thereafter consciousness could repeat the same process with the second noêsis and so on ad infinitum. But in each case the new noêsis would relate to a previous one and thus to an Other (it now as a noêma), not to itself (qua noêsis). 100 This is tantamount to the “birth of man,” his having left the containment that the logic of the closed uroboric circle provided.

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the function (that in turn is a logical, psychological “engine”), and they merely utilize the biological energy as “fuel.” The logic of “instinctual aims” in the personal, psychological realm is thus analogous to that of the commodities fetishism (Marx) in the public sphere. In three regards, “desire” is nothing natural, biological. First, because structurally it is the craving of the empty slot in the modern logic of (no longer the “judgment,” but) the “statement” and merely receives its underpinning from the biological drives. Secondly, because this structure is, in turn, a late product and result of history (rather than an immediate expression of nature). And thirdly, because its particular aims have their origin in ideas, in fantasy (which, on top of it, in the modern world are frequently artificially induced by advertizing, propaganda, peer pressure, etc.). When “the Will” shows itself in its psychologized version as the psychoanalytical fantasies of “desire” and of a “libidinal structure” of man, this is the fantasy of a consciousness that has identified itself with the idea of the animal that has its nose on the ground and that imagines psychic processes from this point of view. However, it is important to note that it is a fantasy that becomes effective only in psychology’s interpretation of those processes, a mental idea. It is only of theoretical significance. In this regard the neurotic “The Absolute” is very different. It is pure Will as a real “factor” (“factor” in the etymological sense of the word), the Will as a real presence and present reality, indeed a hard-core reality, a mighty sickness that is very persistent and laborious to treat. This neurotic “Will” is, furthermore, fundamentally different in that it is not, like the fantasized “desire,” only a psychic willing, not a behavior of the organism. It is strictly psychological or logical, indeed (in a loose way) “metaphysical,” “other-worldly.” It does not have the dual structure of a striving (1) for some aim (2). As pure Will, “The Absolute” only wills itself. Therefore, much like the longing for the stars under the conditions of classical metaphysics, it has always already arrived. It is not désir infini. From the outset it is itself what it wills to achieve. It is its own fulfillment. This is what gives it its enormous power and gives it its absoluteness, turns it into the absolute in the literal and positivistic sense. But—and with the last few terms I come to the difference over against the authentic metaphysical position— as the collapsing into one point, the zero-point, of the metaphysical

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upward-looking and reaching-out, it has lost any extendedness, any soul space. The entire crucial difference or dialectic between implicit (an sich) and explicit (für sich), between longing or reaching-out and having a priori been reached, between “not yet” and “is always already,” between empirical reality and “in truth,” is abolished. “The Absolute” is the classical metaphysic, but absolutely reduced to its zero-stage. It is the metaphysical upward-looking, but imprisoned within itself: positivized.

9. THE SPHERE OF THE PERSONAL AND PRIVATE AS THE NEW “BATTLEGROUND” We have discussed the historical emergence of the general concept of “solitary individual” as the new “battleground” as well as how the “surplus value” or “The Absolute” that is at stake on this battleground came about. Now we have to familiarize ourselves with what “solitary individual,” seen from inside, means and involves. I start out once more from Jung’s statement that “the light’s fight against darkness [has] move[d] its battleground into the inner” of the individual. Here we have to understand that “the inner” had not been an already existing and available space as a possible receptacle for what Jung called the light’s fight against darkness, but that it only originated through that very movement into “it.” “The inner” is, just as the “solitary individual,” a product of history. It did not exist at all times. It was created. Three aspects of what the creation and historical emergence of the inner logically involves shall now be discussed. (1) What happened along with the invention of the concept of the solitary individual and the possibility of mainly focusing on the latter (which is what most forms of modern psychology as decidedly personalistic psychologies practice as their business plan) was that— in accordance with the world’s having become horizontal—a sphere of the private and merely subjective was first established besides, and in addition to, the public world. It is a sphere which, in a second step, could be concretistically construed and positivized as “the inner in man.” This means that now the world or life as a whole had become dissected into two spheres. Here it is crucial to stay with the psychological argument, the argument of a psychology with soul, according to which psychologically

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significant is only what I called the essential or ultimate questions, the soul truths, and the logical level. My thesis of there having occurred a division into the said two spheres makes sense only when we use the essential questions as criterion. For without our applying this criterion, it would be clear that a private sphere must have existed at all times, even if in very early times maybe only in rudimentary form. Something must have been going on inside people from the first beginnings of the existence of humans, and inasmuch as it was “inside,” it inevitably was also private. (Already in higher animals it is to be assumed that emotionally something is going on inside of them.) At later times, we find, already objectified, the distinction between public temples and cultic life, on the one hand, and, for example, family altars, on the other hand. Jung referred to this latter possibility when he rhetorically asked the audience of a seminar he taught, “Have you got a corner somewhere in your house where you perform the rites, as you can see in India? Even the very simple houses there have at least a curtained corner where the members of the household can lead the symbolic life, where they can make their new vows or meditation” (CW 18 § 626). In ancient Rome, too, certain important families had, outside the official Roman cult, their own private cult devoted to their particular family gods. More important is, concerning the topic of privacy, that each house (familia) had its Lar Familiaris, who was honored by prayers, offerings, and sacrifices and may originally have been a spirit of the dead, the spirit of the primordial ancestor of the family. Similarly, the Penates were gods that belonged to the house and were worshiped at the hearth. Even more private, namely in the direction of “personal,” is what Christians were taught already 2000 years ago, “But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; ...” (Matth. 6:6). Numerous other examples from different times and cultures could be listed. About such forms of private religion we can say that the difference between public-official and private was merely one of extent, so to speak, a quantitative one. It was not a qualitative, not a logical difference. The logic of religion or piety as such, the concept of “the essential,” was one and the same in both areas. What happened cultically at the family altar is, as it were, a small but concentric circle within the larger circle of official cultic life. There is a continuity in

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spirit from the public religion to the private devotion, just as the latter is in logical regards a continuation and adaption of the official cult to the needs of the private sphere. Even the prayer of the Christian in “his closet” amounts only to the very personal appropriation and inward intensification of the public creed. But what we see in modernity is that the concept of “the essential” itself is dirempted, in itself split. We get two equally important (“essential”) spheres, but the meaning of “essential” in each is totally different. We now have the public domain, the sphere of politics, economy, high finance, industry, science, technology. All this is absolutely essential in practical regards, the battleground where the real action is, and determines the well-being of each of us as well as of every society or nation, indeed, if we think of global warming, desertification, and a host of other serious problems, the well-being of the natural world and planet Earth at large. And, qua science, the public sphere decides about what is true. But psychologically this sphere has now the status of the merely external and is condemned as the domain of rationalistic ego-consciousness. As such it is considered to be of no soul significance. 101 It is psychologically precisely the unessential. “The inner” of man, by contrast, is the sphere of the merely subjective and private, and thus in practical regards mostly (not totally 102) irrelevant. Above all, it is logically absolutely irrelevant, inasmuch as it is completely up to each individual what he or she wants to consider as true and essential. “Let every man seek heaven in his own fashion,” Frederic the Great said, and he only could say it because already at his time religion had lost its absolute significance; it had ceased being a matter of truth and universal Reason, and instead has become a matter of mere opinions and personal preferences, likings: fundamentally beliebig, completely up to the individual, his private affair. Ultimately, in religious and ideological matters, now anything goes. Religion may be taken seriously by individuals, they may even be fanatics. But objectively it is no longer anything serious. However, this unessential area of the private is now the 101 In former times, cultic life, on the one hand, and politics and other areas of practical life, on the other hand, were intrinsically intertwined. 102 It can influence public opinion and voting patterns, can be turned into ideologies and belief-systems that influence others, maybe even the masses.

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“battleground” where what formerly were the essential (metaphysical or religious) questions are decided, the questions about that which is of “ultimate concern,” where the “symbolic life” (Jung) has to take place or, as for example in atheism, where it is systematically denied, or perhaps simply ignored and omitted. Now we see that the split did not simply and innocently create two domains lying side by side. Rather, it is a logical dissociation, i.e., a split that goes also through, or is reflected within, each of the two domains themselves: because it is the dissociation of the very concept of “the essential.” The public domain represents the unessential that is in reality absolutely Essential, and the private domain represents the “metaphysically” Essential that is really unessential and irrelevant. This twofold really-existing self-contradiction indicates that we are here dealing with a structural neurosis. Parallel dissociations are to be found in the co-existence between the so-called natural “life-world” (Lebenswelt, Husserl) and the theoretical, intellectual worlds of modern science and philosophy as well as in the division between leisure time and work, entertainment/hobby and serious business. (Here I should insert as an aside an explanation about the difference between a “structural neurosis” and a literal neurosis. Whereas the latter is the illness of individual people, the former refers to a structure inherent in the particular constitution of collective consciousness, or in a particular form of the organization of a society and culture, or the inner logical form of a theory. It occurs on the logical or theoretical level and does not imply that the people living in this society or culture or entertaining such a theory are personally impaired as to their mental and psychic health. A literal neurosis, on the other hand, is characterized by the fact that it is “enfleshed,” concretely enacted in the real life of individuals. It is lived as their pathology and shows in symptoms, in their behavior and/or subjective feeling and thinking. This is so because in neurosis it is the soul’s need to give an immediate real presence or present reality to “The Absolute.” A structural neurosis, by contrast, shows only in the dissociated way how things are formally ordered, set up, but it is not concerned with “The Absolute” and not with real presence.

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If neurosis in the narrower or literal sense, and this is what we are mainly concerned with in this book, is by definition enacted in the flesh and in the real life of individuals it follows that any discussion of it inevitably has to adopt a personalistic standpoint. This seems to be in contrast to the demands of a truly psychological approach that has to be based on the psychological difference and view things strictly from the standpoint of soul and not in terms of people, human beings. But the particular topic is responsible for this conflict or contradiction. Neurosis is self-contradiction (in several different ways). In our present context it is the selfcontradiction between its being obviously the individual’s very personal illness and its nevertheless not belonging merely to subjective psychology, but rather decisively being a manifestation of soul, the objective, supra-personal soul. Therefore, psychology must straddle the line in the case of neurosis. It must under no circumstances allow itself to succumb to the psychological illusory appearance (the personalistic fallacy), and yet it must also render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s rather than exclusively unto “The Absolute” the things that are “The Absolute’s.” However, it is also clear that this rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s can only happen in practical psychotherapy, in the work with actual individuals. A book on the psychology of neurosis, by contrast, must concentrate on the general workings of the soul in the production of neuroses. A second consequence of the fact that neurosis necessarily occurs as an illness of individual people, a consequence that I merely mention here without further comment, is that it belongs to what I call, with a repurposed alchemical term, the soul’s opus parvum in contrast to the opus magnum. It is a soul phenomenon, but primarily of only private significance. 103 ) 103 Only Neurosis (I write it purposely with a capital N) in the singular and in the sense of the general phenomenon (i.e., neurosis as the cultural-historical fact that in modernity neuroses in the plural came about in numerous individuals), only neurosis in this sense can be considered a symptom of the modern world at large and as such as something that also has a general soul significance for the culture.

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After this aside, I can continue with the exposition of the three aspects of what the creation of the inner logically involves. (2) According to Jung, “the whole primordial animatedness of nature” was logically stripped off (or extracted) from nature (from the individual natural beings: Planets, trees, rivers, etc.) and “swallowed into ourselves.” While I agree with the basic tendency of Jung’s observation—it is nothing else than the idea of the fundamental and irrevocable sublation of the previous locus of soul during the ages of myth and metaphysics—, I think things are a bit more complicated. It is (at least) a two-step process. What had really happened to “the primordial animatedness of nature” was by no means that it was swallowed into ourselves. It was rather condensed and collapsed into the objective idea of the One monotheistic High God up there in heaven and, for example, into the objective philosophical concept of Being. So when Jung speaks of the “animatedness” that according to him has been peeled off the world and was stuffed into the person, this represents, strictly speaking, an underdetermination. It is not the animatedness and numinosity of the world that was swallowed into the inner. They belong to the innocence of a pre-philosophical, i.e., mythological, status of consciousness. The process of abstraction or extraction that we are concerned with here happened much rather already to the successor of “animated nature,” 104 to the already reflected nature as the “Creation” of God. Or, to be precise, it did not either happen to the already reflected nature, but rather to its divine ground and Creator. In other words, it happened to the early-modern abstract, conceptual metaphysical reality, to the summum bonum, the concept of the absolute God of Christianity, the metaphysical concept of “the highest being.” 105 And as a result of that extraction process there now existed a separate extract of the already sublated “animated nature,” i.e., the metaphysical world. And this extract is the completely 104 With the help of a passage from Chaucer I discussed a partial aspect of this shift from an animated nature to its successor in Chapter 8 (“The Opposition of ‘Individual’ and ‘Collective’—Psychology’s Basic Fault. Reflections on Today’s Magnum Opus of the Soul”) of The Flight Into the Unconscious, New Orleans (Spring Journal Books) 2013. 105 When Jung says that, “the stars have fallen from heaven and our highest symbols have paled” he uses, to be sure, a language that is reminiscent of a pagan polytheistic situation, but this image is nevertheless merely his paganizing and mythologizing metaphor for a process that in truth happened to “heaven” as such, that is to the metaphysical and Christian-religious sphere as a whole, and thus to its highest symbol: God.

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abstract, disembodied logical character of “The Absolute” as such, i.e., absoluteness as a free-floating disposable authoritativeness that could for people at times contingently attach itself to arbitrary (in themselves depleted, irrelevant) contents and inflate them (equip them with absolute importance and unquestionable necessity). This is what makes ideologies, fundamentalism, but above all also obsessions, compulsions, phobias, and other neurotic symptoms possible. (3) Due to the process discussed under point (1), the public and official sphere lost its character of being the place (“battleground”) of ultimate decisions and thus was emptied of any “metaphysical” importance; simultaneously, due to point (2), the individual former realities on the previous battlegrounds of nature and of metaphysics (the dryads, gods, spirits, etc., on the one hand, the Platonic Ideas, God, absolute Being, divine Reason, etc., on the other hand) had become logically sublated and were thus reduced to subjects of purely cultural-historical and ethnological interest, or to topics of folkloristictouristic appeal for people’s leisure time entertainment. Logically the gods and spirits turned into mere “human ideas,” “contents of consciousness” in the minds of pre-scientific primitive or naive people during former ages, into “what they thought and believed.” As such they are at bottom mere curiosities. They can, however, also serve as convenient disposable props that, beyond their entertainment value or scientific historical interest, can be utilized as building bricks in modern ideologies and cults, just think of modern pagan witchcraft religions, of people trying to practice American-Indian shamanism or to live as Celtic druids, etc. But, another, more serious possibility, if those ideas well up from the nightly pit of historical memory in the inner of the individual,106 they represent also items ready to be inflated, if the occasion arises, by the now free-floating absoluteness and to turn into what Jung called “numinous archetypal images.” Or, in the case of Christianity and other “high religions,” their ideas are still possible today, but only as utterly private convictions in one’s inner, in one’s subjective mind and feeling, and not as objective truths. The narrow and fundamentally irrelevantized sphere of the personal and private is—or rather gives the impression of being—the successor to the sphere of myth and metaphysics, and now in modernity provides 106

Jung posited it (sometimes in a mystifying way) as “the collective unconscious.”

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(again I have to say: seems to provide) the exclusive arena that essential life has at its disposal to display itself, and it is the whole horizon and ultimate circumference within which it has to unfold itself. This has the consequence that man has turned into homo psychologicus and has now in all essential regards, i.e., as far as “importance” and meaning are concerned, a psychological relation to, and interpretation of, himself and psychologizes even his experience of the world, his entire worldrelation,107 while with respect to self-evident truth he has a scientifictechnical relation to himself and the world. Concerning the aspect of this funneling of “the essential” into the sphere of the personal and private, we could say, in still mythologizing language, that the “Spirit Mercurius” is now locked into the bottle of the private and subjective. The essential or “metaphysical” life that once, in archaic times, was released, dispersed, disseminated, into the whole wide world (the cosmos) all around us—and later, at the time of metaphysics, into the whole expanse of Being as such, into the Creation, and into the logos—to play itself out there and in return to speak to the soul and heart from there, is now squeezed into the tiny space of the person’s interior. This has the consequence that the material it has available to express itself (to say it in terms of the logic of existence)108 can no longer be the planets and the spirits in trees and rivers, Heaven and Earth, paradise and hell, God and his salvation-work in history, and not either “the universal, the particular and the individual,” nor subject, predicate and copula. No, the stuff to express what is absolutely essential has to be Mom and Dad and my relation to them, my ego, my childhood development, my emotions and desires, my traumatic experiences and my reactions to them, my conflicts, my guilt and my pain, my worth and identity, “I and my boss,” “man and woman”—notabene: all this not merely as individual finite exemplifications and representations of the logic of 107 See the very insightful book by Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, London (Chatto Windus) 1966, and “The Emergence of Psychological Man” in his Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, rev. ed., New York 1961, pp. 361–93. I owe the awareness of these texts (and even a copy of the former) to the friendliness of Greg Mogenson. 108 This “expressing itself ” could be seen as a spontaneous analogy to what Dora Kalff established as a psychotherapeutic method, namely sandplay therapy. The cosmos could then be compared to the “sand” of the sandplay and all things in the cosmos to the “toy figures” used to create a specific sandplay image.

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existence, among many, but as its absolute locus and immediate reality. They now have to be “The Absolute,” be of absolute importance. This is the logical precondition of the possibility of neurosis as self-contradiction and ingenious contrivance. 109 If, to mention only one tiny example, a patient suffers from an uncontrollable inner restlessness and from insomnia because he cannot bear it that in his professional position in a firm he has to stand up for decisions made by his superiors, decisions that do not completely concur with his own moral values or his own expert judgment, then one can tell from this small neurotic symptom that he himself as real human being and individual has become that “battleground” that Jung spoke about. One can see that, and how, “the light’s fight against darkness” has translocated its theater of war into the inner of that person. He now is the arena in which two tendencies fight with each other and spend themselves more or less autonomously (in symptoms: restlessness, insomnia), so that he is helplessly exposed to the effects of this internal fight (rather than being exposed to this fight itself, of which he remains largely unconscious). This is what is neurotic about it. In the neurotic situation it is precisely not the way that it could just as well be, namely, that he would have simply the problem of having to adapt his subjectivity to external reality. Such a problem could cause lots of conscious suffering for him, and he would then have to solve it one way or another. Then the problem or rather his task would be that he would have to decide between three options: (1) he could opportunistically side with the business necessities and his career interests and pay for this choice by sacrificing his subjective convictions; or (2) he would, conversely, have to stand up for his view and conviction and pay for his courage by having to accept, without grudge!, the possibly very unpleasant consequences; (3) he could try to come up with some sort of compromise solution and pay for this by the not exactly flattering knowledge that he merely weaseled out of the 109 The archetypal images that occur in dreams and other inner experiences are not comparable with respect to “absolute importance” and “immediate reality” to “Mom” and “Dad,” “my childhood trauma” and all the other things that become psychological man’s stuff to express his ultimate concern with. The archetypal images belong only to the rhetoric of soul. As such they can of course be given ultimate importance by the ego.

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problem. 110 All these possibilities, although in moral regards very different (the first and the last one certainly morally problematic) and all of them hard to bear, would nevertheless be part of normal psychology, that is to say, psychologically unproblematic. The person with the neurotic symptom, by contrast, displays a psychologically untenable stance. By having his symptoms (the uncontrollable restlessness and insomnia), and thanks to them, he has no problem. He is relieved, completely out of the woods. It is not he who finds himself on a battlefield upon which he would have to stand his ground and prove himself, a battlefield on which he would have to show what kind of person he is, whether he is, for example, a man of character or rather an opportunist. No, instead of being on the battleground, he is himself the battleground, a battleground on which, to the total surprise of his innocent consciousness, two strange armies wage a war. This is the neurotic trick. He swallowed the conflict. His restlessness is the on principle endless vibrating or the tremor as which the (swallowed and thus objectified and autonomized) subjective conflict presents itself. And this internal trembling is on principle endless, because both sides are at one and the same time posited as absolutely incompatible and as absolutely irrenunciable. For this reason, an armistice, let alone peace, is just as much totally out of the question as is a victory of the one side over the other. This is what is neurotic about it. Instead of having a problem and feeling called upon to solve it through his showing presence and his own decision, the neurotic is the suffering from a (for consciousness mysterious) symptom, and to that extent he is sick.

*** When I said that the narrow sphere of the personal and private is the successor to the sphere of myth and metaphysics and now provides the exclusive arena that essential life has at its disposal to display itself, I already added in parenthesis that it only seems to be that way. It is inherent in the logic of neurosis to give itself this 110 I ignore the possibility that through having come into this new situation he might get into a process of the development of consciousness, with the result that his original values and opinions would change so that the original conflict between his values and what is demanded of him would be removed.

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impression for us. In other words, the view that the sphere of the inner has become the new battleground itself belongs to the psychological illusionary appearance. It is itself a neurotic interpretation of the modern situation, the situation of homo psychologicus. We must not fall for the appearance created by the neurotic, totally psychologized world-relation. It is precisely not in “the inner” of man that the soul truth expresses itself predominantly. The inner is not the modern successor of the cosmos, that cosmos which was the place in which at the time of myth and, in different ways, of metaphysics the inner truth of the logic of human being-in-the-world articulated itself. Introspection is not the way to go—outside of the narrow limits of the concern for one’s critical self-reflection (which includes the purpose of overcoming one’s neurotic complexes). What happens and presents itself in the inner, especially in neurosis, has generally no relatedness to the world and no reference to being, no “religious” or “metaphysical” or soul significance, is not an access to meaning and is not concerned with the verily valid truth, but is from the bottom private, world-less, cut off from the Universal. I contradict Jung’s view that neurosis is “nature’s attempt to heal him [the man who is ill]” (CW 10 § 361) or even an attempt (even if an incomplete or unsuccessful one) to heal a collective problem (cf. CW 7 § 438 and § 4). It is a “game” in which the individual isolated soul busies itself only with itself. An ego-trip. However, an ego-trip of the soul (not of the ego-personality!). It has to be so because neurosis presupposes the emancipation of the individual from both the universal and the communal, just as it presupposes that revolutionary shift, identified by Simmel and first decidedly executed by Schopenhauer, through which the blind will, the primarily empty desire, was established as the deepest ground of man, as the centerless “center” around which everything revolves. It could only come about after the event of man’s having become catapulted out of Reason as the highest determination of man, that Reason which had it highest purpose and its truth in the gods and later in God. But all this means, too, that homo psychologicus, that is, that man who defines himself in terms of “the inner” and looks for meaning there, is standing with his back to the real battleground on

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which “the light’s fight against darkness” is fought today, that arena in which today’s essential questions are decided. As we will see later more clearly, the nature of neurosis consist precisely in its being without truth, having no connection to the (logically) universal, but being merely the vain claim to, the empty insistence on, “absolute significance per se.” “The Absolute” of neurosis is the Schopenhauerian blind Will, the Will unmoored from its ground in Reason and thus unleashed, which now has become positivized as an independent force and has gone to people’s head. Again: neurosis has no redeeming value. It is simply sick.

PART 3

The internal logic and functioning of neurosis

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eurosis is not a mishap, not caused by external circumstances, not the result of traumas. It is a project, an opus, a Work (a work as in “work of art”). But it is a project of a highly complex structure, and this structure will now have to be explored and expounded. The term “structure” might, however, be misleading, suggesting, as it does, a static building. As a project and Work, and as a manifestion of soul in general, “structure” must here be understood dynamically as logical life: a whole of complex internal movements and relations within what from outside looks like a more or less static phenomenon. It is similar to how, invisible from outside, within a human body perfectly at rest an incredible number of processes and activities are going on, for the most part even unnoticed by the person: the circulation of the blood, digestion, the production of hormones, etc., etc. The difference is, however, that a human body perfectly at rest could theoretically also be a corpse in which these processes would not go on, whereas in the case of a neurosis, if processes of its internal logical life have disappeared, then the entire neurosis itself has disappeared, too. Nothing at all is left. Nothing can be seen. This is because neurosis is a soul phenomenon, and soul is not an existing

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substantial entity within which a certain logical life is going on. It is itself (“only”) the ongoing of this logical life, without substrate.

1. THE SPELLBOUND SOUL AND “THE ABSOLUTE PRINCIPLE” In the previous parts we have discussed in general terms certain decisive properties of neurosis and the historical development that created the enabling conditions for its emergence. Now we want to begin to see how a neurosis functions if seen from within itself. In order to make it easier to get into the subject and in order to have a phenomenal basis for our description of the complex internal drama or logical life that takes place within what from outside appears as the simple fact of a neurotic symptom, stance, or behavior, I will use a fairytale type as our model. In this way the methodological mistake of conventional theories of neurosis can be avoided. They try to go directly to neurosis and view it within the consulting room horizon of case histories. This forces them from the outset to be personalistic and clinical in outlook. Fairytales, by contrast, distance us from the positive facts, and as the soul’s own fantasy productions allow for soul perspective on our topic. The model I will use is the fairytale type AT 507A, 111 possibly best known through Hans Christian Andersen’s “Rejsekammeraten” (“The Traveling Companion,” first published in 1835), also recorded, in a rather good version by Carl August Eduard Ey, under the title “Die verwünschte Königstochter” (“The Enchanted Princess,” in his Harzmärchenbuch, 1862). The story goes as follows. A young man who does not like it at home anymore is paid out his small heritage by his father and goes out into the world. He uses the little money he has to pay for the burial of a dead man who, pennyless, without this good deed by the protagonist of the tale would not have received an appropriate burial. After that, a stranger follows him and becomes his traveling companion. They come to a city where there is a princess who for a long time had refused to marry, but now, after much pressure from her father, the king, and his councilors, has finally consented 111 “AT” followed by a number, here e.g. “507A,” refers to the international classification of fairytale types in The Types of the Folktale, Antti Aarne’s Verzeichnis der Märchentypen [FF Communications No. 3, 1910], translated and enlarged by Stith Thomson. Folklore Fellows Communication No. 184, Helsinki 1961.

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to marry, but only that man who is capable of solving the three riddles she will pose to him. Her condition is that if he cannot solve the riddles he will be beheaded. The traveling companion urges the young man to try to win the princess and promises him his help, revealing that he is the ghost of the dead man for whose burial the young man had paid. He goes to the castle and makes his wish known. At night he observes how the princess flies out of her room. Through the magic help of his companion he is able to follow her secretly and to see how she flies to a mountain and into an underground castle where she spends the night with a demon. It is the demon who also tells her what riddle question she is to pose to the suitor the next morning and what the correct answer is. Because the young man overheard this conversation, he is able to answer her riddle correctly the next day. This happens analogously the next two nights and mornings, except that on the last morning, when the correct answer to the third riddle, the question, what is the princess thinking of at that moment, is “the head of her demon lover,” the young man by way of his answer pulls out from a sack this very head (which he had cut off of the demon the night before after the princess had left him). In this way the magic power of the demon over the king’s daughter is broken, the young man has won her for himself, and the kingdom along with her.

Two different and actually separate themes are combined in this fairytale type: a) the theme of “Dead man as helper,” “The grateful dead man,” as in types AT 505–508, and b) the theme of the enchanted princess under the spell of a demon. There is another fairytale type, AT 306 (“Die zertanzten Schuhe” [“The Danced-out Shoes”], that tells a story that is very similar to our fairytale, but contains only the equivalent to the second theme. The motif of the dead man as helper does not play a role in this other tale. Its story goes roughly like this: A king locks up his twelve daughters every night, but finds out that each morning their shoes are inexplicably danced out. He promises one of his daughters to the man who can find out the mysterious reason. If, however, he does not succeed after three nights of standing on guard in front of their sealed door, he will be beheaded. A poor soldier takes the risk. Also with the help of magic, he is able to follow the twelve daughters as

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Before I discuss the logic of the story told in these tales, I must make a few preliminary remarks. 1. Versions of these fairytale types have been told in many countries, and each time they come with somewhat different embellishments, details, and slight variations. Therefore the fairytale type appears in numerous different version and guises, some more pure and some more distorted, without, however, ceasing to be unambiguously instantiations of that particular type. In my discussion I am not interested in any particular version of the type, nor in the differences between the versions, but only in the general structure, the basic schema, of the plot that characterizes the type as such and that can help us to illustrate the inner logical life of a neurosis. 2. I will at first concentrate mainly on that one part or motif of the story I recounted here in somewhat more detail (AT 507A), that motif that it has in common with the main plot of type AT 306, the conquest and rescue of the princess. That is to say, I am here at first only interested in the situation and behavior of the princess and what happens to her, because this is what expresses for me the analogue within the fairytale to what in the reality of modern life is known as the psychic phenomenon of neurosis. 3. I am interested in this part of the stories only as the narration of a general pattern or constellation that throws a light on what is going on inside a neurosis. I completely leave aside the questions of what the meaning of the stories is if they are considered in terms of the literary genre of fairytale that they belong to, and what the stories may have meant in the context of life at the time in ancient history when these fairytales were invented (they may date as far back as to the Stone Age). Above all, I am not suggesting that the fairytales once did, and thus now still do, want to portray a neurotic condition. In fact, I believe that at the time of their origin, neuroses in the strict sense were still altogether impossible. Their meaning and purpose was something very different.112 But I also believe that if the general pattern objectively 112 At their own time and within their own context, fairytales were in all likelihood something like allegorical commentaries of ritual processes (Pierre Saintyves) or idealtype models of the course of events in visionary experiences by shamans or during initiation rites (Heino Gehrts).

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contained in them is taken out of its own context and used (indeed misused) for our purposes, we get an excellent narrative that can in exemplary fashion help us to plastically illustrate for ourselves certain essential elements of the structure of a neurosis. The psychological mind, generally unpracticed in thought, likes to hold onto images and stories as a kind of visual (or imaginal) aid to gain its insights, much like small children tend to use their fingers in order to perform their simple calculations. It is only in this sense that I use the fairytale types, or rather the theoretical model artificially abstracted and extracted from them, as paradigms for the elucidation of the inner logic of neurosis. My purpose is not a psychological interpretation of this fairytale. The particular advantage of using a fairytale as paradigm is of course that it allows us from the outset to leave the clinical and personalistic consulting room perspective behind and to begin with a fresh, truly psychological approach. By using it we can draw the consequences from Jung’s important insight that the clinical perspective obscures a veritable psychological view. As we already heard, he said, “There is no way, it seems to me, how the psychotherapy of today can escape the necessity of having to do a great deal of unlearning and relearning, [...] until it may succeed in no longer thinking neurotically itself” (GW 10 § 369, my transl.). The particular fairytale type that I chose has as its topic only one special type of neurosis (if one happens to be willing to read it as a story of a neurosis and its cure in the first place). It is concerned with a female figure who needs to be cured from a problematic condition. At first glance we can say that it might be the representation of a case of a neurotic incapability of a personal erotic relationship with the masculine, and maybe of frigidity. But women can have many different kinds of neurotic problems, and men also suffer from all sorts of neuroses. Nevertheless, this example of one particular type of neurosis can serve as a paradigm from which to read off essential aspects of the internal functioning of neurosis that all forms of neurosis have in common. 4. The young man who disenchants the princess (and who in actuality is the protagonist of the tale), has his position completely outside of what from our modern point of view is the neurosis. He alone is able to remain completely unaffected by its power and effects, and this is why he can bring about the rescue from what for us is viewed as the neurosis. The reason for his ability not to have to succumb to

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the power of the princess’s neurosis, nor, like the king, her father, and his councilors, to have to give in helplessly to her obstinate demands, is narrated in the backstory of the young man, and it is condensed to and depicted in the separate figure of the helpful dead. We must not take these two figures literally as two separate beings; they are, psychologically seen, one person whose two aspects have imaginally or narratively been divided into two distinct figures. The one represents the protagonist as the empirical personality that he is, the other represents him as his own soul-depth, with which he happens to be in true communion. What is portrayed in the young man together with his helper from the realm of the dead—so we could say (on the basis of our repurposing the fairytale and reading it as a model of the modern psychic situation)—is the truly therapeutic position and attitude. If it is basically the same tale that once, by Andersen, was entitled “The Traveling Companion” and another time, by Carl August Eduard Ey, “The Enchanted Princess,” then we see from the titles they gave this tale that Andersen stresses the therapeutic aspect, while Ey emphasizes the aspect of the neurotic situation. The latter is, as I pointed out, what will concern us first in the following investigation.

*** Now let us look at the various aspects of the constellation portrayed in this fairytale situation. 1. The princess refuses to marry. This is astonishing because it is unnatural. She is a girl or young woman who as such would normally naturally want to marry. After all, she is not portrayed and not to be imagined as a Lesbian, nor as a modern radical feminist. No, we have to assume that she is a normal girl in a traditional context who would actually want to have a lover and get married, a normal girl, if not for some strange, completely unknown and incomprehensible reason she were made to stubbornly refuse to marry. This refusal is a neurotic symptom.113 113 Archetypal psychology might here, for example, think that in such a person the Artemis archetype (or, another possibility, the Athena archetype) has gained power over her consciousness and functions as its dominant unconscious perspective. In her consciousness she has become identified with Artemis. I find this theory untenable. Neurosis has nothing whatsoever to do with gods, goddesses and archetypes. Gods have

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What emerges here is the opposition between the natural human desires and the contra naturam desires of the soul. In the girl’s initial refusal to marry, it is the soul that manifests. As an interfering, disturbing factor, the soul breaks into the course of normal life, crosses, as Jung was wont to say, our will, our natural everyday concerns, substituting its, the soul’s, autonomous, otherworldly needs or desires for the girl’s own, indeed, even reversing the direction of desire. There are in this story—and in neurosis—two spheres in opposition to each other: here the sphere of our legitimate human interests and personal needs, the pragmatic sphere of what we as real people in our concrete earthly circumstances want in order to live a safe and fulfilled life and what is to our real advantage—and there the sphere of the soul ruthlessly intruding and imposing its inhuman demands upon a human being, not caring in the least for the well-being and happiness of the individual. 2. The desires of the soul manifesting in the girl are a foreign body in the life of the princess, an alien element. This is quite clear from the fact that in the end, after being freed from the spell she had been under, she is a happy bride and she and her husband are said to live happily together. However, despite the fact that this initial desire not to marry is an alien element in the young woman, it is completely ego-syntonic. She herself does not have the least inkling that this is not her own wish. Rather, she is absolutely convinced that it is truly her own wish not to marry. So the soul did not only intrude, it also obliterated its intruder-character by, as it were, turning the girl around, like spies sometimes are turned around. We know today of viruses that settle in certain cells in a host organism and manage to reprogram them so that from then on they no longer do what they originally were meant to do in the service of the organism, but now work for the viruses and their illnessa cosmic dimension and are complex structures of deep meaning. The neurotic “The Absolute,” by contrast, is fundamentally devoid of meaning, really dumb, just factual power. It is not a complex whole which opens up a rich web of interconnected meanings and concepts. It rather has the character of an extensionless point, being, after all, an abstract principle. It is not an image, cannot be thought of as a figure. Neurosis is beyond the imaginal, beyond the level of semantic contents. As thoroughly modern, it is inescapably abstract and positivistic, only logical, strictly functional. The theory of archetypes has to be kept out. (If, in a delusional psychosis, a patient thinks she is the Virgin Mary, then, of course, an archetypal explanation may be in place. But such a patient is precisely not neurotic.)

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producing purposes. In social contexts we similarly know the phenomenon of brainwashing. Something like this reprogramming or brainwashing has happened to the princess. Her own wish, the wish that she as person and human being would have, has been stolen from her and redefined. In a fairytale context this is described as bewitchment, being under a spell. It is not the same as possession, where there is usually some sense or awareness of the alien element that intrudes and takes over. But of course in a loose sense we can say that the girl is possessed. At any rate, because the soul’s alien wish is completely ego-syntonic, she is totally in the grip of this wish and both absolutely powerless with respect to it and absolutely immune to rational criticism and arguments. The neurotic contradiction that manifests here consists in that what is truly alien appears as her very own. 3. Via the hero of the story and his magic help from his traveling companion we find out why the girl refuses to marry: she is already living in a “marriage” with a demon. This fact is obviously not to be learned without “magic” means. Nobody else in the castle becomes aware of it. That is to say, it is not part of empirical-factual reality. The king and his counselors, for example, cannot see it, and not because they were not vigilant enough or blind or stupid. For them the behavior of the princess is simply a riddle, because what is going on here cannot be seen with normal empirical means. What emerges here is the duality of two ontologically different worlds, two different orders of world. This difference is expressed in several ways. a) There is the difference between day and night, in other words, between the day-world and the night-world, which here are not alternating parts of one continuous flow of time, but distinct dimensions, each obeying its own totally different laws. b) While during the day the princess is probably subjected to gravity and held to the ground like everybody else, and therefore has to walk if she wants to go anywhere, at night she miraculously can all of a sudden fly. c) Her lover is a demon and lives inside a mountain, in an underground castle. So it is not that she has a secret lover, like some people have secret extramarital relations. In such relations the lover or mistress is on the same plane as the legitimate husband or wife; they both share one and the same empirical reality, and this is why the lovers

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also need to find special limited times for their rendezvous. Precisely because ontologically both their marriage and their affair take place in one and the same world, they empirically or practically have to take special precautions to keep the two separate and their meetings secret. To have a secret love affair, and for this reason to have to resort to lies and excuses to make the rendezvous possible while keeping it secret, is a social and practical problem, and, of course, also a moral problem. But it is in itself not necessarily neurotic, the holding apart of the two spheres is not in itself a neurotic dissociation. Why not? Because it is a separation within one and the same sphere of empirical behavior and not a separation between the sphere of empirical behavior (day-world), on the one hand, and the sphere of the soul (night-world), on the other hand. The situation of the princess is completely different. She lives in two worlds that are ontologically separate, so that there is, under normal circumstances, no danger (not even a possibility) of their ever coming together. There is no need to keep them apart and secret through complicated maneuvers. Unlike marriage and illegitimate affairs they cannot get into each other’s way. Empirically speaking the princess does not have a rendezvous at night. She does not leave her bed, just as in the other story the twelve daughters do not empirically leave their bed-chamber, since they stay locked in. Their dancing and our girl’s meeting her demon happen while their empirical bodies sleep in their beds. The fact that the princess is flying indicates that it is she not as physical body and real being in the flesh, but she as soul, she as existing concept, who is visiting her lover. If it were indeed an experience, which at least from our perspective it is not, it could perhaps be called a visionary experience. This is what in the authentic ritualistic or initiationrelated context of the original fairytale it may well have been. But since for me this story is serving as a model for the structure of neurosis, it must not be understood as an experience at all, because visionary experiences are emotional and empirical (albeit unusual empirical) events. There is nothing here of the excitement, thrill and romanticism of an affair, of a love adventure. No passion. We have to realize that in our story empirically nothing whatsoever happens during the night. No real meeting of two lovers, no physical embrace, no experience of lust and pleasure. Nothing empirical, nothing

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experiential. For this is what “night” here is about. Here, day and night are not names for different parts of the 24-hour cycle. Day and night are names for two different orders or dimensions of reality. In empirical reality, as part of the 24-hour cycle, day and night are separated by time. They are consecutive and alternate. When it is night, it is not day and vice versa. But in the fairytale world day and night are simultaneous, two autonomous realities. Two realities can only be fundamentally different, even mutually exclusive, and yet be simultaneous, if they do not touch. They must be absolutely dissociated, divided by an ontological or logical gap. We know that there is this gap because otherwise it would not need magic to cross over from the one to the other (the case of the princess) and to bring back the knowledge as well as the beheaded head of the demon from the other into to first one (the case of the fairytale protagonist). There is only one small point in each story type where there is a spontaneous, not magical crossing over the fundamental rift that ontologically separates day and night. In the one fairytale this is the danced-out shoes, in the other it is the refusal to marry, as well as the riddles. In each case, these are empirical manifestations of what originates in the otherwise invisible otherworld of the soul. They are manifestations through which, in isolated spots, the otherwise invisible otherworld or the soul makes its presence felt in empirical reality. However, the spots are so isolated that empirically they remain an absolute riddle. Nobody can make sense of them. In neurosis such spots are called symptoms. Symptoms are like the tip of a huge iceberg that is otherwise invisible, because most of it is under water. So we have to understand that during daytime in the clock-sense of the word it is always simultaneously both day and night in the fairytale sense of the word. The same applies to the nighttime in the clock-sense. This is why the princess is at night both lying in her bed and sleeeping AND flying out to her underworldly encounter with her lover-demon: the one empirically, the other psychologically. But during daytime she is also psychologically flying to and spending her time with her demon, while empirically she is leading her normal life in her father’s castle. I rejected the description of her being with her lover both as an empirical love adventure and as a visionary event, because I denied

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that it is an experience, and as such part of the empirical world (or day-world in the fairytale sense of the word). I emphasized that empirically and experientially nothing happened, although of course our tale, being a narrative and having to portray things with sensual images, shows real action and adventure. Even a visionary experience is a psychic event and not a psychological one. But as what else should we comprehend what is narratively described as occurring in the night? What is the nature of the psychological? With the alchemists and with Jung we might say that it is something that takes place “in Mercurio.” But with this formulation one unknown is merely replaced by another unknown, and on top of it “Mercurius” is still too imaginal, evokes still too many sensuoussubstantial associations and sounds too romantic-mysterious. What the fairytale expresses by means of the night-time flight to the demon in the form of a narrative image is: a “truth.” Not the insight into a truth, a moment of truth, an event of truth, but truth as such—static, timeless, Eleatic: unmoving. It is abstractly noetic, a purely logical notion, a knowing, the notion and knowing that she, the princess, is already married. The word “knowing,” however, is already tricky, because it might be misunderstood as referring to a conscious awareness, her awareness (which would again have the nature of a psychic event in contrast to the psychological reality of a truth). Another way of putting it would be to say that “day” in this fairytale refers to the princess (to restrict this present comment only to her) as the human being that she is. It refers to what she as ordinary, empirical human person (“ego-personality”) may think and feel about herself (as well as about anything else), to her wishes and interests and fantasies. “Night,” by contrast, refers to the princess as the CONCEPT as which she exists, to what she is in truth (independently of what she may think, feel, wish and what she may be aware of ), her psychological being. While empirically speaking she is just a young girl, certainly unmarried, even clearly without any lover, psychologically (“at night,” in truth) she is married. (This is a case of what we call the “psychological difference.”) Paradoxically, the princess has no knowledge of the psychological truth or concept as which she is. This concept or knowing is her being, not her knowing. The knowing does not have

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the character of con-scientia, syn-eidêsis. There is no awareness here, no conscious thought, idea, or reflection, no imagination, no feeling or emotion, no desire, no romantic longing, no happy fulfillment, no pain of love, etc.—no psychic act whatsoever. Just the psychologically objective, sort of extensionless “truth” or “principle” of being married. It is a thought (again: an objective thought thought by the soul, not her subjective thought, her thinking), an existing concept. As thought it is quite unexcited, abstract, cold, sober, ghostly. This is crucial. If one does not get this point one cannot comprehend the psychology of neurosis, nor the nature of the psychological in general. 4. The extensionless, pointlike quality of the principle under whose spell she is comes out in the story in the separate image of the demon. Regardless of what the demon may have meant for the people who first invented or heard this fairytale, for us, who use it for our psychological purposes of explaining the logic of neurosis, the demon does not imply an archetypal or imaginal figure. He lacks the plastic concreteness, depth and substantial realness of a mythic person. In mythology the figures are generally endowed with very many different, sometimes even conflicting personal characteristics, moods and aspects, like these might show in real people. The underworld demon in our fairytale, however, is hardly any more than the empty word “demon,” hardly any more than a placeholder. Thus he has nothing whatsoever to do with the mythological underworld as it was alive in the cult and myth of ancient peoples. Rather, he is the image for the facelessness, shapelessness and irrepresentability of a principle, for the ghostly abstractness and absolute negativity of a notional truth.114 He cannot be imagined, is not supposed to be imagined. He has no personality, is no person. He is not really her partner, her lover, her husband, in whom she could find her fulfillment and from whom she might have children. He is just the representation in imaginal form of the abstract principle or concept of the princesses’s always already being married. He is as such the separate narrative embodiment of the idea of marriage per se as a psychological reality, so that her 114 About the radically different character of mythic figures, on the one hand, and fairytale figures, on the one hand, cf. David Miller, “Fairy Tale or Myth?,” in: Spring 1976, pp. 157–164.

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“relation” to “him” leaps, as it were, across the fundamental border between “species,” she being a woman, he a concept. Her relation is thus not a concrete, real, empirical marriage “in the flesh”; it is “marriage” with the concept of marriage—but, and this is essential, with a concept that (as such, as concept) comes as its own fulfillment, as its always already being real. This is why there is absolutely no need for a real husband or partner here. Indeed, a real husband would only disturb the purity of the concept of marriage, because with a real husband there would be his special personal character and human-all-too-human qualities that would limit the infinity of the concept and draw it into ordinary reality. As demon, the demon is not a real rival for the young man in our tale. First of all, he is not empirically real, does not positively exist. He is ghostly, i.e., purely (logically) negative, and thus belongs to the night-world that does not touch the day-world. He does not make love to the girl. Nothing happens between them. And secondly, there is not really such a demon, sort of in the flesh, no Other who could serve as a real partner of the princess, inasmuch as the demon is merely the visualization as separate figure of the abstract concept of marriage that is the girl’s very own soul truth. Thus there is not really a couple here at all, not two beings, king’s daughter and demon. No, the only thing that really exists is the king’s daughter, a young girl whose psychological true being (not her consciousness!) is unconsciously captivated, spellbound by the abstract concept of marriage as a selfsufficient autonomous principle, and this is narratively portrayed by her flying to a demon. What we see here is the intellectual base and origin of neurosis! Neurosis is an intellectual illness. The demon, I said, is not a real rival for the young man. But of course, in effect such a principle does indeed amount to a “rival,” and a much more serious one than any real lover might be. A principle is an absolute ruler who cannot tolerate anybody or anything beside it. This is made explicit by the fact that (in both fairytale types) there is the threat for the suitor of being beheaded. It would have been completely sufficient to reject him, to send him away. Such an outrageous, radical consequence expresses the absolute incompatibility between the suitor and the principle dominating the true being of the king’s daughter. But this

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incompatibility does not so much exist between the principle and this particular suitor as the empirical man and person he is, not even between the principle and any real suitor, whoever he might be, but ultimately it is the incompatibility between the level of principle (or concept, or soul truth) and the level of the empirically real as such. A principle is radical, indeed absolute by definition, absolutely uncompromising. It leaves no room for tolerance, for a give and take. It is always deadly serious, and, as is shown here, even literally deadly. In this sense, the deadly condition set by the princess for her readiness to confront empirically real suitors does not imply a special cruelty on her part. This terrible punishment has nothing to do with her as person, with her particular character and her feelings. She does not dislike or hate men in general, nor does she dislike or hate this one man. The condition set by her is completely unemotional, cold, abstract, matter-of-fact. Indeed, it is not her condition at all, but the condition required by her demon, the principle. And even then it is not a sign of a raging hatred against people on the part of this principle, and of course not anything like jealousy, nothing emotional at all. Rather, the requirement that the failing suitors be killed is merely the imaginal or narrative self-display of the objective principle character of the principle that dominates the king’s daughter, i.e., the selfdisplay of its absoluteness, its absolute deadliness, as a principle. A principle excludes the real. It is indeed deadly to come into the vicinity of a principle that has come real in a person, in other words, that has taken hold of him or her. The motif of beheading is thus the imaginal representation and illustration of what logically follows from the nature of a principle as an actually ruling one. I spoke of neurosis as an intellectual illness. One could go one step further and speak of it as a philosophical illness. We also had to note that the king’s daughter’s idea of marriage is a concept that is immediately (as such, as concept) its own fulfillment. This makes it apparent that she lives under the laws of psychological reality, because for her the concept qua concept has “everything it needs” within itself,115 115 With this statement I follow an essential alchemical insight about the lapis that Jung expressed (e.g., with respect to fantasy images) in CW 14 § 749 as a general principle: “Above all, don’t let anything from outside, that does not belong, get into it, for the fantasy-image has ‘everything it needs’ within itself ” (transl. modif.).

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even its fulfillment, its existence, its reality: the realm of “the soul” is characterized by the fact that in it the dictum that was offered by Jung as a methodological maxim is taken as an unshakeable ontological truth. This is the fundamental difference between psychology, on the one hand, and “the soul” or psychological reality as it appears in neurosis, on the other. In psychology, defined as the discipline of interiority, that maxim is only valid for its constitutive methodological approach. But it does not claim that what this maxim says is in fact true for empirical reality. For the princess, however, the concept of marriage is a priori self-sufficient, complete, independent, not wanting, not unsaturated. This makes it absolute, unbedingt (unconditional). The concept is here not abstract concept, not a mere idea in contrast to its realization, a realization that might be possible, but is not necessary. In the sphere of the soul there is no difference between the fantasy or image of 100 dollars and 100 real dollars, as there is according to Kant, for whom “being is not a real predicate” (Sein ist kein reales Prädikat).116 For Kant reality or existence is something that has to come as an addition to the concept. But neurosis, as an expression of the soul, relies on another, older concept of the concept, the concept as we find it in the neoplatonically-inspired realism (concerning universals) of early medieval metaphysics. For our princess, at least in her night-world aspect (as also of course for the soul in general), being is a real predicate, and unquestionably so. That is to say, “being” is here something that is inherent in the description or definition of a res. The concept of “always already being married” as such a priori implies its reality in the sense of actual existence (which is why I repeatedly spoke of the “existing concept”). The noumenon is in itself substantial. It is to some degree in the same spirit that Jung said about psychology, Its truth is a fact and not a judgment. When psychology speaks, for instance, of the motif of the virgin birth, it is only concerned with the fact that there is such an idea, but it is 116 “Real” in this Kantian sentence does not refer to reality in the sense of actuality, but has the older meaning coming from Latin res: thing, matter. What Kant is saying therefore means: Being or reality is not part of the content (description or the definition: what can be predicated) of a concept. Part of the “reality” (in this particular sense) of a griffin is that it is a hybrid of lion and bird. Whether such a hybrid exists or not is another question altogether.

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However, as is also made quite clear in this quote, the psychologist does of course not claim that such an idea is also true in positive-factual reality, in other words, that it has an external referent, which is why I stress the strictly methodological character of this view in psychology. But the soul itself, we see, is absolutely sold on the general argument contained in the old Anselmian ontological proof of the existence of God (that for Kant, just as for the empirical ego, is fallacious, even nonsensical). This is why it is crucial that we not succumb to the misunderstanding that the princess’s knowing of her already being married would be her subjective notion. No, neurosis is grounded in an abstract thought as an existing and powerful fact,117 a thought in which and as which the soul in fact lives. That this argument is valid for what we call in a mythologizing language “the soul” is, as it were, part of the definition of soul or of the psychological, its sine qua non. Now it has become obvious that and why the principle must exclude the empirically real. It is not only that there are here two mutually exclusive fundamental premises, the one that of the soul, the other that of the ego. Exclusive premises could also be conceived as alternatives which coexist as such, just as, for example, did capitalism and communism during the Cold War. But the position underlying a principle, the position of the concept’s absolute selfsufficiency and unconditionality, cannot tolerate the possibility of a dependence of the concept on conditions external to itself as an alternative, just as an absolute ruler cannot tolerate the idea of democracy as an alternative. The notion of the conditional and incomplete nature of the concept would strike at the very heart of the other premise and would, if allowed, undermine, even destroy, what it is about, the idea of self-sufficiency, absoluteness. Obviously it is part of the very content of the notion of the unconditional concept that it excludes the conditional, the contingent. If the least doubt or a mere questioning were admitted as to whether the psychological concept of marriage is in itself 117

Which has the result that the thought has turned into a concrete thought.

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already the absolute and absolutely real marriage, the absoluteness of the principle would have been punctured. This is why the mere existence of a suitor represents a lèse-majesté, a sacrilege, because it does not merely offer an alternative, but has a priori refuted, and thus dealt a mortal blow to, the premise of absolute self-sufficiency. The existence of a suitor means: “you are not really married, that is just a fiction and nonsense. You are crazy to think that the mere idea in the soul indeed implies its reality. No, you and your concept of marriage are incomplete; if marriage is to be, you really need a husband, a real husband as an addition from outside.” But this is absolutely unacceptable for the principle, and this is why the existence of such a thing as a “suitor” has to be extinguished (rather than that merely he, a concrete individual suitor, would have to be rejected). In other words, we have a clash between the standpoint of the soul and the standpoint of the ego. The fight between her, the princess, and him, the suitor, is a philosophical one. The issue is: is the concept real by itself, or is it just an idea in the mind? The fairytale settles this question. The suitor wins. And he wins because he is capable of cutting the demon’s head off (just as in the case of her winning she would have had his head cut off ). So we see that the radicality is the same on both sides. The difference, however, is that in the one case the existence of the person would have been extinguished, while in the other case the alleged absolute realness of the princess’s concept has been “killed.” The existence of the princess herself has never been threatened. All that the young man did was to set her head right, to cure her from “the soul” and bring her down to earth, into real life. By cutting the demon’s head off and presenting it as cut off, he demonstrated beyond any doubt that her thesis had been untenable, a phantasm, nonsensical. The image of the beheading of the demon and the sudden presentation of the cut-off head is more brutal than what it is the sensual image of. The meaning of this image is nothing else than that the fairytale protagonist was capable of raising the principle from out of the unreflected, taken-for-granted reality and efficacy in the soul into the princess’s subjective empirical consciousness by confronting the latter with the absolute principle by which it had been unwittingly dominated. The hero of the tale succeeded in dragging the absolute principle out of its hiddenness into the light of day, where it lost its

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status as something that is as a matter of course valid and rules absolutely, without question, and turned it into a mere subjective, debatable idea, thesis or claim, a claim that instantaneously collapses the moment it is seen in the clear light of consciousness. The young man was able to convert that which had been the unconsciously, absolutely ruling-from-behind form of consciousness into an object or content of consciousness itself. He managed to pull the unconscious form of consciousness before consciousness and thus turn it into a Vorstellung, a representation. Only for as long as the idea of the self-sufficiency of the concept had been in effect merely from behind, was it able to hold its place and was, imaginally speaking, the demon alive. As soon as the princess is confronted in her waking consciousness with this her dominant principle as one that stares her in the face, it is as a matter of course absolutely untenable for her, which is imaginally expressed by the fact that the demon’s head is an already cut-off head. The brutal deed of the beheading is not shown in the fairytale, and according to the inner sense of the tale it has not taken place at all. The demon, dragged into reality, into the sphere of consciousness and the rational mind, can only appear as his “always already” cut-off head. He can only be alive as long as he is invisible, indeed, unsuspected. What is depicted in the motif of the presentation of the cut-off head is simply a transition, a translation from “absolute principle” to “subjective idea,” a translation, however, that in itself amounts to a castration of the absolute principle. It would not at all have sufficed for the hero verbally to give the correct answer to the third riddle question (“What am I thinking off right now?”—“Of the head of your underworldly lover”). The redemption of the princess from her spell much rather requires the real presentation of “the head” of the demon in empirical reality, that is to say, the principle’s in fact having been transported from the realm of principles and the interiority of the soul into the sphere of objective reality and common sense. In order to be able to redeem the princess one must in fact have followed her flight into the other world, the underworld of the soul, and fetched something back from there to this earth, from the ideal sphere of principles into the sphere of reality. One must, like our young man, have proven to have power over the ghost-bridegroom. For us this means: translation of logical form or

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syntax of consciousness into semantic content of consciousness. The fact that the fairytale hero has the head of the demon in a sack means in the last analysis that he has integrated into himself that which had previously exclusively belonged to the night-world and the underworldly sphere so that now it has truly been transported hither and shines forth for her from within the real man as an already once and for all sublated moment. The point is precisely not a literal extermination of the content that is expressed by means of the image of the demon. No, this content only becomes sublated, in the double sense of (a) negated or overcome (qua form) and (b) retained as one that has in this way been overcome, pushed down to the status of a mere moment, and that has been interiorized and appropriated by the young man. The presentation to the princess of the cut-off head of her demon husband does not mean the literal end (or a divorce, an annulment) of her marriage, and her marrying the fairytale hero does not mean a new, second marriage. No, she stays in the same marriage. The real young man is himself the demon’s own successor-form, his (the demon’s) logical further-development, and thus precisely also his own fulfillment. For this reason the notion of the unconscious in the usual sense should be kept away altogether, and the idea of “making conscious” should not be used in the harmless sense that is mostly attributed to it. The kind of “making conscious” that the fairytale hero achieves is more than enabling the princess to consciously remember something forgotten, repressed, or unnoticed and ignored. It is not simply a bringing up of contents from a dark cellar into the brightly-lit living quarters. The error contained in the conventional idea of making conscious is above all that one thinks that it has to happen to the consciousness of the patient. But the making conscious, as we find it in our fairytale, is done to the content itself, to the principle, the “demon.” It suffers a change of status! Much as alchemy performs its work upon the matter, so also must psychotherapy be the therapy of the contents, ideas, the thoughts themselves (David Miller), not that of the people and what they think. It is of course consistent that the two (the princess and the young man), even though they are both out to “cut the head off,” aim with this beheading at completely different points in their

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respective other. The princess, inasmuch as she represents the soul standpoint of the self-sufficiency of the concept, has to try to strike at her suitor’s real existence, while the latter, representing the standpoint for which a concept by itself is deficient and in need of an additional realization, deals a mortal blow at her concept or the principle as principle, by putting the latter, which at the outset had been a truth that totally enveloped consciousness on all sides and as such was the logical form or syntax of consciousness, into the status of an individual idea that appears before consciousness, consciousness in the sense of an agency that can and has to rationally pass judgement on the idea.

*** Just as the princess is the unity of herself and the underworldly demon, so the fairytale hero is the unity of himself and his traveling companion, the helping dead man. In both cases, the pairing is between a real person in the flesh and a ghostly figure. Let us now take a look at the young man and his companion. For us, the young man of the fairytale represents a symbolization of the truly therapeutic consciousness. If what in the tale enables him to redeem the princess is the helping dead man, if it is the latter who makes it possible for him to follow the princess when at night she flies to her demon lover, then we must not interpret these motifs as something truly magical, mythic, archetypal. The magical quality is merely part of the narrative appearance. What is represented by the motif of the “dead man” and his “magical help” means for us merely the fact that the young man, instead of falling for the neurotic stance and behavior of the princess, is able to think it, to comprehend it, to see through it. If we want to retain the word “magical,” then we could say that what shows itself in the young man (together with his helping dead man) is merely the “magical power” (the Zauberkraft, Hegel) of thought, of the capacity to think, here the capacity to concretely think the neurosis at hand. It is that power that protects one from taking the neurotic concerns and behaviors at face value.118 The latter is what the princess’s father, the king, and his councilors do. For them it is 118 Here we can add a methodological reflection of general importance. From Jung we have learned that “... behind the impressions of the daily life—behind the scenes— another picture looms up, covered by a thin veil of actual facts” (C.G. Jung, The Visions Seminars, Zürich [Spring Publ.] 1976, p. 8) and to look at dreams and other “documents

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simply so, simply part of the certainly odd, incomprehensible and perhaps annoying, but inevitable nature of the princess, that she insists on riddles and on having the suitors beheaded. They see in it a fact that has to be accepted the way it is. Nothing can be done about it. But this means that they walk into the trap of the neurosis. Our hero, by contrast, sees through the neurosis as neurosis. He sees what is neurotic about it, the sick thinking at work in it. He sees that it is not nature which makes the princess be that way, but that her thinking and behavior are something fundamentally posited, artificial, an ingenious arrangement (Alfred Adler). He comprehends (by no means that every neurotic poses riddle questions, but rather) that each neurosis is a riddle question that the therapist is called upon to solve. Our young man does not fraternize with the neurosis (the way many present-day therapists do) by saying: the poor girl cannot yet behave differently, she is not ready yet, she still has too weak an ego, she has probably been traumatized in early childhood, maybe she had been sexually molested by her father, etc., etc. This approach makes excuses for the neurosis and would, in a way, justify, legitimize it. Whoever thinks this way does not answer the riddle question about the head of the demon, as which the neurosis exists, and he would therefore deserve to be beheaded as therapist, because he has become of the soul” accordingly, i.e., by not falling for “the impressions of the daily life.” The other picture “behind the scenes” refers to the archetypal or mythic dimension. Now with the magic helper, the spirit of a dead man, as well as with the demon lover in our fairytale we get, of course, precisely this “other picture,” so that a move on our part behind the impression of the daily life or actual facts is unnecessary from the outset. But here a second methodological danger comes into play. In a different way than the impressions of the daily life, mythic figures, archetypal images, and symbols are, as I say with a phrase Jung once used for a different topic, “so much more immediate, conspicuous, impressive” (CW 11 § 841, transl. modif.) than what a true psychology is interested in. This means we have to take heed not to fall for the impressions of “the other picture,” of the archetypal background scene, either. We must not take it at face value. Because if we did, what is “behind the scenes” would paradoxically precisely appear only as new, second-level “impressions of the daily life.” It would be the return on the new level of the very thing that has been left behind. This is what frequently happens in orthodox Jungian interpretations of images, interpretations which try to identify the details as anima, animus, shadow, self or as this or that archetype. This amounts to the establishment of a second daily-life world, and, because of its “imaginal” or supersensible character, an even more “impressive” one than the first. Jung’s statement about “the impressions of the daily life” has to be applied to itself and this means to the “other picture that looms up.” It needs two moves. Only then do we get away from “impressions” as such and enter the sphere of the soul and its logos. The soul’s logical life represents a second supersensible world. And as such, as the inverted first supersensible world of the mythic and archetypal or imaginal, it is sober and down to earth.

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the accomplice of the neurosis (of what makes the neurosis neurotic) and “rides the same hobby-horse as” his patient (cf. CW 10 § 362). The helping dead man—who by no means points into the mythic underworld, the world of the ancestors and ghosts, but much rather symbolizes Geist, the spirit, thought—protects one from one’s going astray onto the path of explanations and justifications based on the empirical conditions to which the patient was allegedly exposed. It conversely makes it possible to make straight for what the content of the riddle question is, namely, the demon and his head, that is to say, the absolute principle (“The Absolute”) by which the princess is possessed, in other words, the concept of this particular neurosis. The fact that the princess flies “at night” and that the hero follows her “at night” means that the neurosis has its home in the airspace of thought and not in the realm of empirical experiences and sufferings, and that the truly therapeutic consciousness is able to accompany and re-enact with waking awareness the (unconsciously occurring) flight of the neurotic thought. But Geist must not be thought in a mythologizing fashion as a hypostatized subject or power either. Just as in the old Indo-European languages the words for knowing (German wissen, OE. witan, Greek oida, Sanskrit veda) are formed from the perfect tense stem of the words for “to see” and thus actually mean “to have seen and ipso facto to know,” so also do thinking and comprehending have a perfect tense character. This is what the dead man suggests. He is the image for a “being as always already having been,” and this is what thought, comprehending, is. He establishes a fundamental distance to the events, to their otherwise pressing immediacy and suggestive power, so that they can be seen through to their logical structure. There is no cutting off the head of the demon. Rather, comprehension means that it is always already cut off, it has lost its power. And only when one is from the outset accompanied by the “helping dead man”, i.e., by this “always already,” does one remain free vis-à-vis the neurosis to comprehend it. Only under this condition can one recognize it as a riddle, a question (which is what ordinary consciousness, the king and his councilors, are not capable of doing. They can only react to it, either by going along with the neurotic game, by empathizing with the neurotic person, condoning and making excuses for the neurotic fixation, or by trying to fight it with external force).

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The young man represents for us a symbolization of the truly therapeutic consciousness, I said, and he can have this truly therapeutic stance because he has the help of the dead man. But how does he get the help of the dead man? Because he had paid for his burial, using the money of his small inheritance. One might be apt to interpret this morally in terms of obligations resulting from the cult of the dead and thus as a “good deed.” But more to the point in our psychological context are two aspects. The one is, and here I follow a suggestion by Greg Mogenson,119 that he thereby shows himself as one who can properly deal with what is dead, who can let what is dead be dead. Roland Barthes once said that to be modern is to know what is no longer possible. “The protagonist’s first act, his burial of the penniless dead man,” Mogenson writes, “marks him as being ... modern in this sense. Just as demons and neurosis have to do with clinging to what is no longer possible, the cure has to do with facing the demon’s cut off head, i.e, with really knowing what is no longer possible.” “... right from the start the fairytale shows in this way that what we would call the optimal therapeutic attitude is a matter of ‘irrelevantification’ and ‘verification.’” Seen in this light, we discover to our astonishment that the very opposite idea, namely the one expressed in Matth. 8:22, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their dead” (obviously a radical assault on the traditional cult of the dead) can express almost the same idea. If it were not for the second aspect. In the Biblical dictum, what is dead is simply left behind. It is ignored. Consciousness turns its back to it in order to move into the future. The fairytale, by contrast, makes the young man give up all the money from his small inheritance for the burial of a dead man. He pays a price, the full price, for truly knowing what is no longer possible. By paying the price he personally acquired this knowledge. And it is this knowledge that in the fairytale is pictorially embodied as a separate figure, the traveling companion who turns out to be the helping dead man. This knowledge is what enables the protagonist to present the cut-off head of the demon to the princess. To recognize the neurosis as riddle means to know it as already solved—implicitly solved, even if not yet in actuality—because the 119

Personal communication, email of Jan. 28, 2013.

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riddle question contains its answer within itself. For the riddle (as which the neurosis exists) is, after all, the question about the head of the demon lover, that is, about the absolutely ruling principle of the neurosis at hand. For this reason it would be totally insufficient to try to understand the neurosis by observing the behavior of “the princess” (the patient), by listening to her story, her fantasies, dream images, her associations and by speculating about her unconscious repressed oedipal desires and super-ego inhibitions as well as about the traumatic experiences she must have been exposed to in early childhood or the demands overtaxing her. All this, including the material from “the unconscious,” would only give one the day-world picture, the picture of the psyche, but miss the neurosis itself. The latter can only be sighted at all if one follows “with magical help” the nightly flight of the princess’s soul to her ghostly demon-lover. He alone is, so to speak, her neurosis. And furthermore, one does not see the demon by merely looking at him the way we can look at the princess. One only really sees him once one is in possession of his cut-off head. Only then is the determination of the night-world fulfilled. Real seeing does not mean “looking at.” It means knowing. And to know is to have seen. Real seeing is seeing interiorized into itself. Now the reason for my amazement expressed at the very beginning of the Introduction has become explicit, amazement at the fact that after we have had more than a hundred years of psychoanalysis there has not yet been a psychological concept of neurosis. The reason is that psychology stayed in the day-world. It looked exclusively at the princess. And it came to the princess much like all the previous, meanwhile long beheaded 120 suitors, with only its ordinary consciousness: without the helping dead man and that is, without reckoning with the nightly soul (in contradistinction to the psyche).

120 When the hero of the fairytale, at least in some versions, comes to the castle he sees all around it stakes with the heads of his predecessors. One stake is still empty, and he is advised that, “This is the one for you!” (By being forced in this way to already see, in his imagination, his own cut-off head on this stake, he logically dies a death long before he actually enters the castle. This not only means that he leaves behind all wishful thinking and childish illusions. It is also another way of expressing what the motif of his traveling companion represents: that he sets out on his task with a “death” or “soul” perspective.)

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2. EXCURSUS: AN ALTERNATE INTERPRETATION OF THE TALE AS NOT ABOUT NEUROSIS.THE PSYCHOLOGY OF THE VIRGIN AND THE SHIFT FROM INNER CONCEPT TO REAL LIFE

So far I have used our fairytale as a paradigm from which we could read off the internal logical structure of neurosis, but I have also indicated that this use of it is in the last analysis a violence done to the fairytale’s own true meaning. Stemming from ages when it was historically not yet possible to become neurotic, the tale is not at all concerned with neurosis. Although the topic of this book is neurosis, I will in this new chapter nevertheless overstep the boundaries set by the topic of this book by attempting to make amends for my repurposing of the fairytale. In this way I will try to provide a reading that comes at least closer to what it may have been about originally and in its own terms and that on top of it is also psychologically more adequate. I take the liberty of presenting this new interpretation, which does not focus on neurosis, also because it is of some psychological interest in its own right and in order that it may in addition serve as a contrast and backdrop to the earlier “neurotic” reading,121 and thus highlight the latter for us. I begin with a question that suggests itself on the basis of what has been explored in the previous chapter and needs to be answered: How does the princess’s absolute dependence come about in the first place? What is it that gives rise to and makes possible the absolute principle? This important question cannot be answered by the “neurotic” reading. My thesis is: What appears from the point of view of neurosis as the “absolute principle” to which the princess stands in a relation of total dependence is in truth, for the not neurotic soul, the first immediacy of the Other, as surprising as this might sound. The Other is, of course, in its truth quite abstractly the psychological Other, that is, the soul’s own, internal Other. But it has here fairytale-like become depicted as an interpersonal other as well as, more specifically, as the princess’s counter-sexual other, the masculine. 121 In contrast to the phrase “neurotic interpretation of neurosis,” used before, which means that the interpretation itself shows a neurotic structure (being informed by neurotic thinking), here something very different is meant, the reading of the tale as if it had the task of displaying a neurotic situation.

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Psychologically, the fact that the king’s daughter is oriented towards the Other, shows that she is no longer a little girl, a child, but already a maiden, a Jungfrau—if it is at all permissible today to still use terms to which we in modernity no longer connect any meaning. Virginity may still be a word, but it is no longer a concept. We have no knowledge of it. Modifying a bon mot of Lichtenberg’s we can say: we may still at times use the word “virgin” the way we use thaler even after the minted thalers have long become obsolete. Our fairytale, however, reflects a bygone world situation for which “maiden” or “virgin” was a concept, a living concept of highest soul meaning and on top of it also empirically a real institution, a social reality. In order to make more accessible my thesis that the king’s daughter is already in the status of a maiden we begin with the observation that by refusing to get married the princess decisively adopts the stance of virginity and wants to immure herself in it. With her insisting upon her absolutely not needing a complementation through the Other, the masculine, a real man, she encloses herself completely within herself, within the hortus conclusus of the soul’s interiority, that interiority that in the Middle Ages was depicted in paintings of “Virgin Mary in the Rose Garden” and in fairytales appears in the images of Rapunzel locked up in a tower, of Sleeping Beauty surrounded and totally shielded from what is outside, by an impenetrable hedge of thorns. This inclusion does not have the character of imprisonment. Imprisonment would suggest a forceful retention by an external force, and as such would be something against which the soul would inwardly naturally rebel. No, here the enclosedness is, so to speak, “egosyntonic.” It is the soul’s voluntary turning her back to the world, to externality as such, even to such an extent that there is no longer any idea of “outside” or “world” at all anymore, and thus also no need to literally “turn her back to” the world, because she is totally given over to and absorbed by her own interiority. This her being absorbed in it is the sleep of Sleeping Beauty.122 The Maiden’s self-enclosure in herself is in radical contrast to the psychological reality of the child. The latter knows itself on principle as needy, as dependent on real others, especially of course the parents, or rather, the child exists as the living concept of this dependency. It is 122

It does not mean unconsciousness in our modern sense.

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the logic of “child” to live completely one-sidedly the standpoint of its moods and fancy and to have all rationality, responsibility, and care outside of itself, in its parents. As an aside let me here point out that for practical psychology and psychotherapy it is not the child archetype, but the concept or the logic of the real child that counts. Both are fundamentally different. The archetypal child is the essentially threatened child, threatened by murder, or at least by expulsion and abandonment—e.g., Moses, Oedipus, the Massacre of the Innocents, the fairytale motif of the king who commands his hunter to take certain children into the forest, kill them, and cut out their tongues as proof of the killing, etc. The archetypal child is thus essentially alone, severed; when it is rescued, then only as a foundling. It carries its own negation within itself. By contrast, the real child is, according to its concept, essentially related to the parents. The child is the one half, the one side, of a relation and as that one side the child is contained in this relation and supported by it. The transition from girl to maiden is in this regard a radical reversal. The virgin is virgin because she has completely withdrawn from this relation, from “the child’s” essential being logically released into the relation to parents, and has thus completely reflected herself into herself and ipso facto shut herself up within herself. But this is not quite correct. It is not really that she has reflected or interiorized herself into herself and enclosed herself within herself. Rather, what she reflected into herself is this being as relation or relatedness as such, which is given with human nature. Here we run into the dialectic prevailing in the virgin of absolute lack of need for an Other, on the one hand, and fundamental relatedness, on the other hand. For the relatedness has not simply disappeared altogether. The virgin is by no means unrelated. She is not alone by herself, not a single. No, she has precisely gone beyond the child’s “innocent” and natural family-libido relatedness and broken through the being that had been contained in and supported by it; she opened herself, reached out for the Other. Or rather, she allowed herself to be reached by that Other that is not simply a given, the way the parents are empirically given to the child, by that Other that she has not always already been born into. The parents as others are not truly an Other. As naturally given, they are part of the child’s own self. The Other by which the

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virgin has been reached is the Other as Other, an explicit Other that truly appears from outside as something new, alien, contingent, and that only for this reason arouses erotic desire, but also requires erotic desire if a connection to the essentially Other is to become real. In contrast to the child, the virgin has already been touched by the psychic opposites, which objectify themselves for her in herself as the feminine and the—wholly other and in this sense frightful—masculine. For the child there was nothing comparable. The child and its parents are not a representation of the psychic opposites. Both sides are, seen in terms of the child, much rather the unfolding of the concept as which the child exists, into two; in its parents it has something that is part of its own reality; at bottom they are its true I, which the child precisely does not yet have within itself. It itself represents only its own subjective pleasure-aspect (Freud’s pleasure principle); the parents, by contrast, represent its own objective reason and necessity aspect (Freud’s reality principle). Both together thus represent the two sides of one and the same I. The family is, for the child, essentially the sphere of what constitutes the child’s self. The parents, although positivefactually (from a naturalistic perspective) an external reality, are logically or psychologically nevertheless by no means an Other, an alien, an external reality, for the small child, but something internal and its own. For they are the carriers of the essential and objective side of its own I. Precisely because this is so, the actual continued existence or loss of the parents as well as the concrete ways of their actual behavior towards the child are of the greatest importance and consequence. The lack of a stable and reliable relationship to parents or parent substitutes can be disastrous for the child. In the case of the virgin, being reached by the truly alien Other paradoxically does not happen in external reality, as one might expect, but within herself, and it remains in her inner space. It is an internal being touched by the external Other, at first still (and only) by it as a mere idea within the interiority of her own soul and coming from this interiority. And this for the simple reason that the former relatedness has now completely been reflected or interiorized into the soul, that being-as-relation as which she as child had factually lived in external reality, namely in her relationship to her parents. The alien Other is in the case of the virgin an intrapsychic Other, a masculine Other completely enclosed within her interiority. As completely internal, this

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Other is a mere idea without reality, without flesh and blood, the mere “dream” of “Other,” an abstract principle, which imaginally expressed therefore appears as a ghost, an otherworldly demon, or monster. The virgin lives with this ghost-husband in an unswerving bond; she is already “married” to him similar to how Hera in her first form as parthenos or pais (virgin or maiden) was married to her brother-husband. That this relationship is absolutely “secret” is only an expression for the fact that it exists only in the night-world, in her sleep, in the depth of her interiority. But this also means that the relationship (as well as the ghost-husband) is “secret” even for the virgin herself. It is unconscious. She herself does not know anything about the demon to whom she flies every night according to our fairytale. One must not fall for the external, social phenomenology of the virgin and think that even in psychological regards she is single. Psychologically, she is as virgin in herself essentially bride, indeed, wife of the invisible masculine ghost (demon). It was not without reason that the Roman vestal virgins (the priestesses of Vesta who were bound by law to absolute chastity) wore bridal garb. In the Christian world, nuns, too, were fundamentally married women, married to Christ. 123 The Virgin Mary was “married” to the Holy Ghost. In all cases, the “husband” is an invisible, ghostly or spiritual Other. (In myth it was even possible that these marriages were fruitful, which comes out in the archetypal motif of the virgin birth. Just as the Virgin Mary gave birth to Jesus, so the Vestal Virgin Rea Silvia gave birth to Romulus and Remus, the progenitors of the Romans. And just as in Mary’s case, so was also in Rea Silvia’s case the father otherworldly, divine, the God Mars.) The virgin’s being married does not contradict her virginity. On the contrary, it is precisely in this her already being married that the virgin’s virginity consists. And this her being married is also what shuts her radically off from others, embodied others in empirical reality. That the first immediacy of the alien Other (and the desire for it) emerges as an idea that is and remains enclosed within her inner, has to be seen in terms of the revolutionary transformation from the child status to the woman status. This transformation requires that the soul in a first step completely withdraws from its primary and natural 123

Conversely, prostitutes are in German occasionally referred to as “nuns.”

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outwards releasement into a relation to the original others, the parents, and cuts off all bonds to them (bonds which erroneously have been called libidinous, but have nothing to do with desire; they are logical bonds), in order to establish itself solely in the seclusion of her (the soul’s) interiority and to discover “desire” as something totally new, something exclusively originating from out of her own selfhood. Erotic desire comes psychologically into being through the Er-innerung (interiorization) of the relatedness that had previously been directed to the parents. Or rather: it is the child’s interiorized relatedness (i.e., what remains of the latter after its having become inwardized). The child status is the simply lived or acted out relatedness. This the child’s relatedness as an interiorized one and as one that consequently has turned into the sublated concept of relatedness, is the first immediacy of erotic desire, of a desire, which, because it is in the status of first immediacy, seemingly paradoxically still remains absolutely enclosed within itself, a feature that gets expressed in our fairytale in the absolutely secret and absolutely unconscious relation to the invisible demon-lover. Desire is the first immediacy of relationship, and relationship is the fully sublated and reflected relatedness. The earlier relatedness exists by nature, whereas a relationship to the Other must be established. It is a product of the mind. The Sleeping Beauty fairytale shows that the falling into a deep sleep—the symbol of the virgin’s total self-inwardization—happens at the time of the beginning of puberty. Thus, empirically viewed, the becoming wrapped up and enclosed within herself stems from a biological change. The psychic transition from the status of child into that of maiden or virgin is caused or necessitated by a body change. The psychological status of “child” does not of its own accord develop into that of “virgin,” the way the baby develops of its own accord into “I.” Rather, a girl in the psychic status of “child” finds herself, so to speak, assaulted by a biological change and now has to come to terms with the fact that the floor has been pulled out from under the feet of the psychological child and she, the girl, all of a sudden has been translocated into the completely new, unknown status of maiden or virgin. This change amounts to a revolution and occurs outside the soul. It is done to the soul; the translocation is like the soul’s being seized and carried away by a griffin, and then being dropped into a completely different place. Or rather, since this being carried away

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happens outside the soul, it is more like its suddenly awakening to the fact that she finds herself in herself as in totally different, surprising surroundings. The “virgin” in her now asserts her right, and the girl’s soul must learn to satisfy its demands. This need is one example for what Jung called the task of adaptation.124 Now we understand that the sleep of Sleeping Beauty and all the other sleeping princesses (in the Traveler’s Companion as well as in the Danced-out Shoes tales) is precisely not anything pathological, not a neurotic symptom. It is exactly the opposite: the sign for the fact that the adaptation to the new situation of “virgin” has taken place and the child status has really and once and for all been left. The motif of sleeping expresses here (1) the withdrawal from the relatedness to the parents into the girl’s inner, and ipso facto the awakening of the soul to the idea or the concept of “relationship with the Other, the masculine.” However, and this is important to keep in mind, it is the soul’s idea or concept, the idea as objectively existing in the maiden, but not a subjective idea entertained by her. The idea is not “for her,” but only objectively in her and for itself. She is, after all, “asleep,” totally unaware of the concept by which she is already reached, which is the other meaning (2) expressed by the motif of sleeping. Virginity thus does by no means imply a state of exclusively circling around herself. On the contrary, psychologically she is, and “always already” has been, in an inviolable relationship with the truly Other, and precisely because of this her being in a relationship she is virginally untouchable, lost to the world. The psychological truth of her being bonded to the ghostly, and in this sense unreal, masculine, to a pure ideal or abstract principle of the psychological Other, has the obvious consequence that the virgin knows herself to be complete within, and sufficient unto, herself, i.e., not in need of complementation through a real man, so that psychically, outwardly, in empirical reality, with respect to real men, she appears unapproachable, aloof. The punishment to which virgines Vestales were condemned if they had lost their virginity was terrible: they were immured alive. From a 124 Adaptation in a psychological sense; not to the social environment, but “adaptation to the soul, the psychic inner world” (CW 8 § 66, transl. modif.). In its logical life, in its self-development, the soul needs to adapt to the new, altered conditions or statuses of itself that it has already been thrust into.

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psychological standpoint we can understand that this is not so much a punishment in our sense; it has nothing to do with retribution or moral condemnation, but is in truth nothing else but the ritual-literal confirmation, completion and sealing of the logic of virginity as seclusion and interiority. The objective soul’s concept or logic of virginity was not to be punctured by the factual sexual contact. The present-day so-called honor killings by their closest male relatives of Turkish girls who had premarital sexual contacts probably have a similar archaic psychological background. I said that the virgin knows herself to be complete within, and sufficient unto, herself. Here the word “knowing” is first of all used in opposition to “feeling” or “experiencing” herself. Secondly, it does not refer to an explicit knowledge as a state of the subjective consciousness of a real empirical person. We always have to be on our guard against the danger of succumbing to the modern personalistic and anthropological fallacy, a thinking in terms of people. Rather, it is an objective knowledge inherent in the concept or essence of “the virgin.” It is the cold, objective logic, the psychological being, the living truth, not the psychic state of mind of a real girl who is virgin. We could say: the concept knows, not she. In the case of the fairytale princess, the soul’s being spellbound and absolute being captivated by her demon-lover is already the first immediacy of true feminine surrender to the Other and capacity for erotic love. But again, a surrender and capacity for love in the hidden background of the logic of the objective soul, in its absolute negativity, as its truth, not loving surrender on the empirical, positive-factual level of her emotional state, not as passion and felt experience or behavior. What in our fairytale appears as a terrible cruelty, the beheading of the former suitors, is accordingly not at all to be seen as a character trait, sadism, or as a personal attitude of the princess, for example, as some extreme hatred of men, her fury. It is simply the symbolic expression for one side of the objective logic or nature of virginity, namely, for the absolute exclusion of a relationship with a real, flesh and blood man. It is an absolute exclusion because it is a logical one. The first point about the dialectic of virginity is that the exclusion of a relationship is precisely a sign of relationship, the self-sufficiency is the first manifestation of desire. The second point about its dialectic is that in the first emergence of desire it is always already fulfilled.

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This has to be so because what here emerges is the concept of desire, the Ansich of desire. The concept qua soul concept has everything it needs within itself. The desire shows itself in the maiden as satisfied within itself, it comes as always already satiated. The goal has been reached. In the soul the fulfillment is the starting-point! After all, the Other is already there. Nothing remains to be wished for. In the night of the soul they are united in an eternal embrace, just as youthful Hera parthenos was secretly united with her brother-spouse Zeus in an embrace that was said to have lasted for 300 years, i.e., eternally. The virgin, just as humans in general, is therefore not a Lacanian for whom everything begins with a fundamental and unfulfillable lack and for whom “desire” is defined in terms of lack. In the soul there is no such lack. For the soul the way is not the goal. The soul has always already arrived. No seeking. The desire and longing known from empirical life precisely derives from a logically already being at the goal. Only because psychologically, logically the goal has already been reached, can there also be an empirical longing after the goal has been reached. Without the “demon” and the princess’s being married to him, a desire in real life for the Other, for a real man, could not come about. The soul must logically already have reached out for the Other, moored and docked to him, in order for the empirical person to become able to let herself in for erotic desire in real life. For a psychological understanding this is crucial. The soul’s reaching out from within its realm of interiority and self-enclosure for the truly Other would have set itself up as on principle unfulfillable if it came from a lack and began as lack. The fulfillment must psychologically, however, always be already given, always already be thought and reached. In order to be able to long in empirical life for a real husband and to be open for a real relationship with a man, the position of the husband must psychologically already be established. Within the psychic infrastructure, the post of the lover must be installed and ipso facto also already occupied; the pathways upon which the longing-desire can subsequently proceed must already be paved. Where this is not the case, where the logical ground for a relationship is not prepared in the soul, a real love relationship in real life can not come about later. De nihilo nihil fit (out of nothing comes nothing, you can’t get something from nothing). The thought of a relationship fully thought to its

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end, the full logic of relationship, its real concept, includes the “demon” as the incumbent of the post and the absolutely committed relationship with him, which excludes all others. Far from being an expression of a neurotic or pathological condition, the existence of the underworldly demon in our fairytale and the princess’s “nightly” flying to him are precisely what is psychologically necessary and healthy. That the demon is underworldly and without flesh and blood and that flying, and its happening “at nighttime,” are required, merely shows that the real fulfillment of the relationship given here is psychological, logical fulfillment, the concept (the havingbeen-comprehended) of the fulfilled relationship—in other words, the fulfillment as a soul truth and not as an empirical state. The fairytale does not portray a faulty development, not a neurosis, a disorder, but conversely, the ideal-type process. That the princess has her demonlover is the sign of her really having entered into the concept of relationship and desire, of her really having been reached by it. It indicates that she is really maiden, virgin, and no longer girl in the sense of innocent child, on the one hand, and that she is also not yet woman, on the other hand. Everything else that has to follow for her from this point onwards, that is, for the additional move from maiden to woman to become possible, is the empirically real and as such essentially contingent filling of that post of husband that in the psychic infrastructure has been established and made available by the concept: the replacement of the demon-lover by a real man. It is the condition of the possibility of any real love-relationship in real life. If the ghost-husband is the first immediacy of the truly Other, then the problem of the transition from the psychic maiden-status to the woman-status obviously consists in the question how that which at first has its place in the interiority or logic of the soul can find its external realization. How can the concept of fulfillment in its turn become fulfilled, i.e., become flesh and blood, in order to be realized concept? How can the position established in the psychic infrastructure be filled with an empirically-real office-bearer? How can the passage actually happen from the cold, abstract, ghostly (even if fully unfolded) logic of the soul to real life, the passage from the logic of relationship to a real relationship?

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Our fairytale shows us that the transition from maiden to woman, or to wife, does precisely not have the form of a transition, i.e., a gradual, continuous change, but happens as a logically abrupt change, indeed, a shock-like reversal, and is brought about by confrontation with a real Other coming from outside. It is not the inherent furtherdevelopment, be it of the demon-lover or of the maiden. The further development of the virgin to the woman does not happen in herself, nor from within herself. She is dependent on something that is fundamentally beyond her control, something that must come as an addition, that contingently falls to her, if it falls to her, and this is the real being-desired by a real man. It is her being recognized in her innermost soul and to be really meant as this empirically real person. It is important to comprehend this point. A maiden can choose a husband, or she can be married to a man by her family or clan, without this having to mean that ipso facto she truly, i.e., psychologically, moved from the virgin status to the woman status. There are married women, even mothers, who have nevertheless psychologically remained in the status of the innocent virgin. That she is really desired by a desire that comes from outside her, and that she is really meant, shows itself in our fairytale by the fairytale hero not letting himself be scared off by the very real risk of death. At the same time we see that in fairytales also in this regard the focus is not on subjective feelings, passionate wishes and longings, but on objective, matter-of-fact relations, here the young man’s readiness to let himself be beheaded if it should have to be, that is to say, the focus is on the objective absolute committedness of his wooing. But not every committed wooing in fact brings about the sudden change from virgin to woman. After all, all previous suitors had been beheaded. They failed. That the suitor truly desires this maiden and really means her is only one necessary precondition. An additional one is needed. This second irrenunciable moment is that the suitor has to be the right one. But what does “the right one” mean here? In no way does it mean what is today a popular view about “the right one”: one’s ideal man, the man of one’s dreams. It has nothing whatsoever to do with his attributes: his looks, his wealth, his position, his intelligence, his character. All this is no topic in our fairytale and for the princess. What

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is needed, in addition to the absolute seriousness of the man’s desire, is as the second precondition one particular capacity. It is the capacity “to actually follow the princess’s flight,” that is to say, to in fact penetrate to her innermost center, to reach her and meet her in her inner sanctum, her deepest secret. When the young man in the fairytale is able to present to the king’s daughter the demon’s head as an always already cut-off head (rather than our seeing before our eyes how he beheads the demon), then this tells us that for him the demon is not simply nonsense or a vain illusion, but rather that he himself is capable of truly seeing, comprehending, and appreciating the princess’s deepest secret and her dearest inner treasure. He shows himself to be up to her secret. He proves to be on the same psychological niveau with her, to be open to the same reality, to her reality. By having been killed, the demon is thus by no means disproven and unmasked as a mere delusion of the princess. He is also not destroyed as a factual rival. Rather, he is mere logically negated as the secret, purely internal lover, so that he can re-emerge in the flesh. The act of killing is therefore not directed against the content that is expressed in the image of the demon, but solely against its inwardness, against the fact that this content had remained totally enclosed within the virginity and therefore had been an only-psychological one. The content itself, however, is preserved. That the young man has taken possession of the head proves him to be the incarnated sublation of the demon. He is not underworldly demon, but he is relation to and power over him, over the Geist (ghost, spirit, mind); more than that, he is the demon’s real embodiment (embodiment as real). What previously had existed only in the night-world, that is, only in the logic of the soul and only in the absolute inwardness of the princess, flip-flopped, as it were, from inside to outside and is now standing before her eyes as a flesh and blood person. In a real man, who as a stranger came to her contingently and unpredictably from outside, who as such did precisely not belong to her own interiority and was beyond her control, the ghost-husband who had his place in her own hidden inwardness is now recognized as a living presence. The young man and the demon are not rivals. They are the same. The former now fills the position of “the Other” established in the psychological

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infrastructure through the appearance of “demon.” The young man shows himself to be the demon translated and sublated into his real-life version and to be his successor figure. It is not the demon-lover that disappeared, but merely his concealedness, in which alone, for everyday-consciousness, his demonic underworldly character consisted. And it is not the princess who has been freed from her having been enchanted. She was not enchanted in the first place, as we now realize. All she had been was a true maiden, in the status of veritable virginity. No, it is the demon who has been redeemed of the spell of having to exist in absolute concealment. He has now come out into the open, having moved from the inwardness of the soul into real life. The princess had access to her demon lover only in the nightworld, in her sleep, as sleeping beauty, so to speak. Only in the objective logic of the soul. That is to say, she as conscious personality, on the experiential level, was totally unconscious of him. He was not a secret hope of hers and not a content of her daydreams. He had been concealed even from her. He existed only in the absolute negativity of the logic of the soul, but not for her. Now that the young man has appeared and has shown himself to be in possession of the demon’s head, she for the first time knows about and can relate to “the Other,” her own innermost Other, in the day-world, she as her conscious self. Not his emotion, his desire, his feeling-in-love is what empowers the young man to function as redeemer, but solely his capacity to hit the princess’s deepest, most secret psychological core, to follow her soul’s flight into her inwardness. The mythological image of Eros/Amor hitting and penetrating the heart of a person with his arrow presumably expresses the same event of hitting. But we must not forget that the hero’s following the princess’s flight as well as his getting in possession of the demon’s cut-off head also happens in the night-world. It is not really his doing. It happens to him in his sleep and is made possible only through the magic help of the helpful dead man! He remains unconscious about it. He does not know “how he did it.” For him, as well as for the princess herself, it is simply a fait accompli. For both it just happens. So what, on the one hand, is the coming out into the open of the hidden secret,

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that is, the becoming conscious experience, remains nevertheless irrational, a mystery, a secret, happening in the dark recesses of the soul’s logic. It is the secret of love. The fulfillment in reality has essentially the character of an encounter and occurrence, but also the character of violence. Leaving the world of fairytales for a moment and thinking of real social situations, we see that the moment of violence inherent in the transition from virgin to woman was displayed in many archaic cultures through a particular ritual enactment. I have in mind the institution of ritual bride kidnaping. Although in such societies all other essential points, such as the price for the bride and the dowry, had already been agreed upon in a contract by the two families between which a marriage was to take place, the bridegroom had to stage a seemingly violent abduction of the bride. As late as the end of the 20th century there still existed in certain parts of the Greek peninsula, for example, the custom that the bride, fully dressed in her bridal costume, waited together with her mother in a room of her parental home, and the bridegroom had to kick down the door to this room and symbolically snatch the bride away from her mother and then “abduct” her. Just for this purpose, an especially cheap and thin door that could easily be kicked down had replaced the normal door. The deeper psychological ground for this custom is probably that the bride must be snatched away from the ghost to whom in the depth of her soul she had been married, as well as snatched away from the world of ideality, and dragged over into the sphere of an earthly flesh and blood man. The soul here obviously knew that there is no natural, gradual transition from virgin to woman/wife status, but that psychologically, logically, an abrupt translocation, transplantation, indeed “rape” (raptio) is needed, a translocation not merely externally from a first empirical place of residence (the paternal home) to another empirical place of residence (that of the man) and from the one family or clan into the other one, but much more radically, i.e., logically, syntactically, from one psychological status into another one. And that means here: from one ontological sphere into another (opposite) ontological sphere, from the sphere of ideality or of what has merely the status of principles into the sphere of empirical reality. The ritually staged violent transplantation had the function of giving visible expression to the soul’s necessity of translocation from the one into

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the other status, of confirming it through this visible representation and at the same time also facilitating the actual happening of a psychological transportation within the bride. The violent moment of the transition from maiden to woman is also expressed in the myth of Kore-Persephone. Kore, as innocentvirginal maiden, is playing in a meadow full of flowers. Suddenly the earth opens underneath her and the masculine, in the shape of the underworld god of the dead, bursts up into her world and violently abducts her and makes her his wife and queen. The transition consists in an abrupt change and happens through the intrusion of the masculine from out of the underworldly depths into the innocent idealized world of the maiden. (The myth has, of course, also other aspects. I am here only interested in the maiden-woman transition. From this particular point of view, the underworld character of the masculine needs to be understood as showing that through the emergence of the real man in the flesh as future husband the floor on which she has been standing caves in under her feet, namely the floor of the ideal world, of the soul’s total self-enclosure within itself. The ideal’s becoming real is terrifying, shocking, an underworldly irruption into the shelteredness of the soul’s virginal constitution. Becoming a reality means a death of innocence.) I might mention in passing that there are psychological interpretations of our fairytale type (AT 507A) that see it as a representation of a familial problem, a girl’s father fixation and its cure. This view needs three responses. First, it turns the wheel backwards. We have seen that the demon as secret spouse within the interiority of the soul is precisely the first immediacy of the truly Other, with whose emergence the childlike orientation (“fixation”) toward the family and the parents and thus also to the father in particular is terminated. The father is precisely already obsolete. The princess’s refusal to marry does not at all serve the wish to remain child, to hold on to the child status. It is precisely prospective. Childhood lies here psychologically definitively behind her. She is really in the status of virgin and for this reason strictly oriented inwards in a relation to the otherworldly ghost-husband. Rather than reductively viewing such a situation in terms of the family romance and the father, we should turn the matter around and comprehend the so-called father-complex or “father fixation” in terms of the soul, of the psychological, that is

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to say, essentially intellectual, logical, problem as it emerged for us in the preceding discussion. The second point is that the reductive recourse to a father problematic, i.e., back to the original family and to childhood, probably suggests itself today because the concepts of maiden and virginity have become pointless, indeed, senseless words (apart from the medical or juridical meaning of “virgin”). The whole logical stage between girl and woman, the link, has disappeared, has no reality in psychological, social, and cultural reality anymore. A small but clear symptom is the elimination in language of the difference between “Miss” and “Mrs.,” in German the abandonment of the title “Fräulein.” The third point is, of course, the conventional confounding of the merely psychic with the psychological. People do not usually think in terms of soul and its underworldliness, that is, of the logic of the soul, but in terms of the emotions, wishes, object-relations, etc., of people. The situation in the fairytale is definitely not neurotic. That this is so comes out most clearly, I think, in the fact that it is the virgin herself who asks the riddle question whose correct answer breaks the spell of virginity. If it is the demon himself who gives her the question about his head, then this is evidence of the fact that of its own accord the spell presses for its own dissolution. Empirically it demands to be known, to be released from its concealedness in the night-world, in the strict interiority of the soul. We can state the same about the princess: in her own soul there is an urge to be redeemed from her virginity. The insistence of her royal father and his councilors is not the true source of the princess’s readiness to let herself in for suitors. Their insistence has merely the purpose of making visible the virginal state of shutting herself off. The virgin is the unity of absolute self-enclosure within the interiority of the soul (thus the death threat toward all potential suitors) AND the call (to the same suitors!) to free her from this selfenclosedness (therefore the riddle about the head of her ghosthusband, which is an unspoken and unwitting request that the suitor find out and reveal her secret, which, after all, is a secret for her, too). But for this liberation the virgin is dependent on the real “external” Other, and, to be sure, exclusively on someone capable of enduring the dialectic of death threat and invitation/call and executing what he was called to do.

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Now it also becomes clear that the princess’s posing those riddles was by no means a superfluous quirk of hers. No, it is a simple necessity. She can only give herself to that man who has taken possession of the demon’s head and thus has in fact become the empirically real successor figure to the invisible, underworldly ghost-bridegroom. What in the fairytale appears as three literally asked riddle questions could psychologically be understood as a symbolic depiction of the fact that the virgin exists as the question about her demon-lovers head and as the invitation to the suitor to answer this question not verbally, but through his showing himself as the demon’s sublated successor. The condition of the possibility of a real marriage relationship, our fairytale tells us, does not lie in two persons’s liking and finding each other attractive. Marriage is here not seen as partnership. In order to become husband, the masculine must much rather have been capable of penetrating into the innermost heart of the virgin’s virginity itself and of awakening her from her secludedness, in the same way as happened with Sleeping Beauty, surrounded by a hedge of thorns, and with Brynhildr, who also sleeps shielded by a ring of flames. And conversely, we learn from our tale that he has his capacity of being the husband of a wife not simply in himself, and is from the outset endowed with it, but that he has to gain it for himself from his Other, from the virginity of the feminine, namely, through the conquest and appropriation (integration) of the innermost secret of the virgin, imaginally speaking of the ghost-bridegroom. The man gains his masculinity in the deepest virginity of the feminine, the particular maiden that interests him, and this happens by not letting himself be scared off by the death-threat that is irrevocably inherent in the virginity as such. Maybe, with this in mind, it is not so surprising that today, when “virginity” has vanished from our thinking, knowing, and being, one hears frequent complaints about men’s lacking masculine identity and about their deep insecurity over against the feminine.125 The relation of the sexes is represented as dialectically joined in a crosswise way. The maiden needs the alien man coming to her from outside, against whom she defends herself with utmost consequence, 125 One cannot even rule out the possibility (and it might be worth closer examination) that the increase of pedophilia during the last decades is in some way connected with the disappearance of “the virgin” as an in-between stage.

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in order to be freed of her isolation within herself, and the man needs the virginal defense on the part of the female in order to gain his masculinity through her. But as pointed out: our fairytale, as all fairytales, does not talk about people, men and woman, but about the soul, here in particular about the psychological logic of virginity and the transition to the wife status. The loss in our time of the real, i.e., lived, concepts of virginity and the maiden is concomitant with the loss of the ghost-bride and thus at the same time of a real concept of a ghost, a demon-lover. When there is no lived knowledge anymore in the soul of virginity and of the ghost to whom the virgin is married, then nobody can follow the princess’s nightly flight to her loving encounter with the ghost. Nobody can meet her in her virginity and bring about the radical change of the Other from its first immediacy into the empirically real presence of the Other. Now, the disappearance of virginity in the historical situation of modernity is the sign that the opposition of male and female as a whole, the entire topic of the relation between the sexes (just as sexuality as such, too) has been released from the soul altogether and now has become a merely subjective, egoic, personal affair of either pragmatic or emotional character. 126 Psychologically it has become irrelevant. It is unmoored, left to the moods and fancies, wishes and emotions, of people. The objective soul has given up its claim to it, thus leaving it to its own devices, and the relation between the sexes, conversely, has lost its soul depth and soul truth, the dimension of soul depth. Psychoanalysis now rightly speaks of object-relations, in all earnest. Some people about “games people play.”

*** I return to our fairytale. We have seen that in it the psychological structure of the virgin presses from within itself for the real man and that the demon wants of his own accord to be known and sublated. In mythology, by contrast, we find virginal goddesses who immutably remain virginal forever, just think, for example, of Artemis or Athene in Greek mythology. Here there is no developmental impulse, no inner 126 The fact that nowadays the relation of lesbian and gay couples is socially often honored as “marriage” also shows that the soul has emigrated from the sphere of personal sexual relations as an arena for it to publicly display its logical life, here especially the union of its opposites.

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need to get beyond the status in which the virginal figure is at the beginning and move into a new status. Indeed, such a move is excluded. In mythology, virginity is absolutely self-sufficient and remains selfsame. A further development beyond the status of virgin is unthinkable here. To expect it would be a misunderstanding of what or who Artemis is (but the same applies also to any other mythological figure). This raises the question of what is responsible for the difference between myth and fairytale concerning one and the same theme, virginity. Where does the impulse for a further development in fairytales come from, and what makes it possible? It is best to start with the insight why there cannot be a development of figures in myth (I have here especially Greek myth in mind). Mythology distributes all the many different moments and aspects of reality onto separate, independent figures and releases each one into its own nature and being-for-itself. Each one represents statically an essence, and only all of them together make up the complete picture of the world. Myths, of course, show actions, deeds, family relations, encounters, marriages between different individual deities or deities and other mythic figures, as well as numerous fatherings and births. But all this interconnection is only in the service of portraying in imaginal and narrative form the one, in itself complex many-faceted nature of each of the figures. Through the seemingly external relations (or interrelations) of a figure with others, myths represent precisely the unfolding of the internal logic of the particular “essence,” imaginally embodied in each particular figure. In this sense myths are like (prephilosophical, prelogical) “definitions” of (prephilosophical) concepts. One might object that there are also metamorphoses to be found in mythology. But again, they only serve the same purpose of unfolding and displaying the inner truth of the figure that undergoes a metamorphosis and do not represent a further-development from one logical status to another, fundamentally higher one via a logical negation. Mythology is fundamentally atemporal. For it, there is—logically, syntactically—no time. Only an ageless being-so. As Sallustios127 said, myths represent what never happened but always is.128 127

On the Gods IV, 8. It seems, however, that myth often reflects actual historical changes. But when this is so, it only reflects them, but it does not represent them as such. The point of myth is precisely to raise into generality even historical events that may have given rise to the story and to obliterate all literal reference to or memory of historical facts. 128

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In this sense virginal Artemis, for example, is the concrete concept of (a certain type of ) virginity, a concept that has been abstractly released into ideality, and, what is most important, she is a goddess and not a human virgin! As such, she is primarily a cosmic reality (in the case of Artemis the aspect of the ruthless wildness of Being as such, but also the pristine wilderness of untouched nature), not merely a representation of virginity as an actual status of human beings. By the same token, the Great Mother is by no means an enlargement and idealization of a human mother, or the general essence abstracted from all human mothers (as Jung sometimes seemed to think). She too is a priori and irreducibly a goddess and a cosmic principle. As cosmic principles, gods need cultic worship. They have to be feared and respected. Turning from here to our fairytale we have to admit right away that our princess is, of course, also not an empirical flesh and blood human being. She is an ideal type, quite abstract, even more abstract than any mythic figure, the symbolic representation of a psychological status. But nevertheless (or precisely as such) it is inherent in this figure that it refers to a specifically human reality whose envisioned quintessence and logic it represents. It would be unthinkable to come to our fairytale with ideas in one’s mind of a possible cultic worship of the figures contained in it. The princess is not divine, not a goddess. She does not represent an aspect of the world, nor serve, as myth does, the deep cognition of the world. In fairytales the ideal type is the ideal type of “real person.”129 Notwithstanding the ideal-type generalization characteristic also of fairytales, the sphere in which the story takes place is fundamentally empirical-temporal. Although one might say about fairytales, too, that what they describe “never happened,” just as Sallustios had said about myth, nevertheless, the continuation of Sallustios’ dictum (“but what always is”) could not possibly be applied to fairytales, because they are not interested in what is, in being, in the knowing and portrayal of the cosmos. At least Greek myth is from the outset theoretical. Fairytales, by contrast, are, so to speak, ethical, in the sense that they provide 129 But fairytales are not concerned with real persons as people and do not talk about their behavior and what happens to them. Their topic is soul processes, what happens in the depths.

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ideal-type models of how to go through certain processes, paradigms for the correct way of passing through (particular) initiation experiences (Heino Gehrts). As “ethical” in this particular sense, they refer from the outset to possible human tasks, to possible human “behavior” and “moves” in particular transitional soul situations. Fairytale heroes or heroines are logically (typified) humans in concrete life situations 130 and completely down to earth. 131 They may switch between empirical places, or they may have to move yonder into the other world of spirits (into the “forest,” the land “behind the seven mountains,” to the top of the glass mountain, etc.) that is not subject to time and change in the same way as their own world. But their journey yonder and back itself happens as an event in time. Our tale, with its duality of “day-world” and “night-world,” describes these two realms directly in temporal terms. This fundamental logical difference between two worlds or realms—we could also say: the syntactical disruption of reality as a whole into two, day-world and night-world, here and yonder, ordinary human world and the other world of the soul’s logical life—would be incompatible with myth, because within myth we always stay syntactically in one and the same world even if, for example, Hermes may fly from the heaven of the Olympics into the human world or into Hades under the earth. The difference between those different spheres of the mythological cosmos is only semantic. The logical continuity and unity of reality as a whole is never ruptured in myth (in the sense of stories about the gods). 132 Mythology is logically uniform: the portrayal of the deep soul view of the cosmos. Everything in it is “archetypal.” Ordinary empirical reality is 130 Concrete life situations on the deep level of the soul’s logical life, not situations in the pragmatics of everyday life. 131 In myths the gods and goddesses, even if they interfere with human affairs here on earth, never truly come down to earth. Even if they take human or animal shape, they remain divine, otherworldly, essentially aloof. Only in Christianity with the incarnation in Jesus does the divine really touch the earth and temporal reality. Which is why Christianity is fundamentally post-mythological. Myth is burst. Fairytales do not burst myth. They start out from the earth. 132 Odysseus’ descensus ad inferos is structurally a fairytale topic, not a mythological one. The same applies to the Argonauts’ journey in quest of the Golden Fleece. This is true in spite of the fact that there was a tendency in the ancient Greek tradition to absorb the fairytale motifs into the logical sphere of myth, to mix tales about human initiations or quests with Göttergeschichten.

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excluded (fairytales, by contrast, sometimes speak of real earthly situations of illness, famine, loss of a parent, etc.). The structural commitment to this earth and to time already opens up the general possibility of developmental changes. But if the purpose of these tales, or their actual topic, was to provide models of rites de passage, then we can in addition state that fairytales even aim from the outset for a passing from one status to another. They have an impulse towards further-development—in contrast to the mere unfolding of the internal logic of a chosen topic—within their very structure or syntax. This is why in our fairytale the concept (of “the Other,” the demon) pushes of its own accord for its further development and this always means: for its own negation, sublation.

*** At the beginning of this chapter I started out with the question, “How does the princess’s absolute dependence come about in the first place? What is it that gives rise to and makes possible the absolute principle?” We have seen that the princess’s demon-beloved came about through the soul’s having been transported from the innocent child status into the status of virginal maiden, which was tantamount to the reflection-into-herself of the child’s beingas-relation or of relatedness as such. The interiorized relatedness as such, an abstract logical reality, coagulated and imaginally crystallized into an inner figure, into the counter-sexual inner Other and the princess’s bond to it. In a way our question about the genesis of the demon-lover has thereby been answered. And yet it has precisely not really been fully answered inasmuch as it is an explanation that only applies to the situation of former ages in which the concept and lived social reality of “virginity” as a psychological link between the soul’s childhood status and its full adulthood status was still intact. This explanation is only valid if our fairytale is read as referring to normal, not neurotic development. But in this book we especially need to know how the neurotic “The Absolute” comes about, that is, how the “first immediacy of the Other” in the healthy development at bygone times became “the absolute principle” that in our “neurotic” reading of the tale, appropriate for the situation of modernity, holds the princess in total

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dependence, in a neurotic fixation, a fixation which as neurotic does precisely not have any developmental potential, but on the contrary amounts to an absolute deadlock. It is not a first immediacy of something new, not something prospective and promising. It is the sterile point-blank insistence on a principle for principle’s sake. Whereas the princess’s ruthless command to have all suitors beheaded is based on her deep and genuine relation to her demon-lover, the absolute principle of neurosis appears as a positive-factual, pedantic, totally senseless power-demonstration and absolute insistence of the absolute principle, abstract absoluteness that has neither a substantial basis nor does it lead anywhere. Total standstill. Endless repetition, but no movement. The reason for this fundamental difference is the rupture of history, particularly in two regards. First, as we have already seen, the concept of virginity and the institution in lived life of the status of the virgin has been eliminated from the soul’s logic. It is no longer available. What this means for the psychological condition of modern man is that the whole sphere of the relationship between people as embodiments of the masculine and the feminine as well as sexuality at large have been deserted by the soul. The soul has emigrated from them and left them behind as (in a psychological sense) “trivial pursuits,” without soul meaning, completely irrelevant for soul and indifferent (“anything goes”), mere ego behaviors or experiences dependent on the likings and subjective capabilities or handicaps of the empirical individuals. In status and rank they are no different from the question of what we like to eat for breakfast or what type of clothes we prefer. The soul has left behind the entire sphere of people’s actions, relations, and experiences, and moved into the new dimension of logical form or syntax. Or to be more precise, it moved to the new dimension of the form of logical form. For, after all, the soul had always, even in archaic times, expressed itself on the level of logical form or syntax, and nowhere else. However, in archaic, ancient, and medieval times precisely in a semanticized logical form or syntax, that is to say, in the enactment of formal rituals, in the rigidly ceremonial conduct of public and private life, in fixed role assignments, and in the sensual-imaginal portrayal of symbols, etc. When under these new conditions the soul stubbornly, spitefully, nevertheless insists on soul meaning in the area of human relationship,

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then, due to its modernity, it cannot, to be sure, really go back to the former logical status in which the concrete enactment of the logical interplay between the soul’s opposites (in the form of the male-female tension) was a highly loaded soul theme, and find its fulfillment in an attempted recovery of it. However, it can at least adamantly refuse to go along with the soul’s historical development and try to simulate a return to the historically obsolete status of (psychological) “virginity.” But all it gets thereby is a compromise formation: the “absolute principle” as the totally depleted, no longer imaginable, or zero-stage form of the former demon-lover, a mere function. The compromise character lies in the fact that by the radical reduction to zero of all semantic-imaginal content of a male lover and in this way its having become merely functional, it unwittingly pays tribute to the irrevocable obsolescence of the semanticization of the soul’s opposites and to the ritual enactment of their interplay, and thus to its own having already inevitably been thrust into the modern soul condition and its empty functionality. And, conversely, by having an “absolute principle” that posits “The Absolute,” it at the same time incorrigibly holds on, if not to semantic concepts, then at least to the (totally emptied out, completely abstract) form or level as such of the semantic, and successfully refuses to go over to the truly modern form or level of form, of syntax. In fact, “The Absolute” is thus both the zero form of the semanticization of syntactical or logical form and the zero form of the form of syntactical or logical form. Neither fish nor fowl. Nihilistic positivism or positivistic nihilism, but equipped with absolute power. The second aspect of why the “first immediacy of the Other” (that belongs to the deepest inner psychology of the maiden of former ages) in neurosis and in modernity in general can only appear as “the absolute principle” is that the modern soul is from the outset a fundamentally and irrevocably awake soul, an enlightened soul, a soul born out of itself. Today Sleeping Beauty could not possibly fall asleep again. The soul’s sleep is over once and for all. But if the soul’s sleep is over, then the night-world with the demon-lover is over, too. The “princess” cannot be married to him as the representation of the first immediacy of the Other. But since she is not married to and totally enchanted by him, she cannot be healed from her enchantment. And the first immediacy of the Other (of the concept of husband) cannot of its own

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accord press for its further-development through its negation, to become replaced by its successor, a real husband. The neurotic soul gets stuck in its neurosis. There cannot be any further-development to real husband because, as I showed, the whole topic of “husband,” man-woman relationship, has become psychologically irrelevant. The soul has no stake in the semanticizations of its opposites anymore. This, however, by no means implies that the soul has altogether given up on its own Other and on the interplay between its opposites. It only means that the soul’s way to her own Other cannot lead anymore via the soul’s sinking into deepest sleep, into its innermost underworldly recesses, and that it cannot find its Other in such a thing as husband or wife. The now inevitably waking soul can find its Other only by going its way forward into logos and highly differentiated complex thought. When under these circumstances the soul, spitefully, nevertheless insists on its old mode of finding access to its own Other by going to sleep and sinking into its deepest underworldly recesses, it cannot get there. All it can get to by trying to go back (or rather not “get to” but invent and establish for the first time) is the simulation of “sleep of the soul” and underworldly depth, namely, the thoroughly modern, empirical, positivistic “unconscious”: unconscious fantasies, images, ideals and illusions, so-called “instinctual” wishes, fixations, as the egopersonality’s property and elements of personalistic psychology. Jung said that in contrast to “mana,” “a daimon,” “a god,” the name “the unconscious” “is banal and therefore closer to reality. This latter concept includes its accessibility to empirical experience [Erfahrbarkeit], that is, everyday reality the way we know it and have access to it. The unconscious is too neutral and rational a term to be of any practical help to the imagination. The term, after all, was coined for scientific purposes” (MDR p. 336, transl. modif.). No doubt, this is a correct observation. The unconscious, as part of the modern soul, belongs fundamentally to the abstractness of the modern rational functionalized, operationalized world and to empirical reality. It is part of “civil man.” The logical constitution of the contents of the so-called unconscious is one of “facts.” So far, we agree with Jung. But Sleeping Beauty’s or rather her soul’s sleep is on principle not accessible to empirical study. It does not lead into the familiar world of everyday reality. It is the soul’s real sleep, its sinking into its own

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innermost recesses and not into people’s unconscious. The princess’s demon-lover is not a “fact.” Nobody knows about him, not even she herself. She does not see him even in her wildest dreams. He is not a content of her unconscious, 133 not an experience, and not an imagination. The soul’s sleep refers to the nonsemantic, nonimaginal, absolutely hidden logic or syntax of the soul,134 here the logic of virginity, which finds expression exclusively after the fact and outside of the soul’s sleep, in some mirror: in the mind’s reflecting thought—for example, in a fairytale (which, therefore, is not a kind of immediate self-expression of the soul’s experience nor a product of the imagination. The unconscious is not a treasury filled with archetypal contents ready to pop into consciousness when the right occasion arises. Fairytales as well as myth are not images from the unconscious. What an anachronism and psychologistic-positivistic retrojection! They are the product of deepest human thought about and comprehension of135 the essential real—thought, of course, not yet represented in the form of thought, but in imaginal and narrative form. The soul always thinks.) Just as in atomic physics the Bohr model of the atom is a model and not an actual and immediate depiction of the inner structure of atoms, so also are fairytales not records of primordial experiences of archetypal images (Urerfahrungen) but intellect- or insight-produced models136 of particular moments in the soul’s invisible logical life. This is why Jung, despite his important awareness of the empirical (and I think we should add: positivistic) character of the term “the unconscious,” must be severely criticized for restricting this his insight to the name or term, “the unconscious,” alone, rather than applying it to the Sache, the reality and substance, designated by this name. Because this is a pia fraus (but, of course, at the same time a selfdeception, since he presents his view in good faith). Jung commits his pia fraus by claiming “that ‘mana,’ ‘daimon,’ and ‘God’ are synonyms for the unconscious” (p. 337). It is a frivolous game to play with the 133

Contents of the unconscious are always conscious. As I pointed out above in a footnote, the soul’s logical life represents a second supersensible world, which in itself is the inverted first supersensible world. If we saw Sleeping Beauty’s sleep as her unconscious, her inner, we would stay in the first supersensible world viewed as second “impressions of the daily life.” 135 Productive, not merely receptive, not merely “dreaming”! Poiêsis. Soul-making! 136 This concept of “model” should, of course, not be confused with the concept I used earlier when I referred to our fairytale as a model or paradigm of neurosis. 134

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names, as if names were what was at stake. By playing the mythic language against the scientific one and the latter against the former, although at the same time pointing in all fairness to the advantages and disadvantages (as he sees them) of both, Jung manages to evade the actual issue or create a smoke screen around it. This smoke screen, because naturally we don’t know what is behind a smoke screen,137 allows him to hold on to, or rather regressively restore, the idea that the contents themselves that emerge from the modern unconscious still have mythic validity and relevance, mutatis mutandis the same relevance as in ancient times, i.e., as myths, fairytales, and religion had. This is precisely the neurotic impulse, an impulse which here, however, appears in the sphere of psychological theorizing (rather than as neurotic symptoms in a person). Once one has understood that the models are the Sache or issue itself, then one also knows that we are always speaking about our models and not merely about the names we give them, nor about what they are allegedly the models of. But this also means that Jung’s split between the name and what the name is about is a sleight of hand and that, conversely, the names “mana,” “daimon,” and “God,” on the one hand, and “the unconscious,” on the other hand, are decisively themselves fundamentally different models and not merely names, and that as models, or if you wish, as names, they are die Sache of psychology (they are that which psychology is about). Our question is: do we in physics follow the Rutherford model or the Bohr model of the atom, and do we in psychology follow the “God” model or the “the unconscious” model—or, as I would suggest, do we follow neither, but rather the form change from model to logical form, i.e., to the “model” of the soul’s logical life? It is the neurotic soul’s delusion that turning to “the unconscious”—by dreaming, active imagination, indulging in myths and fairytales, going into analysis, etc.—is the modern equivalent to the former soul’s sleep 138 and that the contents and figures in this “unconscious” are in themselves the soul’s sought-for own Other. 137 “... we know just as much or just as little about them [‘mana,’ ‘daimon,’ and ‘God’] as about the latter [the unconscious]” (p. 337). 138 We can think here also of the not infrequent comparison of a Jungian analysis with initiations of old as well as, specifically, of von Franz’s and Ellenberger’s viewing what Jung called his “confrontation with the unconscious” as a kind of shamanistic experience. Borrowed plumes!

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Dreams and analysis may, if handled psychologically, be helpful for finding a way out of the soul’s neurosis into the normal practical life of a modern ego-personality. But they do not lead to the land of the modern soul and to the modern soul’s own Other.

*** That the institution of psychoanalysis was established in the 20th century and that it believes to be an approach to the soul is a sign of the fact that the modern soul is irrevocably a waking soul. It needs to “make conscious.” Jung repeatedly said that today we need to know. The princess in our fairytale did not need analysis, did not need to pay attention to her dreams, and she did not dream of her demonlover at all, and she did not know about him. This is because she was still contained in the soul, not born out of it, and psychologically went therefore through life as Sleeping Beauty. As the conscious person that she was she was enveloped in the soul’s sleep, and all important psychological changes happened in her sleep (not her literal sleep at night, but sleep as her logical status of being), without any knowing or conscious participation. “In her sleep” precisely does not mean in herself, in her inner! It means in the objective logic of the soul within which she was contained and within which she moved, or was transported, objectively from one “place” (concept, status) to another, much in the same way as we move “subjectively” (by our own walking or driving) from place to place in a landscape. Before modernity, before the birth of man, humans were enveloped in the soul. Thus they were the concepts as which they existed; they were, for example, the concept of child, virgin, husband, chief. And it was the concept that went through the different important psychological status changes in the respective individuals, not those individuals themselves. Our fairytale shows how in the princess the soul’s concept changed from “maiden” or “virgin” into “woman.” Sleeping Beauty even shows how the concept changed in her from “innocent child” or “girl” into “virgin” and finally into “woman.” In actual social life, the enactments of rites of passage were certainly important helps in these processes; yet again, it was never “she” as conscious person

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who went through these rituals as the real enactment of those changes of the concept from child to maiden or from maiden to woman/wife, but the sleeping soul in her. As far as the conscious personality was concerned, those rituals were merely enacted (acted out) and for this very reason were capable of in fact bringing about the necessary real change: ritual acts, Jung rightly told us, are “performed without thinking” (gedankenlos vollzogen).139 They had to be performed without thinking, because they were the soul’s or the concept’s self-display or self-development and not part of people’s personal development. Nobody needed to “develop,” nobody needed to undergo his or her “individuation process.” If the modern waking soul wants to regressively restore the soul’s sleep, the status of immediate present reality of the soul or, which is the same thing, the I’s immediate envelopment in the soul, then the result is what we call neurotic dissociation, the simultaneity of (a) the inevitably waking soul (ego-consciousness) and (b) the waking soul’s simulation of absolutely real sleep. This is why in the next chapter we will have to devote ourselves to the topic of dissociation.

3. DISSOCIATION When we now turn to the topic of dissociation we need to keep in mind that we are doing this within a psychological investigation and, particularly, in the context of a discussion of the internal functioning and logic of neurosis. That is to say, we have to keep away any psychiatric, clinical ideas of “dissociative disorders” in the sense of the DSM IV or ICD-10. We are concerned with the soul’s logical life and not with clinical diagnoses of people. The notion of “dissociative disorders” refers to psychic conditions, to personality disorders, and as such belongs to ego-psychology. Our term “dissociation” is a logical one (referring to logical operations) and is indispensable in a psychology of neurosis (neurosis in contrast to neurotic people). After this clarification we can turn to our new topic itself.

139 “C.G. Jung und der Weihnachtsbaum” (interview by G. Gerster, 1957), in: C.G. Jung im Gespräch, Zürich (Daimon Verlag) 1986, p. 182. C.G. Jung Speaking has “unthinking ritual act,” p. 332.

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With the keyword “neurotic dissociation” we come to that aspect that makes explicit the ingenious, cunning, if not underhanded, character that is an essential property of neurosis as a thoroughly modern illness. Because of its internal complexity, the concept of dissociation and how it operates as a mechanism of neurosis must be developed in several steps. I will discuss the four steps under the following titles: a) self-contradiction, b) immunization, c) chiasmus, and d) “yes, truly—but still more truly.” a) Self-contradiction I pointed out above that in the case of an extramarital love-affair (of a woman), her husband and her lover share the same world and that for this reason, if the husband is not supposed to know about the affair, the two relationships have to be kept apart by special empirical behavior, by secrecy, possibly lies, and the strict separation of the times the woman is with each of them. It is obvious that if there is sameness logically or ontologically, a desired separation of two elements has to be achieved by empirical measures. Now, in the case of our princess, we have the reverse situation. Here two logically or ontologically separate worlds, represented in the story as day-world and night-world, share simultaneously one and the same real person, namely the princess. The two worlds coexist in her, permeate her, without, however, touching each other. They are simultaneously there, both occupying the same space, but absolutely insulated from, immunized against, each other. If the princess would have been asked during the day how her night had been, she could probably in all honesty have said that she slept through the night in her bed. She as day-person does not know what she as night-person has been doing (and we already know: she does not know either what she continually is, and therefore also what she is doing in the present, while she is answering), namely flying to the demon and spending her time with him. She is absolutely ignorant of it. She has no inkling why she has to refuse men, why she has to pose impossible riddle questions to them that would normally ensure her isolation, why she has to demand that the failing suitors be killed. All she probably could say is that this is how she is, it is her nature; or maybe how it is. To her it must appear as a fact that simply has to be taken as a

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matter-of-course. From her view one of course has to behave like this towards men; for how else should she relate to them? An alternative relation is not even feasible. But she could not give any reason why. This has to be so because it is inherent in the nature of a principle. When a principle rules (in the soul of a person), it is simply there and rules as an absolute ruler. “Principle” comes from the Latin “principium,” which is in turn derived from “princeps,” meaning the first (in a hierarchy), the foremost, the most important, and by extension the prince, the ruler. A principle is “first”: it is not derived from an earlier axiom and does not account for itself through argumentation (reasons) to make its legitimacy plausible. It is there and demands obedience, or rather it does not “demand” (which might cause a resistence). No, if it is there, it simply rules, and it rules absolutely, without question, without giving to those ruled by it the feeling of being coerced and oppressed (and this is why I said above that it is ego-syntonic). Its ruling is thus not a laying claim to be the ruler (which could always be disputed); it is not an empirical, not a political, but a logical, indeed, an ontological rule: ruling as a given, a simple fact (comparable perhaps to how something like the law of gravity rules). In this sense, as the day-person the king’s daughter is completely innocent. She does not know about her own other, the night-person. Luther once said in a completely different, theological context, namely speaking about the nature of Christian man (far away from any neurosis): sunt duo toti homines, “there are two whole (or total) persons.” A marvelous formula that we can take out of his context and, ignoring what it meant for him, use for our purposes. It perfectly describes the situation of our princess and of neurosis in general. What does it mean? The first thing to note is that the statement is self-contradictory. If there are two persons in man, neither can be the total person, because it has the other as its counterpart or complement outside of itself. The one relativizes and limits the other. Totality, however, implies allcomprehensiveness; there cannot be anything outside of it. Yet this sentence demands that we think of one and the same as two, as two distinct wholenesses or totalities: the whole person is totally the one person and at the same time totally the other person. Prior to her cure, the king’s daughter is totally the day-person and totally the night-

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person, both at the same time and both totally separately. And this is indeed what we need to think if we want to think neurosis. Neurosis is self-contradiction. The specific name for this selfcontradiction is neurotic dissociation. Conversely, neurotic dissociation has to be understood strictly as self-contradiction. It is not enough to comprehend dissociation as a division of the whole personality into two halves, into consciousness and the unconscious, or as a repression of certain aspects of the personality, which then fall into the unconscious. To have a shadow in Jung’s sense is not per se neurotic; it is just a human problem, a difficulty. Neurotic dissociation is not a split in the ordinary sense, like when you split wood. Neither does it simply mean one-sidedness. It also does not really mean switching between two personalities, 140 as the names day-person and nightperson might suggest. It is precisely not at two different times that each of the two personalities come into being; they are not kept neatly apart through a complementary distribution to different times or places, now this personality, now that one. No, they have to be comprehended as both being totally present at the same time. The strict notion of dissociation in the psychology of neurosis is self-contradiction: the splitting of truth itself so that two truths reign at the same time and concerning the same. It is a logical problem, a logical relation, a form of self-relation. It is not a relation to some other, something alien, something threatening that is feared and evokes defense mechanisms. There is no conflict, no opposition. If the princess would have reserved one personality for the night and another one for the day, this might have been strange, maybe also pathological (but also maybe not), but at any rate it would not be neurotically dissociated, because the separation of the two would have occurred according to a concrete, positive criterion and on the empirical-behavioral level, not on the level of soul, the level of her conceptual self-definition, her self-constitution. It would have been strategic behavior. We all switch between two or more personalities, e.g., between a private and a public one. Jung discussed this theme under the heading of “persona.” It is completely normal, even desirable, that one and the same person displays a “habitual collective attitude” 140 In the sense of the clinical idea of “dissociative identity disorder” or “multiple personality disorder.”

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(persona) at his work place which is different from how he shows himself at home or in a love relationship. This is a more or less conscious strategy (and on top of it a psychic achievement, a sign of one’s adaptability), and as such not neurotic. A neurotic dissociation is, e.g., portrayed by Robert Louis Stevenson in his Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886): “je kill” (I kill), but as Mr. Hyde: I hide it from myself, or better: it is hidden from me, I do not know anything about it. So I, the same I, am totally guilty and totally innocent at once: sum duo toti homines. Historically speaking, this may be the first description of a neurotic dissociation in literature.141 The time when this novel was written was the time in history when neurosis became possible. b) Immunization The two personalities (the night-person and the day-person) are in reality two conceptual self-definitions that are contradictory. The night-person is defined in terms of the notions of the soul, the dayperson is defined by the standards of ordinary reality. Normally two contradictory definitions that are present at to same time cannot persist. They clash, and their conflict requires a resolution. So far I talked about dissociation as self-contradiction. But there is a second essential characteristic of the neurotic dissociation, and this is that the clash does precisely not take place so that neurosis can exist as the miracle of a persisting, lasting self-contradiction. But of course this is not a case of a miracle. It is something that owes its existence to a trick. Something must prevent the two self-definitions from clashing, without, however, separating them empirically. In some way they must be kept apart while at the same time being allowed to be both totally present. What immunizes the one against the other, so that they can coexist despite their contradictoriness? It must be a psychological, i.e., a logical strategy. The name of the mechanism employed is denial, dis-ownment, repudiation. The princess as the day-person that she is would simply deny that she indeed believes in the soul’s thesis that the concept of marriage is 141 A little earlier Kierkegaard, as Greg Mogenson kindly pointed out to me, had already diagnosed the “double-mindedness” of the individual in his time in his Purity of the Heart is to Will One Thing.

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its own fulfillment and as such self-sufficient. She would of course (not only publicly claim, but also privately) honestly think that this is nonsense. Of course, there is a difference between the mere idea of something and its reality; of course, if you want to marry you need somebody else. How could anyone be so stupid as to claim anything else? Not her, at any rate. Conversely, she as the night-person would adamantly insist on the soul’s view that a real concept is its own reality and absolutely not in need of anything from outside to complement it. Anyone stating anything else just does not understand. The rational criticism that the day-person just expressed is based on ignorance, on not being initiated, on small-mindedness. Such thinking may be good enough for the superficiality of everyday life, but not in higher, essential regards. She, as the soul- or nightperson, at any rate could only laugh at it. Each of the two persons categorically repudiates the position of the other as absolutely not worth considering. In this way the two positions do not get into a discussion with each other, where they would inevitably be at war with each other, get into each other’s hair and thus create a situation that, being intolerable, would press for a settlement one way or another. Rather, the two persons talk at crosspurposes, thereby changing their possible confrontation into two parallel monologues that theoretically can go on into eternity. What this means is that the soul’s self-relation, its discussion with itself is disrupted. The soul’s uroboric, circular, returning-to-itself movement is broken open (1), the circle is bent apart (2) so that two parallel vectors arise (3). The soul’s reflexive logic is ended.

This is how out of one person all of a sudden two total persons arise. The wholesale rejection of the other position as in each case totally out of court (a rejection that ultimately means an absolute ignoring of the other position) produces that kind of insulation that allows two contradictory standpoints to be held at the same time without their

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clashing with each other. Ignoring is not enough. Each has to be absolutely ignorant of the position of the other. Dissociation is the sundering of the subject’s reflexive oneness into two separate subjectivities that do not know of each other. It is no longer I who have both this thesis and that thesis and now have to see how to reconcile the two. The I, which is what could and would take responsibility for every thought or reaction occurring within its own sphere and would thus hold everything together, has pulled itself out of the whole situation. It has left the scene, leaving behind the two contradictory standpoints without their subject. Dissociation means the end of subjectivity as an encompassing personality that feels responsible for all ideas and standpoints that come up in consciousness and a reduction or downgrading of this I to two separate smaller or partial I’s, each of which has become identical with a separate conviction or thesis. This of course also amounts to a reduction of the neurotic conviction from an opinion responsibly held by a subject to a kind of objective or natural fact: the neurotic position now behaves much like a physical force, robot-like, mechanically and single-mindedly continuing to insist on its view. Opinions are always in principle debatable. But deprived of its embeddedness in the original I as whose living conviction it could be, the neurotic conviction remains unchecked and is fundamentally beyond criticism, and the small I that now is left has no ears and eyes that could be open to and respond to anything else. It is identical with the conviction and thus incapable of learning from experience. It has lost its character as an I. An automaton. This loss of subjectivity is ultimately what insulates the two contradictory positions from each other. Because the encompassing I left the scene, the two small I’s are deaf to each other. One sees here how explanations of neurosis and dissociation with such notions as “the unconscious,” “repression,” the “splitting-off of undesirable aspects of the personality,” etc., are missing the point. The point is the disappearance of the comprehensive subjectivity and of the soul’s speaking with itself. Through this disappearance two thinglike positions emerge, positions that are like quasi-natural facts. When Luther said in his very different context that, sunt duo toti homines, then this is not a case of neurotic thinking. In Luther the contradiction is, to be sure, established, but the subjectivity precisely

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persists in the face of the contradiction, so the contradiction attains the character of a living dialectic rather than turning into a neurosis. In Luther, the I knows itself as the existing contradiction between totally being under the spell of sin AND totally being “justified” (righteous), or between being totally free (“the most free lord of all, and subject to none”) AND totally “the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.” The contradiction is endured and given explicit expression, whereas neurosis conceals, indeed completely denies, the contradiction—even from itself. c) Chiasmus So far I defined neurotic dissociation as (a) logical contradiction, simultaneity of two mutually exclusive positions, and (b) insulation, immunization. This definition is still incomplete. There is a third element, which we might call (c) its chiasmus. (The word chiasmus is derived from the Greek letter X [Chi] and was or is in rhetoric the name of a figure of speech in which the order of words or parts of a sentence in one of two parallel clauses is reversed in the other so that a crosswise arrangement results, for example, “subject – predicate, predicate – subject,” as in: “His time a moment, and a point his space,” Alexander Pope.) In our fairytale this aspect is reflected in the qualitative difference between day and night. “Day” means what is out in the open, what can meet the eye, withstand criticism—but, unfortunately, is merely-empirical, ordinary, flat, if not banal. “Night,” by contrast, means the flight of the soul, the splendor and elated dignity of a being mysteriously united with a supersensible demon— but only in the absolute secrecy and darkness of night. Day and night are thus chiastically complementary. The one has what the other is missing and vice versa. They exchange their predicates. There is a highest soul value, but alas, it cannot, must not, come out into the open, it cannot be publicly professed, because it is unfounded, untenable, indefensible, and thus it does

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not count, does not have any reality. It has to shun the light. It can only be upheld in the privacy and secrecy of one’s own inner and must under no circumstances be put to the test in real life. It must stay up in the clouds as a mere claim, a “dream,” in the state of potentiality. On the other hand, there is indeed something solid, concrete, something that without fear and without shame can present itself before everyone and before the court of reason (here, a real flesh and blood man as suitor for the hand of the princess). But alas, it is without numinous radiance, without any mysterious deeper meaning and supersensible soul dignity—just drab everyday reality and ordinary common sense. (As an aside we can add here that we immediately recognize in this structural arrangement the inner logic of Jung’s psychology of the unconscious. We merely need to exchange “Day” with “egoconsciousness” or “collective consciousness,” and “Night” with “the unconscious.” 142 “The unconscious” is the locus of numinous experiences, of meaning and soul mysteries, of “the archetypes” [i.e., Jungian psychology’s “demon lover”], but all these cannot and must not be turned into public truths. Because this would amount to an illegitimate metaphysical assertion, which, for Jung, would be a “deadly sin,” as he himself once said. The world of consciousness, conversely, is the sphere of “this mill—this awful, grinding, banal life in which [the people] are ‘nothing but’” CW 18 § 627. And when Jung states, “You see, man is in need of a symbolic life—badly in need” [§ 625] and “Life is too rational, there is no symbolic existence in which I am something else, in which I am fulfilling my role, my role as one of the actors in the divine drama of life” [§ 628], we see that his psychology is, in the last analysis, the attempt, as well as the invitation to us, to actually simulate, and thus to literally act out, the 142 There is, of course, also some (at least formal) similarity of the above schemes with those that Jung presented in “The Psychology of Transference” and that are modeled after the “marriage quaternio,” all the more so since Jung in § 421 of CW 18 even speaks of a “curious counter-crossing of the sexes.” But the fundamental difference between the two stances is that Jung operates on the comparatively innocent first level of objectthinking and phenomenological description, thinking that he is discussing an archetypal structure, whereas my discussion is a second-level one, a critical reflection of the internal logical set-up of Jung’s psychological thought. Jung’s quaternio is concerned with real figures (Adept, Soror, Anima, and Animus), my chiastic scheme with [sentence] subjects (day-world, night-world, or: consciousness and “the unconscious”) and their predicates or value judgements (e.g., “too rational, banal” versus “Then she lives, then her life makes sense, and makes sense in all continuity ...” [§ 630]).

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princess’s nightly flight to her demon lover. She certainly was “something else,” she did “fulfill her role as one of the actresses in the divine drama of life.” For even if she did not say the exact same thing that Jung proposed in the case of some real woman, namely, “I am the daughter of the Moon. Every night I must help the Moon, my Mother, over the horizon” [§ 630], her life was nevertheless based on the virgin’s exact equivalent of this statement, on the idea, “I am the bride of a numinous otherworldly lover. Every night I must celebrate my marriage with him.” Inasmuch as Jung’s psychological dream is not about the psychological status of literal virgins [for whom, as I showed, her being married to a demon lover would have been perfectly legitimate, indeed, necessary], but directed at modern man, born man, as such, it is, therefore, a structurally neurotic fantasy. It is a dream, I hasten to add, not of becoming or being neurotic, but of simulating the princess’s neurosis. By saying this, I am, of course, presenting to Jung’s virgin-like deepest psychological conviction, and confronting it with, his demon-lover’s cut-off head.) We have to compare and contrast this with the ordinary state of affairs in the life of the soul. The ordinary situation had always been (and would also be in the case of the princess, as far as our “neurotic” interpretation is concerned), that the spirit, daimon, god that belongs to the otherworldly dimension of the soul would appear. Even if there was not a spontaneous event of the experience of an epiphany, the god would nonetheless come forth on a regular basis out of the absolute hiddenness of the adyton, the cella, into unconcealedness, into the visible world, revealing himself. Still today, every year on Corpus Christi Day in the Roman Catholic Church, there is a solemn procession in which the priest openly carries the Blessed Sacrament— the body of Christ—in a monstrance (from Lat. monstrare, to show). Through the god’s or the holiest of the holy’s epiphany, an ordinary day turns into a splendid feast day or holy day. In neurosis, it is exactly the other way around. The ordinary day can here not simply be an ordinary day lived according to the laws of everyday reality (according to the laws of human common sense and rationality, according to our natural human needs, in our case: the needs of the princess as young woman, according to the traditional ethical rules of human social life and established customs) because within the everyday sphere the demon rules over the princess and plants his absolutely inhuman demand into

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her mind that all suitors must be beheaded.143 The night-world has seized power over the day-world. But conversely, the ordinary day cannot, and must not under any circumstances, turn into a feast day on which the princess’s superhuman spouse would have his epiphany, thereby openly and, as it were, officially displaying in the light of day the splendor of his numinous power, which in turn would have the consequence that all people present would experience their own exaltation in his supernatural, numinous shine—not only for this one day but also, as Jung had put it, “in all continuity,” or, to be a little more cautious, for all the everydays that lie between this and the next holy day. No, in neurosis the demon or the absolute principle must be absolutely sunk into the darkness and secrecy of the night and remain there. But this also means that the supernatural, numinous shine must in itself become occluded. The night seizes power over the true light and blinds it. Darkness takes possession of the light’s inner radiant nature and stalemates it. A true Unbewußtwerden des Bewußtseins (consciousness’s becoming unconscious, GW 12 § 583). Conversely, the princess flies at night into the underworldly castle and edifies herself logically through his (meanwhile of course in itself occluded) numinosity. On the deeper, logical level, all the princess’s love and passion flow de facto towards that demon-lover who is absolutely inaccessible even to her and remains unconscious to her. The princess, as we know, does not merely keep her demon-lover secret from the king, her father, and from his councilors. She herself, as conscious person, is absolutely ignorant of him. 143 On the stage of ritualistic culture the sacrificial slaughtering of the suitor might precisely have been able to represent the epiphany of the god as the true spouse of the virginal bride, and, to be sure, the exclusively real epiphany. What happened in the sacrificial killing was the theôsis of the sacrificial victim and thus, in the first place, the birth of the god and at the same time his renewed revelation. The beheading of the suitors in neurosis, in other words, on the stage of modern consciousness, is, by contrast, simply a banal catastrophe.

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Now we see that neurotic dissociation does mean a split, after all, but not the kind of empirical split normally assumed (such as the split between ego and shadow aspects, consciousness and repressed contents). The split is not on the empirical or semantic (content) level at all, not a split between two opposite ideas, in our case not between the two theses: (1) “I need a man to be married” and (2) “I am complete, I already have my Other within (and as) my own notion of myself.” It is on a much more fundamental level: the level of logic or syntax. What is separated—dissociated—by this split is “truth” itself. Truth is cut apart into two truths, into (1) a value aspect, or abstract truth in the narrower sense, a truth that has the nature of principle; and (2) an efficacy aspect, or abstract reality, one that best might be described as positive-factual reality. Whereas it is normally the soul’s need and task to see to it that what is true is also real and what is real is also true; to see to it, furthermore, that Heaven and Earth are kept separate and yet united in a syzygy or coniunctio, now the bond between them—the alchemical vinculum, the logical copula, Plato’s desmós, Aristotle’s syllogismós—has been systematically severed so that both aspects can go off on their course independently of each other. A stop has been put to what Jung called—a bit mysteriously—the mysterium coniunctionis, the separation and union of the psychic (seelische) opposites.144 We could express this split just as well in another way and say that reality is split into two realities, into: (1) the soul reality of the night and (2) the pragmatic reality of the day. But such a split, regardless of whether it is the dissociation of truth or of reality, is in itself not yet enough to make it neurotic. What makes it neurotic is only the chiasmus that comes in on top of it and entwines the two opposites. It consists in the fact that the abstract truth of the 144 Oddly enough, despite his loving devotion to the topic of the mysterium coniunctionis, in the last analysis Jung seems to have accepted in principle this final disruption of this coniunctio, because he predominantly presented the mysterium coniunctionis as a distant, maybe even unreachable, goal to strive for, thereby not only projecting it into the future, but also showing that the absence of the coniunctio was for him the unquestioned natural basis or starting point and in this sense “all right.” And since de nihilo nihil fit, how could we expect if one starts out from the fundamental separation as one’s archê that one could ever arrive at a coniunctio?

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soul claims for itself the right to, just like that, count in pragmatic reality after all, even rule over reality (in the princess’s demand to kill the suitors or in the neurotic patient’s severe symptoms). In our fairytale the princess insists during the “day” on not getting married and on having the failing suitors beheaded, merely on account of that truth which is exclusively true and valid, after all, during the “night”! Exclusively during the night, because that is what the split between day and night is about. As abstract, pure truth, as a ideal principle cut off from embodied reality, and without first letting itself in for reality, it nevertheless insists on immediately being respected in reality. The truth of the night intrudes, just like that, into the day and interferes with its reality. It crosses over the line. I spoke of its seizing power over the day-world. It insists on making a difference in reality, and even absolutely, unquestionably so. In other words, the abstract truth of the “night” usurps something it could legitimately only achieve from the other, the reality or “day” side, and through its real bond or engagement with it. Conversely, the radiant shine, which actually is part of the day, is wrested from the latter (the day-world here is as a result essentially banal, without numinous radiance) and assigned to the night truth (in psychology: to “the unconscious”). And thirdly, although this cannot be shown in our tale (it appears as the problem of the positivism ruling in some of the sciences and over much of our everyday mentality), the abstract day standpoint of positive factuality demands immediately the status of truth for itself,145 a status it could only deservedly achieve if it had entered into a real relation with the other side. In this description we can already intuit the deeper psychological intentionality behind these illegitimate border crossings. What drives them and is actually aimed for can be psychologically understood as the soul’s will to get to the other side in the sense of a true coniunctio, a mutual involvement of the opposites, their contamination, “infection,” by each other. But it fundamentally miscarries because the logic of the unbridgeable difference makes necessary the reductive substitution of a true coniunctio by a chiasmus, the mutual exchange of predicates, one that does not threaten the fundamental separateness and immunity of the opposites over 145

We believe in the facts.

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against each other. Each remains self-identical and neatly on its own side, even if each now in a completely external way exchanged its attributes with the other. It is a “physical” locomotion, not an “(a)lchemical” or logical union, syllogismos (Schluß). Although on the face of it neurosis may appear to be a problem of adaptation to reality, a reaction to severe hardships in early childhood, blocked personal development, a refusal to grow up and give up certain cherished childhood feelings, we can see here again that in the last analysis it is none of these, but rather a logical illness. Without the logical split between truth and reality, Heaven and Earth, soul and the pragmatic, and without the chiastic playing off one against the other, while at the same time each in a usurpatory way seizes power over the other and loses its own prerogative to the other, neurosis would not be possible. d) “Yes, truly—but still more truly” The insight into the transgression of the night truth into the day reality leads us to the fourth and final characteristic feature of neurotic dissociation. I rely for it on a quotation from Kafka’s story, “The Judgement.” The story itself and the context of the following quotation are not important for us here, so I will not summarize it. I am only interested in a distinction Kafka makes and his astounding formulation for this distinction. At the end of a long difficult exchange, the father in this story says to his son: “So now you know what else there was in the world besides yourself, till now you’ve known only about yourself! An innocent child, yes, that you were, truly, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being!—And therefore take note: I sentence you now to death by drowning!” In our context the essential formulation in this quotation in German reads: “Ein unschuldiges Kind warst du ja eigentlich, aber noch eigentlicher warst du ein teuflischer Mensch!” (my emphases). The distinction that Kafka makes and that we need for neurosis is that between: “eigentlich” and “noch eigentlicher” or “yes, truly” and “still more truly.” This exactly describes the dissociated relation between day-world and night-world, between the ordinary empirical standpoint and the standpoint of the soul. “Noch eigentlicher” or “still more truly” is actually an impossible expression. “Eigentlich” or “true” implies in itself the negation of

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something that is not really true. It is used to contrast it with something superficial or not authentic. And thus “eigentlich” or “yes, truly” amounts to an ultimate. True is simply true. You cannot go higher, it does not make sense to talk of degrees of truth. So by saying, “noch eigentlicher,” the former expression, “eigentlich warst du” (yes, truly, authentically, you were) is reduced to being not “eigentlich,” not really “true.” At least by comparison with what is “still more true or authentic,” it must have been untrue, a sham. This is how one would normally see it. But neurosis exists precisely as the dissociation between that which, yes, is true, on the one hand, and that which nevertheless is still more true, on the other hand. So the first “eigentlich” is here, in neurosis, not to be taken as referring to something inauthentic or untrue. Rather, what Kafka suggests by this unusual formulation, and what indeed is the case in neurosis is that there are two truths, two Eigentlichkeiten, authenticities. Both are true, authentic. The first “eigentlich” stays fully true. It is not relativized, not reduced to something that from the standpoint of the “still more eigentlich” could be seen through as not really authentic, after all. There is a simple, real truth, and yes, indeed, it is true. But this is only the one half of the whole story. This simple truth is surpassed by a second more powerful truth, a second authenticity that wipes away every other consideration and as such is more true. It is a truth that is out of this world: the unconditionality of a principle. So in our fairytale we could say: the princess is eigentlich, yes, truly, a nice girl or young woman, probably kind, warm-hearted, and well-meaning. But noch eigentlicher, still more truly, she insists, and with absolute ruthlessness, that all possible suitors have to be killed. The night truth overrules the day truth. But again: not logically (with respect to its truth character), not in the sense of disproving or invalidating it, but exclusively with respect to its factual power to fascinate, to enthrall. It outshines the day truth like a floodlight outshines a candle. The light of a candle is not less “true” than that of a floodlight. It is merely less powerful. The soul sweeps the girl’s true nature or character as a person and human being aside in favor of its, the soul’s, “still truer” truth. Whenever the night truth enters the scene, the day truth simply ceases to be in force, it completely disappears from the scene as if it had never

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existed. There is no struggle between them, and we know why there can’t be a struggle: the soul’s conversation with itself and thus the dialogue between the day standpoint and the night standpoint has been canceled. “Yes, truly—but still more truly” thus shows itself in truth to be a new form of articulation for the dissociation between truth and reality. What the princess as a human being “yes, truly” is is her real truth. What she is “still more truly” (her brutality of wanting the suitors dead, i.e., the need of her neurosis), by contrast, is her true reality. But additional gain through our fourth aspect of dissociation beyond what we learned through the discussion of the chiastic exchange and distribution is that the chiasmus does not represent a merely formal arrangement, but involves the absolute overpowering of the one side by the other. Neurosis means that when the soul makes itself felt, the person’s normal human reasonableness, wishes, and true character traits are simply wiped aside. A German word for this kind of relationship between a subject and some other is Hörigkeit. It is especially used for cases of total sexual dependence. Historically it also referred to serfdom, bondage. But the word is interesting for us because of its rich etymological associations. In it we can also hear the words for hearing or listening (hören) as well as gehören (to belong to) and gehorchen (to obey, be obedient). The princess absolutely listens to what the demon, her principle, the soul, has to say; she “listens” to it to such an extent that hearing what it says at once means to be possessed by it and to obey it. At once! There is here not a duality of first hearing and then obeying. She hears what the principle says and already has obeyed, automatically. We already know that the principle does not rule like a despot, who might be resented, but is completely ego-syntonic: the girl’s whole being, all her feelings simply flow towards it, are at one with it, are “married” to it. And this is why she truly totally belongs to the principle, as its possession. Kafka’s formulation fits perfectly to Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. An innocent man, yes, that you were, truly, namely as Dr. Jekyll, but still more truly have you been a devilish human being, namely as Mr. Hyde! At the same time, Stevenson gives expression to the chiasmus. For the (yes, truly) innocent Dr. Jekyll carries in his name the murderous moment, whereas the (still more truly)

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devilish Mr. Hyde is named not after the committing of deeds, but after their hiding and denial (which realistically speaking actually belongs to the man of honor, Dr. Jekyll). The truth of the soul, the truth of the night, is so much more splendid than the truth of the day that the latter turns into nothing. But, as we have also seen, the reverse is that the splendor of this night or soul truth does not have the character of an epiphany. Rather, it is in itself occluded, darkened, benighted. It can never show as splendor, as radiance. It can only show as embarrassing symptom, as pathology, as being irrational, absolutely wretched and undignified, maybe even disgusting. The splendor appears as the opposite of itself, it has to cloak itself in the murderousness of Mr. Hyde and our fairytale princess or in the devilishness of Kafka’s protagonist. It has to shun the light of day. This is the neurotic contradiction: in neurosis I unquestionably serve a splendid truth, however a splendid truth that can never show as splendor nor as truth. Or the other way around: in neurosis I show a stupid, irrational, pathological, absolutely undignified and unjustifiable behavior because I am enthralled by the (occluded, absolutely hidden) splendor of the principle character of the principle behind it.

4. PARTIAL TOTAL DEPENDENCE I just spoke of the total dependence of the princess with respect to her demon/principle. But now I have to add that (in the princess and in neurosis in general) this total dependence is only partial. This sounds like a faulty contradiction, but it is not. “Total” and “partial” refer to different aspects. Logically the dependence is total, namely whenever it comes into play. Empirically, however, it is partial because it comes into play only under certain conditions, in certain situations. Large areas of the life of the princess are probably completely unaffected by her neurosis. When she is with her playmates, she is just her normal self. The dominance of that principle does not enter her behavior or her feelings and mentality in the least. The neurosis and thus the power of her principle, i.e., the possessiveness of the soul, manifests only when it is a question of marrying. Then, all of a sudden and out of the blue, she is a different person. Only the necessity to marry is an explosive topic for her.

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What seen from outside is such an explosive topic, is, seen from the inside, a complex, a feeling-toned complex. At the bottom of neuroses complexes are at work. This implies that neurosis is about specific concerns, issues, principles. Something is at stake. Neurosis, I said above, is an intellectual illness. We have to look for the content of neurosis. Here I obviously contradict my own strong statement in Part I that Jung’s talking about “the content of the neurosis” or “the content of a neurosis” (CW 16 § 196f.) was a mistake. But this contradiction is immediately resolved when we realize that “content” is used equivocally in the two instances. I rejected the idea that neurosis had a semantic content, an archetypal depth, a kind of message. I rejected the synonymity suggested by Jung between his “the content of the psychosis” and “the content of the neurosis.” But when I now claim that something is at stake in neurosis and that the latter does have a content, I mean in radical contrast to psychoses, which do have a fullfledged content, only the non-semantic, utterly abstract absolute principle, which is the zero-stage of content, the mere, i.e., empty, form of content, in other words, a contentless content—nothing but the princess’s pale, faceless demon-lover. He is nothing, completely worthless, but he rules absolutely. For Jung, the deepest core of a complex was in the last analysis an archetype. This archetypal explanation credits the complex with the depth of mythic meaning and with imaginal realities. But this does not correspond to what a complex is. It is naked, brutal power. At the core of a complex there is something strictly abstract-intellectual: a cold, abstract, formal principle, and an absolutely negative (destructive) one: “kill all suitors.” There is nothing constructive about complexes or neuroses. The neurotic soul is simply terrible. The abstract absolute principle itself is not yet what makes neurotic. Neurosis consists in the dissociation, which is a purely structural, syntactical, or logical relation (or rather operation). The absolute principle can rule only through the dissociation. Without the dissociation, it, the demon-lover of neurosis, would not even exist. But conversely, without the demon-lover neurotic dissociation would not exist. Both are equiprimordial. Together they are the neurosis.

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5. THE INTERNAL VIEW OF NEUROSIS So far we have approached neurosis from an external perspective. We have, as it were, seen the enchanted princess through the eyes of the young man, who, we found, represents the truly therapeutic consciousness and is thus precisely not neurotic. He had come from somewhere out there in the world to her castle and was confronted there with her strange neurotic behavior, her wish to present all suitors with impossible riddle questions in order to have an excuse for getting them killed. This is of course also the perspective of her father, the king, and his councillors. The latter all see this absolutely odd behavior without being able to make sense of it. However, other than her father and the councillors, for whom her behavior remains incomprehensible, our young man, through his magic help, was able to also get deeper into the secret of her behavior, inside her neurosis. And yet what he sees is still seen from an external perspective, of course not external in the sense of unpsychological, but external because we still see this psychological structure and internal function of her neurosis through his eyes only. And the way the whole fairytale is written betrays the external perspective on what for us is a neurosis. For after all, the whole point, the goal or telos, of this narration is the cure of the princess from her neurosis. So the tale is told from the standpoint of normality and ordinary human interests. The fairytale a priori takes sides for the “healthy” and “therapeutic” standpoint of the young man, the “healthy” (but not therapeutic) standpoint also of her father, the king, and his councilors, and against the “neurosis” of the princess, against the interests of the soul. Thus, although this tale gives us valuable insights into the inner structure and workings of neurosis, it does so from outside. It was not yet an internal perspective. We will, however, need to learn to see and understand neurosis also from within itself, so to speak through the eyes of the enchanted princess and thus from the standpoint of the soul and not that of the human being, from the “night” and not the “day” standpoint. There is another fairytale type that allows us to get this inside view. Although in it we do not have exactly the same setup, it is close enough to allow us to treat it as the internal counterpart to the story we discussed in the previous chapter. This fairytale type has the number AT 510A and is best known under the title Cinderella.

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NEUROSIS A youngest daughter is mistreated by her jealous stepmother and elder stepsisters; she is nastily made to stay home in the kitchen and do dirty chores in her dirty work clothes full of ashes (which is why she is called Cinderella), while the stepmother goes with her own daughters in fancy dress to a ball given by the prince. Through animal help Cinderella gets her work done very fast and goes to the grave of her dead mother, who miraculously provides an absolutely extraordinarily beautiful ball gown and shoes for her. In them she appears at the ball and is the most beautiful of all and cannot be recognized by anybody. The prince dances only with her. At the end of the ball she slips away and quickly returns to her kitchen and her dirty work clothes. The same pattern is repeated three times. The last time, while rushing away, she loses one of her golden or glass shoes. This shoe is now in the possession of the prince and he tries to find the person who fits into this shoe, in other words, the true owner of the shoe and thus his unknown but beautiful dance partner, with whom he has fallen madly in love. In his search he also comes to the house of the stepmother, who wants one of her daughters to become the bride of the prince. So when the shoe is too small for the feet of her daughters she makes the one hack off her toes, the other her heel to forcibly make the feet fit this shoe. But this cheating is found out. Although the stepmother and her daughters try their best to prevent Cinderella from taking the same test, this cannot be avoided and sure enough, the shoe fits perfectly. The prince has found his bride and takes her to his castle where they live happily ever after.

Again I am not attempting to interpret this fairytale on its own terms; it is not my thesis that the fairytale wants to describe a particular form of neurosis. What it means and wants is of no concern here. I use it for our own purposes, to illustrate the internal structure of neurosis. We are immediately struck by the contrast to our previous tale. There the course of the action was heading for the cure of the princess from her love relationship with her demonic lover. Here the tale moves in the opposite direction, it describes how an unlikely, maybe even impossible, marriage between a Cinderella and a prince becomes possible. Now one might say that there is a great difference between the princess in type 507A and the Cinderella of 510A and between

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an underworld demon in the former and a prince in the latter, which would make both fairytale types incomparable from the outset. This difference does indeed exist, and we will have to see wherein precisely it consists, for it expresses nothing else but the difference between the external and the internal perspective. But for the time being it may suffice for the purpose of showing the opposite tendencies of the two tales to point out that the prince belongs to a fundamentally different level, much as did the demon of our earlier tale. He is not, like the young man of AT 507A, a normal man as bridegroom. Cinderella’s prince, too, is qua prince in a sense out of this world, our ordinary world. For this reason we can say that the Cinderella fairytale, rather than portraying how the heroine is freed from her neurosis, shows her way to the completion and fulfillment of her neurosis. The tendency of this fairytale (of course only if it is indeed used as the template of a neurosis and not seen from a historical or literary point of view) is to support and celebrate her neurosis. This is what makes it a representation of the internal view of neurosis. It will now be our task to see in the main figure of our new fairytale and in her fate a portrayal of the enchanted princess of the previous fairytale as seen from within. Of course there are some discrepancies between the two stories that cannot be harmonized, above all the fact that here in our new story we do not find a king and his councillors (all masculine figures), but in his stead a stepmother and stepsisters. This amounts to a real change. But otherwise we find equivalents for the main features of both tales so that the new one can indeed be read as if it presented the inside view of the neurosis of the enchanted princess. We could even view the Cinderella story as the tale in which the episode that precedes the one told in fairytale type AT 507A is presented, that is to say, the episode of how the princess came to enter into a union with her demon-lover in the first place. In our new fairytale the equivalent to the essential opposition that we found in the 507A type fairytale is quite obvious: the opposition of the day world and the night world. Here they manifest in somewhat different guise: as the workaday sphere of the kitchen and the ball in the prince’s splendid castle. And so we also have to recognize in the prince the inside view of what seen from outside, from the day-world perspective of the young man, had been a monstrous underworld demon. From the point of view of the enchanted princess, her lover is

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of course not a monster, not below, deep down under the earth and inside a mountain, but high up above her, in a royal castle and in the bright light of a splendidly-lit ballroom sparkling with magnificent chandeliers, jewels and golden decorations. This way of seeing it is also supported by the other fairytale type AT 306 about the DancedThrough Shoes. For in it the twelve princesses secretly dance every night the whole night through with twelve other-worldly kings. In our present story there is clearly an upwards perspective: from the viewpoint of the lowly cinderella, the Prince is unimaginably and unreachably high above. There is a qualitative difference between the two. The social difference symbolizes an ontological difference between two spheres, the same type of ontological difference as the one between the girl in the previous story and her underworld demon-lover. This is not spelled out in this fairytale. But we can nevertheless see it from the fact that the prince in this fairytale is, just as the demon-lover was in the earlier story, absolutely faceless, abstract, just a figure or notion, not a real flesh and blood person, whereas Cinderella, who gets her hands dirty in the kitchen, has a material presence. What ontological difference is symbolized? It is the difference between “real” (earthly) and “ideal.” The prince is in this sense the abstract idea or concept of the ideal husband, immensely beautiful, living in eternal light and riches. He is a thought, and not a mythic image, an imaginal figure; the empty pale thought of “ideal, i.e., supernatural, husband” (no more: not a concrete, specific, spelled-out image of what an ideal husband would in reality look like and be). When I say that as such, unlike poor Cinderella, he does not belong to material reality, but to the sphere of thought, we must, however, not misunderstand this as if it meant that he belongs to her thought, her dreams. She as conscious person is ignorant of him, as was the enchanted princess. He is inherent in her being, not present in her knowing. So the hidden identity of prince and underworld demon, as well as the fact that the difference between them is merely due to the difference between the inside and the outside perspective, is pretty obvious. But it seems more difficult to see in the heroine of the second tale an equivalent of the one of the first. Here, in our new fairytale, we are dealing with an outcast, a cinderella, a kitchen maid. This cannot be the same person as the princess in the 507A type tale. And yet we have to realize that an identity between the two exists here, too.

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The cinderella aspect (dirty, full of ashes, in other words, detestable and undignified, a slave for menial chores) is the imaginal portrayal of the absolute contempt that the soul has for the empirical aspect of the real human person. The princess in the 507A type story (in our “neurotic” reading of it) might not have chosen this exact image for herself, but whatever she would have chosen, the quality of being detestable would have been the same. The cinderella aspect shows how the neurotic, i.e., soul-controlled, soul-possessed princess perceives herself in her empirical human-all-too-humanness. (In actual reality this feature is best manifested in anorexic girls’ disgust of themselves as physical bodies.) It expresses the radical depreciation of the whole “day-world” from the internal point of view of the “night-world.” To the extent that she is part of physical reality she feels disgust at herself. She is “nothing but.” A bag of unspeakable inferiorities. The princess, totally dependent (hörig) on her soul principle, not only insists on her suitors’ being beheaded, as we had thought before. She has also thrown herself in her realness away as unbearably inferior. Precisely because she is possessed by the soul she has fundamentally higher, otherworldly aspirations. And we might here even speculate whether in her having the suitors from the real world beheaded she is not also trying to kill herself in her real, physical womanhood. In the sphere of the otherworldly principle there is no room for empirical or physical reality. The empirical sphere is here “the enemy” (which is also why—I swerve with this to the non-neurotic reading—the bride kidnaper is needed if the virgin is to become wife). Here we can even see how her wish to have all suitors killed coincides with the cinderella aspect. The real man that she would marry, so the neurotic view goes, would precisely turn her, once and for all, into a cinderella, a housewife and mother of children, down to earth. He would irrevocably tie her to this ordinary sphere and thus deprive her of any higher, numinous dignity. Maybe she would not have to be a literal cinderella, a kitchen slave, because she is rich and would have servants, but nevertheless a psychological cinderella. Be that as it may, the mystery, numinous meaning, and higher aura of the otherworldly sphere would be lost. Jung once said: “Everything is banal, everything is ‘nothing but’; and that is the reason why people are neurotic. They are simply sick of the whole thing, sick of that banal life ...” (CW 18 § 627). He hit

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the nail on the head, except that he confused cause and result. It is not the alleged banality of life that makes neurotic, but it is neurosis that makes life appear as banal so that then one can only be sick of it. In explaining neurosis, Jung here himself falls for the neurotic conjecture and makes it his own view. In neurosis the standpoint of the otherworldly soul rules, and from this standpoint life appears to be absolutely shallow, meaningless, absurd, worthless. The soul sets up, construes, reality as banal, and it also made, e.g., Jung say and feel: “My whole being was seeking for something still unknown which might confer meaning upon the banality of life” (MDR p. 165)—as if life, reality, needed to get something conferred upon it in order for it to become meaningful; and as if it did not have “everything it needs” within itself; and, furthermore, as if a conferred meaning were still meaningful and not much rather like a label pasted on it. It is neurosis that makes real life appear as banal and sick-making. But to put it thus is not enough. We have to say: neurosis wants, needs, the depreciation of reality as banal and “nothing but.” It programmatically sets reality up as such in order to have a base, something like a stepping stone, from which to push off into the height of a higher meaning, the height of the purity of principles. Neurosis even wants the absolute self-condemnation and self-debasement of the girl into the detestable status of a Cinderella in order to thereby become able to establish the absoluteness of the level of principles, which is concretistically represented in our tale as the glamor of existence as the bride of an otherworldly king. Here the bride is the image of absolute existence. But we have to understand that as far as reality (real life) is concerned, “the bride” is by no means the revelation of a higher truth, the emergence and self-manifestation of an archetype in empirical experience. No, “the bride” is nothing else but the absoluteness that has been extracted from the girl’s absolute self-debasement and has then been hypostatized (and is venerated) as an independent truth: absoluteness as such. She is not anything in her own right. In other words, there are not two, the detestable cinderella aspect here and the “bride” aspect there. There is only the one absoluteness. Indwelling in her self-debasement there is The Absolute, a total exaggeration and excessiveness, an overvaluation. And this alone is the very point of the self-debasement. The latter is obviously not an honest rational self-

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assessment, a careful judgement about herself, a piece of selfknowledge. It is an act driven by a powerful, excessive will for the absolute. So I repeat: “the bride” is nothing in herself. She is not a substance, not substantial. Precisely only in her absolute inferiority as Cinderella, in her absolute rejection of and contempt for her own physicalness as part of earthly reality, is Cinderella the true bride. The sublime in neurosis exists exclusively as something neurotic, something unreal. To illustrate it with the example of anorexia: the higher being exists only by virtue of self-starvation and becoming emaciated. It is not brought about by a special constructive achievement and it does not have a higher reality. If somebody worked himself up from a very simple station in life, went to university, proved himself in high offices, he is really up there. The “higher” in neurosis, by contrast, consists only in contempt, condemnation, denial, and disgust for the lower. The act of self-debasement is, as it were, the machine for the production of the neurotic “higher.” And here we must remember Jung’s indispensable insight that neurosis “is daily maintained [or fed], indeed even generated anew.” And it needs to be generated anew in order to exist. It is a production process, part of the soul’s logical life, not an ontic structure, a stable, static Being that one could rely on to simply persist. It exists only as long as it is maintained. It is like a fire. If you don’t feed it, it will simply go out. Neurosis is performative. However, the absolute (in our case: the notion of the prince’s true bride), is also the measure that conversely makes possible and authorizes the absolute self-depreciation of her as Cinderella in the first place. The girl is a Cinderella only from the standpoint of the soul, the soul that is absolutely committed by the demand that the girl be the heavenly beautiful royal bride. (Here it is essential not to mistake this demand as an ego demand for the ego’s self-aggrandizement, i.e., as character trait or personal attitude, as arrogance and presumption. This demand is such that a real person finds himself or herself in it.) We do not hear anything about this in our previous tale, but, as I already pointed out, the enchanted princess must certainly also have looked down upon herself in her self-perception and self-definition as something as similarly detestable as a cinderella. She must have, because only by having this disgust at herself in her empiricalness was she capable of pushing herself off into, and holding herself in, the psychological (and not only social) status of princess and true bride of

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the demon/principle. For her, too, it is true that her neurosis must constantly be generated anew. And what fuels the constant production process of neurosis is the disgust for one’s own inferiority and for the inferiority, contingency, of life at large. But this is precisely not a real, concrete inferiority that relates to demonstrably existing weaknesses or faults that could be tackled; not an insight into actual shortcomings, not, as I said, a piece of self-knowledge. No, what we are here concerned with is that kind of an inferiority that is the result of a lump-sum, sightunseen (a priori) defamation of reality, or particular reality aspects, as such (including one’s own realness): an utterly abstract denouncement on principle. In other words, it is a case of a freely posited and absolutely wanted inferiority, not the painful experience of a personal limitation. We always need to keep in mind that neurosis is not a reaction, but a program. It must be a defamation on principle, must be “otherworldly,” because awareness of weaknesses, character faults, shortcomings, guilt, etc., does not make neurotic. This awareness is absolutely healthy, even though certainly disappointing, disillusioning, and painful. It would only call for what Jung called the integration of the shadow and maybe for empirical attempts at compensation or correction. Thus the bond to real life would only be strengthened; one would get closer to reality and be more deeply tied into it. One’s coming into the world, being born into it (or, if you wish, one’s stepping out of one’s unbornness) would be advanced a bit. But what neurosis needs is the absolute, unconditional dismissal of reality (or particular reality aspects) as inferior, because it wants to catapult itself altogether away from the sphere of the conditional, the contingent, the real, and into the height of pure principiality. It wants the absolute itself. Neurosis is, as we know, a product of freedom. It has its origin in the disgusted rejection, fundamental condemnation, indeed, we could even say (in the religious sense of the word), the curse, of contingency. This is a veritable anathema, in which the excessiveness at work in the absolute demand establishes itself. The anathema is not always directed at the reality of oneself as person. It can also be directed at another specific object or aspect. (And strictly speaking, it is never this aspect or object or one’s own person itself, but in the last analysis only the realness,

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finite nature, and contingency of whatever is cursed.) If the anathema is applied to one’s own person, then this shows phenomenologically above all as an inferiority feeling, just as in our Cinderella. (Her status as a cinderella is the objectified form of representation of what experientially is a subjective inferiority feeling). In an inferiority feeling the neurotic establishes himself so to speak as his own “Pope” who pronounces a ban against himself. And conversely, by pronouncing a ban against itself (or against some other aspect of reality) the neurotic soul rises to the height of the status (fundamentally towering over the ordinary human and earthly nature) of “Pope,” the sacred, the absolute. The following image does not work totally, but it may nevertheless help to illustrate one essential point. We shoot up artificial satellites into outer space in order to be able to communicate here on earth with each other. The designation of oneself and reality as inferior or banal is something like the artificial shooting down (not up) of a logical, psychological satellite into the emptiness far beneath ourselves in order to be able from there to shoot ourselves psychologically equally high up above empirical reality as such. Neurosis cannot push off from the real (e.g., the real I). If it were the real from which the pushing off would take place, then the soul would ipso facto have accepted it and bind itself to it as its origin and measure, and becoming neurotic would be impossible. One might aspire to something “higher,” but this “higher” would only again be something contingent, empirical, not absolute. But the point of neurosis is to leave contingency altogether. It has to be a “satellite” beneath the real I from which neurosis pushes off, something that has

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already left the earth from the outset. Otherwise the establishment of an otherworldly principle, of “The Absolute,” could not possibly come about. And the pushing off goes to another satellite which again is high above the real I. Neurosis creates a bubble around the real I. It has nothing to do with the latter, which simply drops out of the whole “equation” made up by neurosis. It is crucial to understand that in all this I have only described, and that in general we can only describe, the logic or internal functioning of neurosis, but not how it, how those “satellites,” come into being in the first place. Neurosis—“The Absolute”—cannot be explained in causal terms (if it could be causally derived “The Absolute” would be relative). It does not emerge, develop, out of ordinary life. It is causa sui. It is either there or not. And when it is there, it is already complete all at once. Much like Athene, who at her “birth” sprang in full armor out of the head of her father, neurosis “springs” all at once into real human life. We see the described relation in the main figure of our tale. On the one hand, she is a cinderella, in other words, absolutely detestable and undignified. On the other hand, she is of supermundane beauty, i.e., absolutely beautiful, the true bride of the prince (who in turn himself represents the otherworldly realm or the sphere of The Absolute). The absoluteness as such is specifically made visible in the otherwise absurd motif that Cinderella’s stepsisters have to hack off their toes or heels in order to fit into the shoe. This behavior amounts to the attempt to attain the Absolute (which, after all, has its place only in the logical negativity of the soul) through an empirical, positivefactual act, a manipulation that cannot possibly be successful. “Why, on the whole, thou’rt—what thou art. / Set wigs of million curls upon thy head, to raise thee, / Wear shoes an ell in height,—the truth betrays thee, / And thou remainest—what thou art.”146 The main figure in our fairytale is both detestable cinderella and absolutely beautiful bride at the same time. And both are equidistant from who she is as a real, empirical person. They are completely up in the air, irreal. With both ideas the soul pushed itself off from the actual center, the earth, into outer space. Both 146 Joh. W. von Goethe, Faust I, ll. 1806ff. (Transl. by Bayard Taylor, quoted from http://www.gutenberg.org/files/14591/14591-h/14591-h.htm#IV, accessed January 2013).

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are unreal, satellites, the dis-sociation of the real person into two unreal extreme abstractions. Concrete reality has simply disappeared from sight. And both satellites are in absolute opposition to each other, but nevertheless identical, inseparable: a polarity, much like positive and negative electricity. Only together do they make up “The Absolute.” The latter is by no means merely the upper one. They are equiprimordial, Siamese twins that are born at the same instant, or like Castor and Pollux. You cannot have only the one. If you were to take away the one satellite, the other one would immediately fall back onto the earth. Only as totally detestable is the girl the prince’s radiating bride, and only as supernaturally beautiful bride is she the disgusting cinderella that she is (although phenomenologically, experientially, as far as the neurotic’s subjective feeling is concerned, this must be added, only the one pole—either the inferiority [the cinderella aspect] or the grandiosity [the supermundane bride aspect]—may be in the foreground, while the other one in each case remains in the background as the invisible and unsuspected, but indispensable counterpart within the logic of neurosis). Otherwise the main figure of the fairytale would just be a normal person with human, all-too-human characteristics that might range somewhere between exceptionally beautiful and rather ugly and between unusually gifted and really untalented or pretty stupid, but in any case would be normal human, earthly qualities. But here we have an absolute inferiority and an absolute superiority which together create the high voltage which makes up “The Absolute,” that enormous charge of energy that is characteristic of neurosis and allows the soul to hold itself high above and exempt from empirical reality in the outer space thereby created, an outer space in which, however, and through which alone under the conditions of modernity, the soul and its outer space can paradoxically become real and make themselves empirically felt in the first place, as the very real pain and trouble they cause. Because the dropping out of ordinary contingent reality into the soul’s reality amounts to a denial and refusal and is untrue, an artificial splitting-off, this splitting-off imparts itself to the product or result of this splitting-off itself, namely in the fact that it, the artificial satellite, manifests itself as two satellites, as the detestable and the supervaluable.

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*** Since I briefly mentioned the motif of the violent, brutal attempt by the stepsisters to make their feet fit the shoe that the prince presents as a test object, I would like to add a few comments about the motif of the shoe, even if I thereby digress from the reading of our tale as a model of neurosis and discuss a small aspect of its original meaning. Rationally seen, it is rather absurd to use a shoe (and this only with respect to its length) as the tool for identifying a particular individual. One and the same shoe could of course fit many people perfectly. Many people have the same shoe size. It would have been much more plausible to rely on the eyes or face, because then something truly personally distinctive would have been chosen as distinguishing mark. Apparently, our fairytale is not at all interested in identifying an individual on the basis of unambiguous empirical distinguishing marks, as is essential to police work (at best fingerprints and DNA). The fairytale is concerned with something very different. The point is that the shoe is here not an ordinary shoe, but an otherworldly one. It is out of glass or gold and comes from the realm of the dead, from Cincerella’s true (dead) mother and not from an earthly shoemaker. And now it is in the possession of the prince, who himself is a representative of the beyond. This shoe is to be applied as a standard to the foot of an earthly woman. What in this way is supposed to be found out is therefore not the empirical identity of a person. Rather, that human being is sought who as earthly human being is entitled to wear the sign of the beyond as proof of his or her legitimate connection to the yonder. This, of course, because he or she had in fact been yonder, has (in our story: through the real bond with the dead spirit of the mother) in fact access to the other world or the absolute. Thus the shoe is not to be studied in regard to its symbolic significance (the way Aigremont, for example, studied the foot and shoe symbolism in his well-known 1909 book on the subject). The shoe is much rather a symbol in a completely different, original sense: symbolon, a small object as a token that makes possible the identification of something or somebody that is otherwise unrecognizable by mere sight. In ancient Greece, symbolon was, within the ritualized guestfriendship relations, the name for one half of a broken-apart clay ring,

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through the possession of which family members or even descendants of one family could prove their bonds of guest-friendship to the other family if the one half of the clay ring, put together with the other half (symballein), perfectly fit. In an equivalent way here, too, two small fragments from two separate, indeed even ontologically distinct worlds are to be put together (symballein), a shoe from yonder and a this-worldly foot, in order to see whether they truly fit and whether in this way the ontological gap can be bridged. The prince comes from the otherworldly sphere down into the earthly sphere and brings with him the token, symbolon, whose other half needs to be found here on earth. The issue is by no means the factual size of foot and shoe. The issue is the symballein, the joining and fitting together, at one point, yonder and this world, Heaven and Earth, reality and the absolute. The shoe has the function of the copula, ligamentum, vinculum. Time and again there are in fairytales such tiny, often seemingly banal tokens that are meant to establish or prove the mediation between the two worlds. To mention only one example: in the glass mountain fairytale (AT 530), which I interpreted elsewhere in detail,147 the protagonist, a dimwit, at the end presents three golden apples. They prove him to be the one who in fact had been capable of reaching the peak of the glass mountain (the image of the yonder), receiving there the apples from the otherworldly princess and returning with them down to earth, into this our empirical world. The direction is here reversed: the earthly dimwit possesses the token from yonder, the golden apples, thereby showing that he is “the right one,” whereas in our fairytale the prince from yonder is in possession of the token with the help of which “the right one” from among all the possible earthlyhuman women can be found and known. This theme expounded in fairytales is also a topic of religion and metaphysics, even if on an entirely different level and in other spheres. “And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger” (Luke 2:12): in the human baby Jesus, recognizable through certain tokens, the otherworldly Christ is supposed to be known. In the earthly bread and wine of the 147 Chapter one of Wolfgang Giegerich, David L. Miller, Greg Mogenson, Dialectics and Analytical Psychology: The El Capitan Canyon Seminar, New Orleans (Spring Journal Books) 2005, pp. 9-24.

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communion sacrament the body and the blood of Christ shall be experienced. Small isolated moments in which Heaven and Earth really come together at one point. So far there is obviously nothing neurotic about the motif of the re-cognition of “the right bride.” That this can nevertheless serve us as a model for neurotic structures of thought and feeling becomes most clearly visible precisely in the area of neurotic looking for a mate. It happens frequently that somebody who has met a potential mate is tortured by the question whether he or she is “the right one.” This question about the joining together of husband and wife becomes neurotic when it is conceived as the joining together across the gap between two ontologically different worlds. “The right one” means in this case: the (absolutely) right one, “the otherworldly one,” that is, the Absolute. Such a person turns, as it were, into the prince who already possesses the glass shoe and is now merely confronted with the task of finding the a priori singular individual who fits this otherworldly shoe. This has the consequence that the question about the right mate becomes a fundamentally interminable one, and the decision to enter into a commitment becomes impossible. For something will always be found that needs to be hacked off, be it toe or heel, something by which the other person proves not to be “the right one.” The neurotic quality of this question is due to the fact that it is raised in this fashion by modern persons, people who have long been born out of the soul. They act as if the soul could still today be immediately present in a concrete sensible reality, in something empirical. They act as if in something earthly-human Heaven and Earth could and ought to come immediately together. The other person who is the potential mate is qua empirical human being supposed to be the point—this is the itself absolute demand—at which the ontologically separate level of the Absolute, the yonder or the principle, ought to be immediately present and accessible for oneself. Neurosis is a metaphysical illness. But what is sick about it is not the metaphysical itself, but rather the insistence upon a metaphysical situation by a person who as modern man is in his being irrevocably post-metaphysical, that is, has been born out of the soul. The not-neurotic question whether a particular person is the right mate for oneself or not is a pragmatic question, which for this

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reason is also capable of being decided. The problem boils down to the questions: do we fit well enough together, do we like each other, do we feel good when we are together, do we trust each other, do we want to undertake the project of life together? There is from the outset an inner knowledge and certainty that one’s mate, too, is only an ordinary human being just as oneself, that, furthermore, it could in principle have just as well been some other partner—in other words, that the choice of partner takes place within the sphere of the contingent and not within the sphere of the soul. The question of the choice of a mate is raised, and must be answered, within one and the same ontological sphere. The difference is an empirical one between the sexes and the personalities, not between Heaven and Earth. Of course, the neurotic intellectually knows all this, too, but the neurosis in him that drives him and rules over him does not know it and absolutely refuses to concede it. It insists that the union be an absolute one and that the partner, as a thisworldly person, nevertheless immediately be the one who connects him with the yonder.

*** In the discussion of the previous fairytale about the travel companion we encountered the psychological simultaneity of day and night. We distinguished within the one princess her as day person from her as night person. The simultaneity in our present fairytale of Cinderella and the prince’s true bride should, however, not be confused with the simultaneity of day-world and night-world. The Cinderella aspect is, as we have seen, not the empirical reality of the girl, does not represent her real I, over against which the bride aspect would represent the night or soul aspect. No, both the absolutely contemptible Cinderella and the absolutely beautiful bride belong to the night or soul world, they are its two aspects. The day-world, by contrast, is not represented in this fairytale, just as, conversely, the absolute inferiority aspect was not represented in the other story. This is due to the different perspectives and tendencies in each story. The external perspective sees the duality of the day-world and the nightworld; the internal perspective describes the duality within the soul or night-world of absolute inferiority and absolute superiority. The

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actual center (empirical reality, the day-world, Goethe’s “And thou remainest—what thou art”) cannot come into the range of vision at all here, for then it would no longer be the internal perspective of neurosis. The very point of neurosis is to absolutely establish the soul or night-world and absolutely eliminate the real from consciousness altogether: not only to cut off the heads of any suitors, but to totally fade out the very idea of real suitors and real existence. However, since there is not a literal outer space into which the psychological satellites could be launched, but simply and solely this real, empirical world, the outer space established here is much rather an internal space, and the internal space is purely imaginary. The absolute inferiority has to be established in or as the real person. The satellite is, as it were, projected onto (or into), and identified with, the empirical human being. The girl is now the absolutely detestable Cinderella. She has become the satellite (or rather the self-contradictory twin satellites). The personality that she is as empirical human being has disappeared in or behind her new outer space status as totally inferior. Neurosis forced the flesh-and-blood person to exist as abstractuniversal concept, i.e., as a ghost. The night-world has absorbed the girl’s day reality into itself, and ipso facto the night-world has established itself as real. From now on, her Cinderella aspect, although an outer space reality, now appears for her to be her true empirical character. And this is what is neurotic. But the infinite superiority does not appear in the same way as a seeming empirical reality (and in consciousness), as does the Cinderella aspect. This is made visible in our tale by the fact that Cinderella is transformed into an absolutely beautiful woman only by the magic help of her dead mother and has to remain anonymous, and even has to run away after the ball, because superiority cannot hold its place in reality. So although both aspects are not real, although both are soul or night or outer space aspects, there is an internal distinction between them in that the inferiority (or more generally: any neurotic pathology, any despicable symptom) is what empirically powerfully manifests in reality and is experiential (it is what the neurotic as ego terribly suffers from), while the superiority is unempirical, strictly logical, notional, intellectual, irrepresentable. This essential difference will have to occupy us later in more detail. So the relationship we had

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in the previous chapter between the day and the night worlds now recurs within the night world as the relation between its two extremes: eigentlich, yes, truly, I am absolutely inferior, but noch eigentlicher, still more truly, I am absolutely superior. But whereas what is only eigentlich, namely my inferiority, is my empirical, alltoo-real suffering, my noch eigentlicher superiority is only my absolutely hidden, secret, intellectual truth that has to shun the daylight of human reason. A point that could still be added to our analysis is that what from the external perspective was the nightly flight of the princess to the underworldly castle of her demon-lover, here, from the internal perspective, is portrayed as the magic transformation from the absolutely inferior form of Cinderella into the celestial beauty in a splendid ball gown. Both are not real. The transformation, happening absolutely abruptly through magic, is the imaginalnarrative representation of what in truth is a strictly logical relation between both sides. The magical change is the portrayal of the fact that both sides are simultaneous, equiprimordial, indeed identical in their difference, namely each other’s reverse side. In this sense it is not a case of an empirically real transformation process, a new development, but a case of suddenly switching from the “yes, truly” to the “still more truly” aspect of what is permanently and unchangeably one and the same (and later, after the dancing with the prince, switching back again). If we turn our attention to the all too real suffering that most of the time goes along with a neurosis, Jung’s statement comes to mind that neurosis (and thus also neurotic suffering) is a substitute for legitimate suffering (CW 11 § 129). In itself this is a valuable idea, pointing as it does to suffering as an integral part of human existence. But it does not fit to neurosis. The reason is that this conception ties neurosis back to real life and presents it as a reaction to life, namely as an attempt to evade normal suffering. It would then be like a compensation. But neurosis is self-sufficient, aloof, enclosed within itself, generating itself from within itself. The origin of neurosis lies in the outer space of the soul. Neurotic suffering is not a substitute, not an ersatz for something actual. It is in itself “legitimate” and essential: it is, under the conditions of modernity or of man born out of the soul, the only access there is to the acquisition of the highest

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prize that the psyche aspires to, the absoluteness of the principiality of a principle. Neurotic suffering should not be seen in relation to a real situation, because this real situation has simply and altogether been left behind by neurosis; neurosis exists in outer space, in the otherworldly sphere of the soul. Neurotic suffering, e.g., suffering from the feeling of absolute inferiority, should be seen exclusively in relation to the absolute superiority that is its own other side, just as positive and negative electricity should be seen in terms of each other and not in terms of any external third. Molière wrote a play about Le malade imaginaire (The Imaginary Invalid). Although in a sense totally different from what Molière had in mind, we could nevertheless say that neurosis is indeed a maladie imaginaire, an imaginary illness, not because it is not utterly real but merely simulated, but rather because it takes place in outer space, in a virtual space that does not exist but is artificially created by neurosis itself. Homespun, so to speak. The instrument of this creation is the defamation of reality, or a certain aspect of reality, as absolutely inferior, detestable, unbearable—that is, a ban, a curse. In this act of absolute denunciation the soul establishes absoluteness as such (which otherwise would not exist). In other words, it pushes off from the earth and into the outer space of pure principles and thereby creates itself in the first place. But once this “inferiority” satellite has been brought into orbit, it no longer relates to the real world, but only to its own other, the principle of absolute superiority—a neurotic “syzygy.” The equivalent to the polarity between Cinderella and the prince’s true bride can be found in our fairytale in one other figure too, the girl’s mother. In her ordinary humanness, all-too-humanness her mother does not appear at all in the story. She is rather split apart into two extremes, two opposites, into the absolutely evil, devastating stepmother and the absolutely benign true mother. Here we again see the special relation of the two extremes of inferiority and superiority: the mother, in so far as she exists in reality, is logically defined (defamed) as the false mother (stepmother), whereas the mother, in so far as she is elevated into the status of the metaphysically true, helpful mother, is qualified as being dead and absent (and thus as the equivalent of the underworldly demon-lover of our other tale). Therefore she can become active only magically from the beyond. That is to say, the good mother is set up as being present only as an abstract concept

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in the virtual space of the soul. Yes, truly, my (real) mother is an evil stepmother, but this is only true in empirical reality. Still more truly, namely logically, I have a true mother with magical powers, but as a logical one she is on principle removed, not here, invisible. The one is the woman that exists in the flesh, the other does not exist, but is only in the mind, in my absolutely insisting upon it, as the firm and all-too-real abstract concept of “true mother.” However, only by virtue of the absolute depreciation and condemnation of the obliterated real mother to an absolutely false mother can there be the absolutely true mother. And conversely, only on the basis of the insistence on an absolute mother (absolutely good mother) can the real mother be defamed as evil stepmother. With both these extremes of mothers, this neurotic structure leaves the level of the empirically human and real and breaks through to the sphere of the absolute. The real mother, “that frail and fallible human being—so deserving of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness—who was mother for us” (CW 9i § 172, transl. modif.), has been extinguished, in favor of two mother “satellites.” The latter are the result of the dissociation of the actual, really existing mother. In her being split, she disappears. From the standpoint of neurotic experience, empirical reality as it really is cannot and must not be perceived. For if it were perceived, the neurosis would immediately collapse. For the neurotic view, reality must immediately (even if unacknowledgedly) be metaphysically inflated reality: absolutely evil, inferior, intolerable, despicable. By looking at the diagram of the dissociation of the actual mother (as frail and fallible human being) into two extremes, we can become aware that the modern neurotic dissociation is the simulation, under the conditions of modern positivity, of the logical structure of the mythological world that came about through the separation of the World Parents united in a primordial gamos, the distancing of Heaven

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and Earth, as well as the simulation of the world of metaphysics that is characterized by the separation, in the singular individual, of the Universal from the Particular and of identity from difference. Dissociation can thus be viewed as the neurotic successor formation of these mythological and metaphysical distinctions and as the simulation of verticality within a strictly horizontal logic. (We will return to this topic in a later chapter.) The horizontality is, however, not expressed in this diagram. It lies in the fact that the distinction is not a logical or ontological one (such as the one between Heaven and Earth, Father and Mother, the masculine and the feminine), but an egoic and fundamentally subjective one of wishful thinking (good – evil as attributes of the same: mother). After what has been discussed so far it hardly needs pointing out that the mothers here (and the neurotic mother images in general) are not to be understood in terms of an archetypal mother image. Both are much rather fundamentally abstract concepts, extreme abstractions from the real experience of an ordinary, earthly mother. They are the result of an (unconscious) intellectual operation. The multitude of concrete qualities that a real mother has is (a) reduced to and (b) dissociated into two sets of diametrically opposed abstract predicates, “absolutely evil” and “false,” on the one hand, and “absolutely good” and “true,” on the other hand. These abstract predicates are then, sort of in a second step, hypostatized, personified, and visualized in our tale as the living bad stepmother and the dead good mother. The two concepts are treated as realities. The abstractions conversely swallow the real mother and take her place. In neurosis, we are no longer in the world of innocent phainomenal mythic experience and imaginal perception, but already in the thoroughly modern, cunning world of technical production and construction, in any case in the status of consciousness characterized by reflection and conceptual thought. Neurosis is beyond simple intuiting and representational consciousness. Now one might want to argue that this talk about the denouncement of the real mother as an evil stepmother ignores the fact that in reality there are after all truly evil, nasty mothers. But the point to be made here is that a really evil mother is empirically evil and leads to simple, empirical, non-neurotic suffering. Many people suffer from not having enough to eat, from political oppression, from

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illnesses, from nasty parents, relatives, neighbors, or bosses. All this is, in itself, simple human suffering. Even if truly terrible, psychologically it is nonetheless unproblematic. Also, it is not neurotic to imagine and wish for a better mother if one has to suffer from a bad mother. The suffering only becomes neurotic when the empirical evil is turned into the absoluteness of evil and when ipso facto the exact counterpart, an absolutely good, but dead mother, is created; when, furthermore, the two are dissociatingly conjoined by means of “yes, truly—but still more truly” and the empirically real is extinguished in consciousness. An anathema is the ground of neurosis. Thus we can say that neurosis is as equally apart from the archetypal148 as it is from the empirically real. This has to be so because it generates itself.

6. THE TRULY INTERNAL VIEW. OR: NEUROSIS AS BÜHNENWEIHFESTSPIEL (SACRED FESTIVAL DRAMA) But with all that we said so far we have not yet really penetrated to the inside view of neurosis, after all. We are still far too much torn between the two aspects, the Cinderella and the true bride of the prince, the evil stepmother and the dead good mother. Here we can remember what in the Introduction we heard Jung say in a seminar about the animal. “We have an entirely wrong idea of the animal; we must not judge from the outside. From the outside you see a pig covered with mud and wallowing in dirt ... that pig from the outside is dirty ... for you it would be dirty, but it is not for the pig. What you have to do is to put yourself inside the pig.”149 In the same way we must not look at neurosis from the outside. From the outside, neurosis is, e.g., an awful inferiority feeling, painfully embarrassing obsessional ideas, utterly stupid compulsions or phobias and thus all in all terrible suffering, absolute misery. But this is only what it is from outside, like the pigs wallowing in dirt that Jung had mentioned. The neurotic himself, too, as a rule only sees his own neurosis from outside. We have to put ourselves inside the neurosis itself (not inside the neurotic!). And if we want to really get inside neurosis, see it from 148 “The archetypal” is the thinned-out, abstractly rationalized modern version of the known-to-be-obsolete truths of mythology. 149 C.G. Jung, Visions: Notes of the Seminar given 1930–1934, ed. Claire Douglas, 2 vols., Bollingen Series, Princeton (Princeton University Press) 1977, p. 168.

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within, we have to forget about Cinderella and the evil stepmother and inferiority and suffering altogether and turn to the heart and culmination point of neurosis. The core of neurosis is that it is, for example, the dancing of the king’s twelve daughters with beautiful kings all night through, the dancing of our heroine with a prince who has fallen so madly in love with her that he must move heaven and earth to find her; more generally expressed, it is dwelling with, existence in, The Absolute (in whatever form it may show itself )—and thus it is absolute bliss, absolute fulfillment, triumph. In its innermost truth neurosis is the celebration of a Bühnenweih-Festspiel (sacred festival drama) in Wahnfried (“Peace from [or in!] Illusion”). I have to use here the inflated, corny Wagnerian term. Whenever a person shows a neurotic reaction, whenever a neurotic symptom makes itself felt, then we know: now is festival time, now absolute importance, majesty, splendor, meaning is happening. The normal workaday, the banality of ordinary life, has been disrupted and the sublime, the glory of the unconditional has suddenly appeared on the stage. Now we have to speechlessly hold our breath.150 This is what really happens in the innermost depth of neurosis. This is its ultimate truth and what makes it so precious for, and gives it its absolutely fascinating, enthralling power over, the neurotic. Neurosis is the celebration of The Absolute. One has to penetrate to this point if one wants to understand neurosis. But not only if one wants to understand it, also if one wants to cure it. Before describing in more detail what this sacred festival drama is all about, I interrupt my train of thought and turn to the question of what significance and consequences the insight into this innermost character of neurosis has for the therapy of neurosis. 150 The bliss and triumph that is the innermost core of neurosis must, of course, not be confused with what in psychoanalysis is known as “secondary gain.” The latter is precisely external to the neurosis itself. It refers to the benefit that the neurotic, he or she as ego-personality, has from the neurosis (much as, for example, the boy C.G. Jung had the benefit from his fainting fits that he did not have to go to school), not to the glory that neurosis itself in its innermost depth is and celebrates. This splendor could, by contrast, perhaps be called “primary gain.” However, I fear that the talk of a “gain” is still misleading because it invites a thinking in terms of the ego and of an instrumental type of thinking (duality of means and end). But like religious feasts, the Sacred Festival Drama does not happen for a purpose but is its own purpose. This is why it does not bring a gain, but is bliss. Bliss is always the soul’s, not the ego’s, satisfaction. And in neurosis in particular, in contrast to traditional religious festivities, the ego-personality does not even become aware of the very bliss that de facto happens in its own neurosis.

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7. CONSEQUENCES FOR THERAPY The young man in the Traveling Companion tale was able to free the princess from the spell of the demon-principle because he had a magical sword with which he could cut the demon’s head off so that he could present this cut-off head to the princess by way of a nonverbal, absolutely conclusive answer to her riddle question about the head of her demon-lover. Amazingly, being confronted with the cutoff head of her lover does not represent a terrible shock to the princess. The loss of her lover does not plunge the princess into infinite grief, nor into rage and desperation. It liberates her. How can that be? The union with her demon-lover had not been an interpersonal relationship in real life, but a relationship to the abstract concept of “the other” within the ideality and interiority of the soul. It had been her being under the spell of an absolute principle, and thus not a human feeling of love. It had been her being possessed, being totally dependent, fused, that is, in the last analysis, quite abstractly, a logical being identified with it. Therefore we cannot speak of a real relationship at all, inasmuch as a relationship requires that the duality, the vis-àvis character, of those who relate to each other is preserved within the union. In a situation of total dependence, the dependent part has, as it were, been swallowed by the other, has become subsumed by it. It is a mere appendage. All subjectivity of willing rests one-sidedly with the demon-lover, whereas the princess has lost her independent selfhood and has, over against him, mutated into a marionette. What he, that is, the principle, wants is then a priori “ego-syntonic” for the princess. To the extent that she is totally under his spell, there is then nobody who could love him. Love takes place between two real persons. It is a dialectical contradiction, the mysterium coniunctionis, or the identity of the identity and the difference of the opposites. When I said that the princess has, so to speak, been swallowed by the other, this means that, inasmuch as she is the night-world person, she has ceased to be real. She has been pulled out of reality and absorbed into the ideality of the soul’s night-world, the sphere of concepts. Imaginally speaking she is like a sleepwalker: physically present, but mentally, psychologically somewhere else. Because the real duality within the relationship is missing, her being under the spell of the demon amounts to an essentially

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unconscious identity. She is totally in him. The moment, however, that the cut-off head of her lover is presented to her by the young man, she sees it from outside. There is now a vis-à-vis, a distance. Her demonlover no longer emerges from out of her own being identical with him. The identity could exist only within the night of unconsciousness. Seen in this light, the night-world could in general be conceived as the world of distancelessness, of being fused. By showing the demon’s head, the protagonist of our fairytale makes it clear that he has dragged it out of the night-world, in which it could stand its ground as an unquestionably ruling principle, and transported it into the day-world, into reality. A conscious encounter with it in the light of day and from outside has thereby become unavoidable. “From outside,” “encounter,” “vis-à-vis” is the one aspect. It means that the princess as she herself encounters the demon. She is no longer a priori subsumed under him. The confrontation with the cut-off head means, furthermore, that she is confronted with her lover as a positivity rather than as numinosity, which also implies that she herself confronts him as the empirical personality that she is, or as the day person. She now has “the absolute principle” in front of her consciousness. It has become a content of consciousness and ipso facto lost its absoluteness. It no longer imperceptibly rules over the syntax of consciousness, but, as a content, has become objective and semantic. She has become conscious of her former having been under a spell. The scales have fallen from her eyes. As far as the demon-lover is concerned she has now entered the stage of reflection. His demonic power is thereby ipso facto broken, or rather, not broken at all, but simply dissolved into nothing. For the demonic power (his capability of absorbing her into himself, the notion that he is) consisted precisely in his immediacy, his being unreflected, in other words, in the fact that the demon was inherent in and existed as the very structure, logical form, or syntax of her consciousness. Now, furthermore, concept and reality, which before had been amalgamated (“the concept of being married is self-sufficient, I don’t need a real husband”), have separated. The princess has awakened from her dream. The young man has shocked her out of her being enclosed in the soul. She has become free, and thus turned into a truly human being. This provides us with a model in imaginal form of the cure for a neurosis.

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As already pointed out: just as the fairytale hero follows the flight of the princess (in her night aspect) into the underworldly castle in which she celebrates the glorious union with her demon-lover, so the therapist must find his own access to the concept or absolute principle and to the underworldly castle, i.e., the interiority of the soul. He must, on the night or soul side, penetrate to that very point at which the neurosis is moored, where the hold of the neurosis over the patient is, where it has its power over the patient. And this point is the celebration of the sacred festival drama. Neurosis cannot be imagined without the institution of psychotherapy, and psychotherapy can be seen as the concrete image of the whole of neurosis, of the drama that the soul at once enacts before itself and that is watched by it as the audience of the drama. In psychotherapy, the patient has the role of the soul as the actor performing this drama or as the stage on which it takes place, while the therapist has the role of the soul as audience or as the observing general consciousness. The important thing to realize is that in contrast to the medical model, the therapist is here conceived as being an integral part of the total phenomenon of neurosis itself and not as standing outside as the representative of health. A theater performance requires an audience, the audience is an indispensable part of the performance itself. But as audience, the therapist cannot be a passive consumer. He has to become active as theater critic. First the therapist has to drag the celebration, or what is celebrated, from the sphere of ideality and numinosity into sober reality and, so to speak, downgrade it reductively to a mere positivity. This it the cutting-off of the demon’s head. And secondly, he has to make the patient see that he or she is absolutely fascinated by the absolute principle that is celebrated in his or her neurosis and that therefore the patient wholeheartedly wants the neurosis and that he is neurotic solely because he wants to be neurotic. The neurotic plot is the patient’s highest and most precious treasure. This is the answer to the riddle question expressly posed by the patient by his coming to therapy. The patient, to the extent that he is a conscious personality accessible to reason, that is, he as his day-world side or as empirical I, will, of course, usually flatly deny that he wants the neurosis and that it is his highest value. No, of course not, on the contrary, he wants to be freed from this neurosis; he himself thinks that his inferiority

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feelings, phobias or compulsions, and so on, are totally stupid, irrational, utterly superfluous mechanisms, which miraculously, however, simply do not want to go away. He himself does not understand how it is possible that he is obsessed by such irrational fears, desires, or compulsions. After all, he only suffers from and bemoans his neurotic problems, is disgusted by and outraged at them. What we have to realize is that the patient himself views his own neurosis completely from outside. As rational, enlightened mind the patient usually sides with the viewpoint of the rational, reality-oriented ego, with the day-world standpoint, with the young man of the 507A fairytale, and he would love nothing more than to have the demon’s head cut off. Because then he would at long last be rid of his terrible suffering. But this is the neurotic trap. In thinking so, he unwittingly fools himself and, of course, his analyst, too. We have to keep in mind here that neurosis follows the scheme of eigentlich–noch eigentlicher, yes, truly, but still more truly. And so we can say to ourselves with respect to the patient’s wish to have the demon’s head cut off: yes, truly, you want his head cut off; you honestly think that your neurotic behavior is nonsensical, you hate it. But still more truly you adore this demon, you worship him. You are celebrating the principle that he embodies, it is your most precious possession, your lord and king, it is what is most holy to you. You are sitting as the audience in front of the Sacred Festival Drama, speechless with admiration and totally given over to its blissful truth. While you watch it there is in you no distance to the enacted spectacle of this festival, not a trace of rational criticism. You are completely at one with and sold on it, you love it more than your concrete happiness and wellbeing. At bottom you love it even more than your life. Deep down, there where you are enthralled by this Sacred Festival Drama, the fact that as empirical personality you are suffering from the symptoms caused by this festival drama has no weight at all. The splendor, the glory, of the principle that you as night-world person, as soul, worship is so fantastic that the pain that you as a real human being feel is just nothing by comparison. As soul or night-world person you follow the motto: fiat absolutum et peream homo (May The Absolute [the principle that I serve as my absolute lord] take place, even if I as empirical person should perish). Yes, truly, you want nothing more than to be able to live a normal

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happy life without these painful, disturbing, or embarrassing symptoms. But still more truly you think: “Compared to the overwhelming triumph that The Absolute offers, my empirical happiness and even my very existence are irrelevant.” That this, as I noted earlier, is sometimes literally and absolutely realistically the case can best be seen in anorexia nervosa, but as a logical structure it is inherent in every neurosis. To avoid misunderstandings let me point out that the foregoing “speech,” seemingly addressed to the patient, is by no means meant as an example of what I think a therapist should literally, in more or less the same words, say to an actual patient in a concrete therapeutic situation. It has a purely rhetorical function and is meant as a description of what the therapist must have understood in order for him to be able to adopt a truly psychological, therapeutic attitude towards neurosis. What a therapist in fact will say in the consulting room to a patient and when he will say it, and how he will word it, depends entirely on his therapeutic as well as human tact, his psychological instinct, his own character, as well as on what concrete opportunities arise in the course of a therapy. With the foregoing reflections my theory of neurosis comes to a crucial point. The general premise of this whole book is that neurosis is a Work, and at that the work of the soul and not of the empirical person, not his reaction to, defense against, avoidance of, something, not his refusal to grow up, or what have you. The neurotic is— innocently—under the spell of something powerful that simply came over him without his intention or approval. It simply happened to him. Neurosis, I insist, is self-generated, causa sui. Now, however, I all of a sudden present the empirical I as involved in its neurosis, even as wanting it, being in love with it. The I appears as being responsible for it, maybe even guilty of it. How can that be? Here we come across the dialectic of neurosis and the dialectic of the soul. The “cause” of neurosis is, to be sure, the soul. But the soul does not exist.151 In order to exist it needs empirical human beings of whom it can take possession. An existing neurosis is only possible if it has made the empirical person its own executive. The princess is not 151 Wolfgang Giegerich, The Soul’s Logical Life: Towards a Rigorous Notion of Psychology, Frankfurt am Main et al. (Peter Lang) 1998, 4th edition 2008, p. 90, 116, 134.

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the passive victim of a tyrannical absolute principle, not the victim of neurosis. She herself lives it, executes it. There is nobody else. There is not a soul that could be held responsible for her neurosis. There is only she. The demon-lover is completely “ego-syntonic” with her as night-world person. And she as this night-world person is indeed “in love” with him, or rather in a state of total dependence. She has become totally identified with him and unquestionably does his bidding. She expresses the brutal condition that suitors allowed to come to her have to be beheaded if they fail. She defends her demon. She clings to him with all her might. The I did not cause the neurosis and in this sense is certainly not responsible for it, but it must assume responsibility for it. The empirical human being is under the obligation to establish itself as free, as a subject, as subjectivity. Freedom is his duty. The “guilt” of the neurotic princess is that she has not emancipated herself from the soul, that she has allowed the soul to use her as its playground, nay, its agent, executive, and to “swallow” her, completely absorb her into its mischievous designs. “To be under the spell of ...” contains a contradiction. It means (1) passively being the victim of something overwhelmingly powerful. But it also means (2) having become totally dependent on, sold on, this power and ipso facto idolizing it, actively celebrating it, being in cahoots with it. The neurotic is an accomplice after the fact. And therefore, even if he was by no means responsible for his neurosis in the sense of having caused it, he now is responsible for it in the sense of having become identical with his neurotic demands, wishes, fears, etc., without having freed himself of them. In his twelfth year C.G. Jung went through a neurosis. He came out of his childhood neurosis when he was able to see “clearly that I myself had arranged this whole disgraceful situation. ... that the whole affair was a diabolical plot on my part” (MDR p. 32). Jung’s insight is theoretical. It amounts to a theoretical explanation of his neurosis: “I did it myself, it is my own fault.” I think that Jung was right in seeing it this way, but for this very reason his particular so-called neurosis was not a full-fledged neurosis. It was precisely not the soul’s own work, but his own semi-conscious arrangement. And so his insight that it was a plot on his part was justified. But in genuine neuroses the patient should not say or think what Jung said. He should not confuse himself with the cause and origin of his neurosis, the diabolic plotter.

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Nevertheless, he ought to come up with an analogous insight, however not a theoretical, but a practical one. What he needs instead of a “causal” explanation is an act of appropriation, that is, the free and revolutionary act of assuming responsibility, the act of his establishing himself as responsible for something that he precisely did not cause in a factual sense (causa efficiens) and thus has not been responsible for. This act would end the dissociation, the two-track situation. It is an uprising, an act of self-empowerment. It snatches power away from the soul. And for humans this is, as I pointed out, an irremissible duty. When they have understood how silly the desires or demands underlying their symptoms are, patients often ask why they have such desires, how it is possible and how it came about. They want an explanation. But “why” is absolutely the wrong question to ask. It leads astray, away from the problem. The patient has to learn that the that is what counts, not the why. The fact that I have such desires or demands, that I in fact desire or demand those things and that I take these desires to be absolutely indispensable, that they are my “ultimate concern” (Tillich), my program—that is all that needs to be known and admitted. That is the point where the neurosis is attached, and it is also where its origin is (“origin” not in the sense of “hangover from the past, a caput mortuum,” but of its being “daily maintained, indeed even generated anew”). The flight into concern about the “why” is a defense. It is what Jung called a “historical deviation,” which leads one astray.152 Here our insight into the chiastic relation in neurosis between the day truth and the night truth proves helpful. The day truth that the patient is outraged at the stupidity and embarrassing quality of his own neurotic behavior is, yes, truly, his honest truth, but it is a truth that is absolutely ineffectual. It doesn’t make any difference. Just a soap bubble. So we can forget it. What good is an opinion that I have, if it does not count, does not have any practical consequences, any weight in reality, for my actual behavior? It is not worth anything. It does not deserve any credit. The night truth, by contrast, is indeed stupid or despicable, but it has all the weight. It rules. It determines what really happens, it determines how I as neurotic patient in fact behave. 152 If neurosis is its own cause, any “why” is a blunder from the outset, a misunderstanding.

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So the truth of my otherworldly, irrational soul is my real (actual, effective) truth, and the truth of my real, empirical personality is unreal and insubstantial. The fault of the patient and the reason why he stays neurotic is that he takes seriously and for real his correct rational and critical assessment of his neurotic behavior, merely because it is correct, rational, and, conversely, that he takes the convictions underlying his neurotic symptoms, merely because they are stupid, for not real. In this way he is the accomplice of his neurosis. He covers up for it. He is the honorable front of an evil business, he is the Dr. Jekyll for a Mr. Hyde; he solemnly proclaims the day truth so that the night truth may go on undetected forever. The complicity is only one aspect. The other is that by siding with the correct, rational view he dissociates himself from his own soul passion. This has a very serious practical consequence: the enlightened, rational, critical mind does not attend the Sacred Festival Drama and leaves the latter, so to speak, to the naive, absolutely uncritical, popular masses who are addicted to this soap opera. So the theater critics and the theater performance do not come together anymore. Performance and criticism have been disengaged. The critical voice has withdrawn its presence from the festival, and so the latter can go on and on uncriticized, while at the same time the rational criticism can go on and on without reaching the theater people. Criticism and performance now have their own separate tracks. So therapeutically, four tasks become essential. (1) The precise nature of the Festival Drama that is performed in the background of a given neurosis has to be made explicit in all its detail. We have to see what exactly the principle is that is worshiped and celebrated in this neurosis. (2) It has to become clear to the patient (to him as rational or day-world consciousness) that his conviction that he wants to be freed from his neurosis and his conviction that his neurotic behavior is stupid are just talk, absolutely idle talk. He should forget them. (3) Instead, he has to learn to admit that “still more truly” he worships his demon, he is obsessed by the Sacred Festival Drama, and that he wants it, he loves it more than anything else, or, to say

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it in a slightly different way, that it is really he who wants it. It is not something that has been imposed on him against his will from outside, by whatever circumstances, God knows from where. There is no “who done it?” He has to learn to really understand and profess: “Yes, indeed, I, the same I that is sitting here, am the one who constantly stages, produces and finances this Festival performance, and it is I who have not missed one single performance for the last twenty years, and I still cannot get enough of it.” (4) This act of re-owning of what had been disowned, disavowed, dissociated from the day self does not only imply that the split-off Festival Drama of the night self will become reintegrated into the total personality, it also means that, conversely, the adult, rational, critical mind will be present at the performances again. And then the Sacred Festival Drama will turn out to be a total flop. It cannot stand up to the criticism. It will become apparent as the soap opera that it is. Now there is no need for outrage anymore. No, the moment that the critical consciousness opens itself up for the inner festival drama, this play simply won’t be able to hold its ground any longer; it is too silly, too corny, too boring. It will just die. A neurosis can exist and persist only because of the uncriticized and disowned worship of the principle celebrated in the Festival Drama. And the Festival Drama can persist because the subjectivity of the subject was split into two, into an esoteric and an exoteric half. I take these terms in this sense from a passage in CW 6 § 816, in which Jung wrote, “For every esoteric interpretation the symbol is dead, because esotericism has already given it (at least ostensibly) a better expression, whereupon it becomes merely a conventional sign for associations that are more completely and better known elsewhere. Only from the exoteric standpoint is the symbol a living thing.” Jung’s use of the terms is unusual, but makes sense. The exoteric subject is helplessly exposed to and taken in by the suggestive power (cf. CW 7§ 269) of the demon, the principle or, in former times, the symbols, the images, the myths, similarly to how children are often taken in by what they see on television. It is this subject that is the spell-bound audience for the Sacred Festival Drama. It is “exoteric” because it is unable to comprehend and see through the

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image or performance; it does not have the necessary critical distance. But precisely for that reason it is completely taken in. The esoteric subject is the one which has the power to comprehend and judge and for this reason overcome the naivety of the exoteric standpoint. It has left the magical circle that the suggestive power of the principle or image had drawn around the subject and sees the absolute principle or the image from a critical distance. This is the dialectic: the exoteric person is taken in, sold on the image, while the esoteric one sees through it from outside. The latter is named “esoteric” because by virtue of comprehension and seeing-through he is, as it were, initiated into the inner secret (the logic or syntax) of what is going on. Exoteric and esoteric are not simply alternatives, side by side. Rather, the latter means the destruction of the former: “the death of the symbol.” In neurosis, however, owing to the neurotic dissociation, the esoteric and the exoteric viewpoint have precisely been turned into juxtaposed alternatives. The esoteric standpoint actually can only be what it is by destroying the naivety of the exoteric one as its material and precondition. But in neurosis this possibility has been removed; it has been disengaged from its own precondition and is now a free-floating rational attitude that has lost its true object and thus its bite, just as conversely the exoteric position has been freed from having to suffer the fate of being exposed to the criticism of the other and thus having to die, so that now it can go on forever undisturbed. The moment that the patient realizes that he is the dissociated unity of the exoteric and the esoteric standpoint, the esoteric standpoint will again have its natural object with which to be critically engaged and at which to exercise its real function. And at that moment it will already have destroyed the suggestive power that the Sacred Festival Drama had for the exoteric standpoint and along with it the exoteric standpoint itself, and this entire Festival Drama will be dead. The neurosis is over. It vanished. The exoteric standpoint is no longer rescued beyond its time by being hid in the darkness of a split-off night and by the esoteric standpoint’s having been reserved for an equally split-off day so that both move on their own tracks without the one ever being able to fulfill its job of getting into the way of the other.

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Luther (basing himself on St. Augustine) had said: oportet me adesse, 153 it is necessary that I am present, make myself present. Hegel had said that I must step behind the so-called curtain in front of the inner. The impulse or gesture in these statements, which belong to entirely different contexts, is mutatis mutandis similar to that of my sending the esoteric standpoint into the Sacred Festival Drama. But in therapeutic practice we could just as well turn the direction of the movement around and say that the inner has to come out from behind the curtain; the festival drama has to come out from its hidingplace in the darkness of the night and become present in the dayworld. The desires and complexes must not be combated with willpower. On the contrary, they have to be pulled out into the light of consciousness and invited to present themselves. They should be given a true chance. They have to be pressed to identify themselves, pressed to show their hand, show what they have to offer. And then they will automatically melt to nothing, because they have nothing to offer; they are untenable to begin with. That is the reason why they had to shun the light of day in the first place. Despite my reference to Jung (his idea about the exoteric and esoteric standpoints), my opinion that it is necessary for the treatment of neurosis to help the patient own up to the fact that the Festival Drama is his doing is diametrically opposed to the general direction of Jung’s thinking as well as to that of Hillman. It is one main interest of Jung’s to make the ego aware of, appreciate, and establish a relationship with, the psychic Other. I am supposed to understand that I am confronted in my psyche with powerful dominants, ultimately archetypal powers, that what happens in the unconscious is precisely not made by me. “My” unconscious is mine only like the bank that employs me is “my bank” (CW 11 § 65). The contents in the psyche are autonomous, vis-à-vis the ego, objective, not subjective. Even my dark aspects are not really mine, but in Jung’s thinking they are to be substantiated as an independent reality, my “shadow.” I have to learn to respect psychic phenomena as the expression of the non153 “Oportet me adesse” (it is indispensable that I am present, involved) is what Luther (in his Disputatio de iustificatione, 1536, WA 39 I; 96,6) added by way of commentary to a statement by Augustine (in Sermo CLXIX CLXX, 13, Opera omnia [Migne V, p. 923]): “qui creavit te sine te, non salvabit te sine te” (he who created you without you, will not save you without you). For the page references of these quotes I am indepted to Prof. Martin Brecht, Münster.

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ego, the other persons in me, and enter into a relationship with them, comparable to how I have social relationships with other people. I should even learn to serve the god in the disease (CW 13 § 55). It is characteristic for Jung’s whole thinking that he hails “the passion of the ego,” the “violence done to” the empirical person (CW 11 § 233) and “the defeat for the ego” (CW 14 § 778). So one can say that it is the general tendency of Jung’s psychology to teach the conscious I, the empirical person, not to view itself as subject but rather as object of the true subject (the unconscious), as the mere employee, rather than the owner, of the bank, and to make consciousness disown those of its contents that are depthpsychologically relevant. They are logically pushed off by him into the status of fundamental otherness, and he held this movement of alienating, dissociating, these contents from the ego-personality to be of therapeutic importance. “This fact could be best expressed by the words ‘It is not I who live, it lives me.’ The illusion of the supremacy of consciousness makes us say, ‘I live.’ Once this illusion is shattered by the recognition [acknowledgment] of the unconscious, the unconscious will appear as something objective in which the ego is included” (CW 13 § 76). This beautifully expresses the fundamental tendency at work in Jung’s stance. All true supremacy and autonomy should be returned to the archetypes of the collective unconscious. For much the same reason neurosis is for him ultimately a morbus sacer, a holy illness (CW 11 § 521). “The main interest of my work is not concerned with the treatment of neurosis but rather with the approach to the numinous” (Letters 1, p. 377, to Martin, 20 Aug. 1945). The gods have become diseases (CW 13 § 54), and thus, for Jung, in the disease or symptom a god is ultimately hidden. This tendency came out even more strongly in Hillman, who wants us to “recollect[-] the Gods in all psychological activity,”154 to ask who the god is155 in each pathology or perspective of ours and to follow the course of an epistrophé, up to the archetypal sphere or, as he prefers to say, “the imaginal.” I think that this is therapeutically counterproductive, at least in the case of neurosis proper. For this dis-ownment of the essential 154

James Hillman, Re-Visioning Psychology, New York et al. (Harper & Row) 1975,

p. 226.

155

Ibid. p. 139.

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content, in conjunction with the emphasis on the dependence of the I (its being dominated, indeed, defeated), is the very thing that has already happened in neurosis anyway. It is what neurosis is about. The hailing of otherness, the dissociation of the psychic contents away from the subject, the I, and the distancing of the day person (“consciousness”) from the night self (“the unconscious”), of the rational personality from the soul, should not be substantiated and condoned by psychological theory, nor deepened by therapeutic methodology. This would only amount to a continuation of the impulse and logic underlying neurosis, of course an unsuspected continuation because it happens on a higher (theoretical, conscious, attitudinal) level rather than on a primitive unconscious-spontaneous-factual level, the disgraceful level of symptomatology. The morbus sacer idea tends to feed the glorification of The Absolute, to continue the celebration of the Sacred Festival Drama. Unwittingly, therapy along these lines does not want to cure the neurosis. It wants to rescue and preserve it by kicking it upstairs. It believes, of course, that removing it, the neurosis, from the obviously disgraceful level of blind fact (spontaneous unconscious pathology and suffering) and raising it to the more noble and symptom-free level of a conscious self-understanding and ethical attitude is the cure, simply because it frequently goes hand in hand with the neurotic patient’s, the human person’s, liberation from neurotic symptoms. But in truth it is the rescue, preservation, and legitimization of the very logic of neurosis, and the protection of it by concealing it in a higher, less conspicuous sphere. Let me stress this: my critical assessment of Jung’s and Hillman’s basic therapeutic vision is by no means supposed to suggest that with their approach the patient could not indeed be helped, that is, freed from his neurosis. By teaching the patient to look up to the archetypal dominants and the gods in the disease, the “sacred festival drama” is, as I suggested, officially acknowledged, condoned and even honored by psychological theory. This has the effect that it is pulled out of the darkness and secrecy of the night and lifted into the brightness of day and to the height of theory. In this way, to be sure, the immediate, personal, existential identity of the patient with the neurotic structure is dissolved so that he is relieved of it, because this structure is now loaded onto the

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shoulders of the third person of therapy, psychological theory, who as a pharmakon or scapegoat has to carry it now for the individual patients. 156 The former immediate “suggestive power” (CW 7 § 269) of the soul drama is transferred to and transformed into the ideological admiration, adoration of the archetypes, the mandalas, the Jungian Self, the individuation process, the imaginal, etc. This transferral does not dissolve the neurotic structure, but may certainly free the individual from it. No, thoroughgoing therapy has to move in the opposite direction and try to re-attach the detached (objectified, autonomized) unconscious stage performance, of course not re-attach it to “the ego,” the “ego complex,” those split-off abstract constructs of psychology, but to me as a living whole, to my subjectivity, to my consciousness as the whole person that I am (homo totus). I have to learn to take responsibility precisely for those contents or goings-on as my wish and my doing that Jung wishes to declare to be manifestations of autonomous factors that ought to be honored, if not worshiped, as such. Where there was It, there indeed “I” shall be! The form of I. I have to make the neurotic machinations my own as my own wanting and producing them, despite the fact that (or precisely because) I know that at the time when my neurosis first came into existence it was not my will, but the will of the soul. It is even possible that my neurosis originated at a time when I was not yet a full-fledged I that could have had such a wish as its own wish. But now I am I, I have a critical consciousness, and this is the reason why I, I alone, have to assume responsibility even for the activities of the non-I, the soul. And I only assume this responsibility if I adopt these machinations and wishes or demands as my own. The fact that within my own innermost psychological territory I let myself be dominated by a not-I, by the will of the soul, is my psychological fault. If I don’t appropriate the alien will in myself as my own, I am guilty of what Kant called man’s “self-imposed [or: self-incurred, selbstverschuldet] immaturity ...” Thus, even if it is not my bank, it certainly has to become my bank. 156 Cf. my “On the Neurosis of Psychology or The Third of the Two,” in: Spring 1977, Zürich (Spring Publications), pp. 153–174, now in a slightly expanded version in: W.G., The Neurosis of Psycholog y. Primary Papers towards a Critical Psychology, (= Collected English Papers, Vol. 1), New Orleans (Spring Journal Books) 2006, pp. 41–67.

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The choice between this view, on the one hand, and the one of Hillman and Jung concerning this point, on the other hand, represents a problem of ethical significance. We can describe the difference also in the following way. Jung certainly wants the beloved demon to die as neurotic symptom, but he nevertheless wants him to be reborn as numinous archetype. By contrast, I think that the demon’s head needs to be cut-off (or rather instead of the idea of such a violent act of cutting off I should say, what needs to be gained is the insight into the demon’s already long being dead, his head as already being cut off, its having all along been the veritable caput mortuum!). Is it enough to dissolve the patient’s identity with the neurotic structure—or must not the structure itself be dissolved? Is it enough to move (displace!) the sacred festival drama from one theater to another, from the interior of the individual patient to the objective and public structure of psychological theory—or must this play not be altogether dropped from the program, indeed, should not the whole institution of such a thing as sacred festival theater be shut down? Jung clearly believed in the necessity of displacement. Concerning neurotics and their infantile fixations he asked, “How are they ever to emerge [i.e., from those fixations] if analysis does not make them aware of something different and better, when even theory holds them fast in it and offers them nothing more than the rational or ‘reasonable’ injunction to abandon such childishness? That is precisely what they cannot do, and how should they be able to if they do not discover something to stand on? One form of life cannot simply be abandoned unless it is exchanged for another” (MDR p. 166). What Jung hinted at here is more clearly stated in a passage from an earlier text of his (CW 4 § 350): “... The fantasy of sacrifice means the giving up of infantile wishes. ... But man cannot leave his previous personality and his previous objects of interest simply as they are, ... Here religion is a great help because, by the bridge of the symbol, it leads his libido away from the infantile objects (parents) towards the symbolic representatives of the past, i.e., the gods, thus facilitating the transition from the infantile world to the adult world.” This is the move from the personalistic and literal to the transpersonal or archetypal. In other words, a therapy that works with symbols and archetypal images can bring about an exchange of the adult version of the parental objects for the infantile version of these (same)

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objects. What they are the versions of remains the same. Thus therapy aims for a semantic change, believing it indispensable to leave the syntax, the logic or structure, intact, that is to say, the syntax of the exoteric standpoint. There is in this interpretation of the transition from child to adult no real negation, no cancellation of the immediacy, no “death” of the child. There is too much of a soft spot in Jung towards immediacy, towards the “childhood paradise,” and, in the case of neurosis, towards the demon-lover, so that all we get is a displacement from one version to another version of the same thing. Jung is of course right that one cannot simply, by a rational decision and the power of will, abandon one’s infantile fixations. But is it a matter of abandoning, rejecting, combating anything in the first place? Why think in such technical terms? Is it not much rather a matter of freeing the exoteric standpoint from its immunization against and dissociation from its own counterpart, the esoteric position, so that they can come together again? This would inevitably lead to the natural 157 “death of the symbol,” that is, in the context that Jung had in mind in these quotations, to the death of the suggestive power of the infantile objects, rather than to their eternalization and elevation (ascension!) into the heaven of archetypes. Returning to our train of thought, I again ask: Is it enough to shove the intact exoteric standpoint from one place to another, from deep down inside the patient to the height of explicit theory—or should there not rather be a revolutionizing change of standpoints, a move from the exoteric to the esoteric position, a move by patient and theory together? A move that would be a real advance, rather than a relocation: the rise of the logic of consciousness as such to an entirely new level or status of itself. For this move would move via a negation, critical destruction, 158 and consequently death of the 157

“Natural” not in the sense of physical, but of “of its own accord.” “Destruction” sounds violent. But as we already know, no forceful killing is needed. The moment that the Festival Drama comes out of its hiding-place in the darkness of the night and has to face the light of day, to really face the glance of the esoteric standpoint, it dwindles away all by itself: it self-destructs. The moment the demon is dragged into the day-world it shows itself to be already dead. Thus it does not suffer the destruction from outside. It has its obsolescence within itself, and only because it had been protectively concealed and screened off was it able to defend itself against this, its own, truth (of being a mere ghost) and feign to be alive, indeed more than that, to be the true life. 158

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initial standpoint; it would move by pushing off from the exoteric to the esoteric standpoint, and to the esoteric standpoint not as another juxtaposed alternative, but as the sublated, negated exoteric standpoint itself. Jung of course also opted for such a sublation. But his was the sublation only of the objects (on the semantic level), not of the standpoint or logic of consciousness (on the syntactic level). How is the self empirically to be truly freed from the suggestive powers of the unconscious images, as Jung demanded (CW 7 § 268), if the theory of analytical and imaginal psychology itself logically codifies this suggestive power of the images by ontologizing them159 and by itself adopting the exoteric standpoint as its own official position?

8. THE SELF-OCCLUDING GLORY OF THE SACRED FESTIVAL DRAMA With these questions I leave behind me the excursus about the therapeutic necessity of penetrating to the patient’s secret but absolute fascination with the Sacred Festival Drama and return to the discussion of the highest or deepest core of neurosis itself in the context of our fairytales. I emphasized that if we want to really get into the inside view of neurosis, we have to forget completely the lowly Cinderella-aspect and Cinderella’s suffering and only see the triumph of the girl dancing with her loving prince, the bliss of her being his one and only true bride. I said that when a neurotic symptom makes itself felt then we can know that now is festival time, now absolute importance, majesty, splendor, meaning is happening. The intensity and reality of the bliss is so great that everything else, all empirical misery, is forgotten. This cannot be stressed too much. But now I have to take it all back and state: there is no bliss, no triumph, no worshiping and celebrating the demon-principle. There is no splendor, no majesty, no meaning. This insight is equally important for doing justice to neurosis. We have to establish both these positions, splendor and no splendor, not because I would want to make things unnecessarily 159 Here it is significant to note that the image is ontologized even if the objective reality that is attributed to the image is meant only metaphorically or poetically. Psychologically, such distinctions as between the literal and the metaphorical understanding are just decorations. What psychologically counts is whether you assign objective reality to the image and speak of Gods or not.

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difficult, but because neurosis is a logically highly complex, sophisticated reality. It will have to be the task of the following discussion to see how these two absolutely contradictory statements fit together. I will proceed in three steps. (1) The festival drama at the core of neurosis takes place in the soul; it is a soul drama, and the soul is not emotional, but intellectual, noetic. Precisely where the culmination point of neurosis is reached we have left the precinct of the ego altogether and are in the remote and cold recesses of the soul. When we use words like triumph and bliss, we think of emotional realities, of excitement, intensive feelings, personal thrill. This is so because we are modern people for whom the subjective ego is the locus of experience, and not the soul. We are basically tourists, even when we journey introspectively into the psychic realm. We want to experience and feel. We want happenings, “sensations” (in the two senses of the word), entertainment. But the soul is different. A feature that the neurotic festival drama has in common with ancient rituals is that in emotional regards it is absolutely sober, quiet, unsensational, unsentimental, matter-of-fact. What counts in a ritual is that it is performed absolutely correctly, not that it is understood or experienced by an ego. The soul is interested in a truth’s being actually performed, that a concept or notion has indeed been expressed, that the knowing that is stored in the soul has been objectively celebrated. What individual people think or feel about it when faced with it, and how much they understand of it, is absolutely irrelevant for the soul. The only thing that matters for the soul is the fact that its truths, the contents of its knowledge, have been performed, have become objectively manifest. It wants them to be born, to have come into the empirical world. As a soul drama, the neurotic festival is likewise strictly intellectual, it is about a soul truth and not about an emotional experience. The inner core of neurosis is pre-modern. So if we want to speak of triumph and bliss we have to say it is the cold intellectual triumph or bliss on the part of an objective truth, not the triumph of a feeling human subject. It is the soul truth that triumphs by having become real. That is all. It is not the triumph of the neurotic ego. And what the truth celebrates in its triumph is simply its own truth, the fact and the absolute certainty, that it is true. The soul’s truths celebrate themselves,

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their majesty as truths. People are merely the location and the instruments of this self-celebration. (2) Whereas the neurotic triumph has this intellectual quality in common with the sphere of ancient myth and ritual, there is nevertheless a fundamental difference between the inner world of neurosis and the world of myth and ritual. During the time of myth and ritual and still during the time of Western metaphysics, soul truths were celebrated by being, in differing ways, articulated, displayed, publicly shown, made explicit. Processions, masked dances, symbols, myths, holy places, pyramids, temples, cathedrals, elaborate metaphysical systems, to mention only a few examples, were the often visible, concrete expression of the celebration of these truths. Notwithstanding the fact that these truths were often seen as mysteries and as such surrounded by secrecy, they were disseminated, and this secrecy had merely the task of protecting the inner intactness and preciousness of the truths. Jung, contrasting our modern religions with the religion of the Pueblo Indians, said about the latter, “Here, however, the air was filled with a secret known to all the communicants, .... This strange situation gave me an inkling of Eleusis, whose secret was known to one nation and yet never betrayed” (MDR p. 249). But in neurosis the sacred festival drama is not displayed, is not made public. The soul’s truth conversely conceals itself. Mr. Hyde has taken over. This has two aspects. The one is its withdrawal into the absolute privacy of the individual, a withdrawal to such an extent that it is even kept private with respect to the ego of the neurotic, which does not have access to it, despite the fact that the sacred festival drama exerts tremendous power over the ego. The conscious personality does not enter as audience into the festival drama, does not become exposed to it, let alone allow itself to be carried and elated by it. This is why as far as bliss is concerned the neurotic ego comes away empty-handed. It has no benefit from the whole performance. From this follows a second aspect: the entire effort of the Sacred Festival Drama is all in vain. There is no “audience” that would be illumined and blessed by its radiant shine. This means: neurosis has no redeeming value at all. It contains nothing constructive. It does not have a meaning pointing beyond itself, a meaning that at least indirectly could reconcile one to it. It is not an incomplete or

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unsuccessful attempt at a cure on the part of the soul, nor an attempt to attain a higher stage in the person’s individuation process. True, The Absolute has realized itself in it. But the self-enclosedness of neurosis within itself is such that it on principle excludes consciousness from its uroboric structure, even, as we have seen, the neurotic’s own consciousness. It locks consciousness out, keeping it outside, completely ignorant: dissociated. 160 The splendid glory of The Absolute pointlessly circles within itself, remaining absolutely unconscious—undisclosed as far as its meaning is concerned, opaque, mute, invisible, even unsuspected. And therefore: no longer truly absolute and no longer truly true. Neurotic, after all. “Neurosis has no redeeming value at all, nothing constructive”— one could raise the question here how this “it has no redeeming value at all” can be reconciled with our earlier assertion that neurosis, this stinking water, contains everything it needs, even its fulfillment and its meaning. Both notions are true. However, what we need to keep in mind is that neurosis, as a thoroughly modern phenomenon, is not the kind of innocent prime matter in which alchemy still believed (for which “the stinking water” could ultimately be transformed into “gold”), but a devious, cunning phenomenon that contradicts itself. The direction is here reversed. The “gold” (in our case: “The Absolute”) realizes itself in neurosis by producing the “stinking water” and completely sinking itself into it so that it systematically renders itself in this “stinking water” absolutely inaccessible, invisible. And so it is also present only in this (perverse) sense. The telos and fulfillment of neurosis thus lies in its openly displaying its own total senselessness—in its displaying that its “The Absolute” is nothing but stinking water. Neurosis is its own self-refutation and thus also in itself salvation from itself. This is a point where the theoretical position presented in this book concerning the nature of psychology (the psychological phenomenon as a self and not as an appendage of the personality of human beings as its substrate) shows its indispensability for therapeutic practice. The moment one starts out from the idea of the empirical person, one views neurosis from outside and paves the way 160 It is this ex-clusive nature that distinguishes the (only internally) uroboric logic of neurosis from the uroboric logic of both myth and metaphysics, which are both comprehensive, inclusive.

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for one’s being taken in by the neurotic conjecture, for taking it at face value. Its other, self-contradictory side will not find due acknowledgment, which has the consequence that the implicit logical self-sublation, self-redemption of neurosis cannot become an actual reality and cannot manifest itself as an explicit event in empirical consciousness. Instead one will probably be of the opinion that the neurosis needs to be artificially overcome by the neurotic through his ego effort and an act of will. But the cure of neurosis is only real to the extent that the afflicted consciousness is capable of comprehending it, comprehending it in the entirety of its internal logic (selfmovement); in other words, to the extent that consciousness is capable of personally thinking its (the neurosis’s) self-sublation. Earlier I emphasized that the princess does not have a real love adventure with her demon-lover, neither on an empirical nor on a visionary level of personal experience; it is not in empirical reality that the twelve daughters of the king dance with twelve beautiful kings; there is no experience of love and bliss, just the abstract notion of an ever-lasting dance or marriage. Similarly Cinderella does not factually turn into a supermundane beauty and marry the prince. All this happens only neurotically, that is to say, it “happens” only as a concept, an abstract, dry, bodiless thought, not as a blissful experience and not as a rich, colorful image, let alone an expanded imagination or vision. The festival not only recedes into the privacy and subjectivity of the individual. Much rather, it recedes into itself, into the mere abstract concept of itself, so that we have only the zero grade (Schwundstufe) of a festival. It is totally locked within itself (which is, of course, also the reason why the ego-personality comes away empty-handed). It is still a festival, but one absolutely reduced to the abstract, empty form or mere matrix of it, an extensionless point. It is only the principle as such of a festival. The principle or concept does not disclose itself, open up. No articulation, no dissemination, no unfolding of its substance. There is still splendor, still pleroma, but pleroma only as the empty shell of itself; still a festival, but only as the bare outline of it; still glory, but only as the abstract notion of glory, the mere suggestion or naked idea of bliss. We have to clearly differentiate this absolute withdrawal of the festival drama into itself from three other types of reduction. First, if we think of Bachofen’s statement that myth is the exegesis of a symbol,

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we can conversely comprehend the symbol as a collapsed myth, or myth reduced to its essence. In this way a single corn of grain in a dream might under certain conditions be a symbol pointing to the complex whole of the Eleusis myth, the myth of Demeter, KorePersephone, Hades. But this reduction of a myth to a symbol is totally different from the receding of the neurotic truth into its mere concept. The symbol is still fundamentally substantial and not merely an abstract form, and it is pregnant with meaning, almost bursting to unfold into the extended display of its meaning, the myth. The principle celebrated in neurosis, by contrast, is the empty form of itself, and it is the tendency to hide itself even more deeply within itself. The receding of the neurotic sacred festival drama into itself is, secondly, also not like the reduction of the modern (postmetaphysical) basic epistemic orientation of intentionality to its ultimate core so that it appears as naked will (as in Schopenhauer), rather than as a form of knowing. Neurosis is still concerned with mythic or metaphysical substance, with values, with a principle, with the pleroma, only that for it the substance has been cut back to the zero grade. Neurosis defends the copula, the coniunctio oppositorum, but it can defend it only negatively, by, as it were, cutting all suitors’ heads off. Modern intentionality does not hold back, conceal, withdraw; no, it is outgoing, it articulates itself, but what it articulates is its emptiness, the lack, the substancelessness, the unbridgeable difference or dissociation between subject and predicate, or rather between function and argument. This last observation makes, thirdly, another differentiation necessary, namely from Hegel’s interiorization of the entire semantics of metaphysics into its syntax. What Hegel did was to transform the traditional logical form of metaphysics into a new form, namely the form of form, a transformation that, however, continued the traditional tendency towards articulation, unfolding, display. Neurosis is again different on both counts. It stops the display, but precisely holds on to the semantic or substantial position. Rather than transcending the semantics of the mythical or metaphysical tradition in the direction of logical or syntactical form, it reduces the semantics to the state of absolute poverty, the semantics of nothing. First I showed that neurosis has the strictly intellectual character of the truth it celebrates in common with myth and metaphysics. Then

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I pointed to the radical difference between the mythic or metaphysical display and to the neurotic reduction to the zero point of their respective truths. Now we come to the third step in the elucidation of the self-contradictory simultaneity of glory and not-glory. (3) In neurosis the soul’s truth recedes into itself. There is no empirical, no public display. But the soul’s truth wants to be born, it needs to come into the world. It cannot stay in the status of mere potentiality. The notion must somehow become empirical-factual reality on this earth. The celebration of the Sacred Festival Drama must receive a real presence in actual life. Now, how is it possible that at one and the same time the festival drama absolutely withdraws to the zero grade of itself and becomes an empirical reality? This is impossible, a contradiction. However, it is that impossibility and contradiction as which neurosis exists. And the solution of this dilemma is that the festival drama occurs as pathology, as neurotic symptoms. In neurotic suffering, the reduction to the zero grade of celebration of the absolute or bliss and absolutely real, empirical presence come together. So there are not two: the patient’s suffering from his symptoms and the reward for the suffering by the glory of the celebrated principle. There is only the symptom. The symptom is the celebration. The neurotic misery is the neurotic bliss. We do not have the structure of compensation here: You study hard and give up all sorts of pleasures and you will be compensated for this self-renouncement at a later time by a well-paid job or by becoming a famous scientist. You sacrifice yourself for the poor as a Mother Teresa in this life and you will later become a saint and be rewarded with a high place in Heaven. No, what we have to understand is that in neurosis, the suffering is in itself the triumph. There is nothing after it, no additional triumph, no other reward. It is not either the case that we find two sides or respects of the same: on the one hand a suffering and on the other hand a triumph of the festival celebration. There is only one side, only the misery—which, however, is the form in which the (neurotic) glory, the only glory there is for the neurotic, becomes real. There is only Cinderella and not also a beautiful bride. On the contrary, the more she is Cinderella and suffers from her maltreatment, the more she is—neurotically—the prince’s true bride; but “neurotically” means: intellectually as an absolutely remote truth, as

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an “unthought” thought, 161 not experientially, emotionally, not as something that is accessible to her as ego-personality. The royal bride exists in reality solely in and as the girl’s absolute self-debasement to a Cinderella. With respect to her realness, the radiantly beautiful bride is nothing but the hypostatized and venerated absoluteness of the girl’s self-denunciation; she is nothing in her own right. Likewise, her ideal mother has her positive existence solely in the absolutely evil stepmother (and as that stepmother). Empirically there is only suffering. Similarly, only in her symptom of refusing to marry and wanting all suitors beheaded is the king’s daughter married to an underworld demon, not independently from this pathology. The anorexic’s starving herself is all there is, but it is the overwhelming reality of the (zero grade of the) triumph of the absolute. Kafka made this beautifully clear in his “Hunger Artist.” For the hunger artist, starving himself is not a means to an end, it is idealistically l’art pour l’art, the highest art. This is neurosis. Anorexia is logically simple, because in it the manifest behavior (the starving of the body) on the empirical level is obviously in tune and supports the celebration and elevation of the absolute principle on the soul or logical level. But there are more sophisticated forms of neurosis where the celebration of one’s principle and the manifest behavior are in opposition to each other. A small example might be the compulsion to again and again check whether the gas stove has really been turned off. Here the empirical behavior is intended to prevent the very disaster (a possible explosion or huge fire) that is the subject of the festival drama to be celebrated. For here the soul wants to explode, wants to burst its tight-jacket, it wants to be aflame (Nietzsche: “Yes, I know whence I have sprung! / Insatiable as a flame / I burn and consume myself! / Whatever I seize becomes light, / whatever I leave, ashes: / certainly, flame I am”162). So here the attempt to prevent what the festival is about is in itself the way, and the only way, the festival is celebrated. For each time I go back to check I (unconsciously) reiterate and thereby feed and celebrate the (unthought) thought of this possible catastrophe. My going back and 161 It is essential to comprehend that thought here does not refer to the empirical act of thinking something. It is not a thought that is thought through or would be an actual content of consciousness. It is an objective, not a subjective thought. 162 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, Vorspiel “Scherz, List und Rache,” # 62 (“Ecce homo”).

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checking is completely superfluous: I know that I shut off the gas, at least after my first checking. Under the title of “I want to prevent at all cost” I again and again invent out of the blue and serve the thought of a consuming fire or an explosion. My silly checking over and over again is the undignified, neurotic version of leading what Jung termed “the symbolic life.” Ostensibly I spend some of my valuable time on something absolutely silly, but in this silly way I logically spend it for my highest soul value. We see that in neurosis the festival drama not only recedes into the empty shell of its concept and to the zero grade of itself. Its form of realization also takes the via negativa of a withdrawal into its opposite, the opposite of glory, splendor, majesty, namely into the absolutely undignified, disgraceful form of neurotic symptom. The symptom is the realized zero-grade of the soul’s truth, the zero grade not only as a logical, but also as a hard-core practical reality. Our time, the time of modernity, is such that the symbolic life or the sacred festival drama can only be (only be real) if it cloaks itself in pathological behavior. Only one’s self-sacrifice, the sacrifice of personal happiness and fulfillment, can bestow real existence to the unconditional, but of course real existence only in the form of a negative (in the photographic sense): neurosis can only really show what it is not about. What it is about cannot manifest. What we see is only the starving of the body, not the absolute principle. The demon-lover of the enchanted princess does not exist as an independent reality. He comes into being exclusively negatively in the act of the killing of the suitors. In their beheading he has his life, the only life that he has. The absolute principle becomes real only in the rejection, repudiation, condemnation, combating of something real. It never has an independent existence and a substance of its own. The undignified, disgraceful character of neurosis has many forms: the ridiculousness that inheres the object feared in phobias, the absurdity of the hand-washing or front-door-checking rituals in obsessive-compulsive disorders, the silliness of hysterical theatrics, the indecency of perverse fantasies, in general the humiliation inherent in the disease character of neurosis, and so on. However, we must never forget that this absolutely undignified form is the form of a highest soul value, of The Absolute, of the copula, at a time when this highest soul value has long become obsolete.

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Seen in this light, neurosis shows itself to be the opposite of the phenomena of Kitsch, simulation, nostalgia. In those phenomena an attempt is made to positively have and celebrate what is already obsolete. Neurosis goes the other way, the via negativa, the way, as it were, of “starvation,” of absolute poverty and misery. Kitsch has, in a certain sense, accepted the loss of the presence of the absolute substance, but does not mind the lack of real presence and simply celebrates the substance anyway as if it had a presence.163 So in this sense it is an obvious, admitted lie—and as such again honest. It displays its phoniness, its make-believe character. Neurosis, by contrast, refuses to let the absolute substance be obsolete; it defends the immediate real presence of it. But it has to pay the price for insisting on the presence of something obsolete, that presence that it stubbornly holds onto is the presence of nothing anymore, a presence content-wise reduced to zero, or rather beyond zero, to the minus side of the scale, inasmuch as this presence vampirically sucks and consumes more and more of the real presence of the neurotic person’s empirical life, his or her well-being. Neurosis is absolutely honest about the emptiness and destructiveness of its truth: it is just pathology, everyone can see it. At times it is honest even to the point of death, but its lie consists in passing something off as a real presence (in the sense of the self-presentation of The Absolute) that is not such a presence at all but the result of contorted machinations. Neurosis is deadly serious; it is lived out on an existential level, in the flesh, as it were. The neurotic pays the full price, in hard cash. Neurosis does not live on credit. Ultimately, as in the case of anorexia, neurosis even stakes the life of the person for its purpose. Kitsch, by contrast, is dissociated from real life, merely aesthetic, an embellishing film put over reality, or an isolated phenomenon beside real, serious life. There is no direct price that would have to be paid by (or for) Kitsch, only the indirect one of one’s being divorced from the existential level of where real life, where the soul, now is.164 163 This may be an occasion to think about the high esteem in which the “as if ” is held in archetypal psychology. 164 The “now” refers to the time of the production of the work that has Kitsch character, not to the time of our viewing it. Kitschy works in themselves contradict and deviate from their own now. Great works of art of former ages never represent our now, but they are fully in tune with their own (now long past) now, and this is why they also have the power to speak to us.

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Historically, one might say that the neurotic reality of having one’s absolute triumph in one’s misery is prefigured in the figure of the martyr. But there is an essential difference. The martyr truly has something that he is suffering and dying for. There is substance. And there is still a duality of two sides, the suffering and the bliss of redemption, despite their almost-identity, their having come extremely close together (because in his empirical torment the martyr may logically already be in Heaven; still, there is a distinction between the two sides). So maybe we could say that the syntax of neurosis is martyrdom (the semantics of martyrdom) reflected (interiorized) into itself, into its own syntax; neurosis, after all, is, like l’art pour l’art, a suffering out of principle and for principle’s or absoluteness’ sake, and no longer for an absolute substance or truth.

PART 4

Neurosis in the context of normal life

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e have discussed the structure or rather logic of neurosis both from outside and from an internal perspective. In order to be able to do this we had, of course, to presuppose that a fully developed neurosis that fulfills its concept already exists. And we had to view neurosis as a phenomenon by itself and in its own terms, as an independent phenomenon contained within itself. Even with this external perspective we nevertheless still remained within its circle, within the spell of its self-understanding and self-presentation. Now we need to step out of this circle and begin to raise the question of how neurosis is situated and anchored in normal life, how it relates to, and is embedded in, what is around it, and how it becomes possible in the first place that all of a sudden a neurosis arises in the middle of ordinary life. How does it emerge both initially, at the very beginning of a neurosis, and later, when in the case of an already established neurosis, the neurosis suddenly raises its head in the middle of a patient’s perfectly normal, adequate behavior? How does a neurotic complex spring up? How is the transition made from not neurotic to neurotic?

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1. THE FABRICATION OF A TRAUMA, OR THE INITIAL ORIGIN OF A NEUROSIS

The fright and the apparently traumatic effect of the childhood experience [of a particular hysterical patient discussed by Jung] are merely staged, but staged in that particular [...] way that the mise en scène is almost exactly like a reality. —C.G. Jung (CW 4 § 364, transl. modif.)

The wording of this title is actually too narrow for what I want to discuss here. I could also have spoken of the manufacturing of a neurotic complex, for not every neurosis operates with the idea or feeling of a trauma as its first cause. There are also neuroses in which the notion much rather prevails that it came into being imperceptibly as the result of a slow development. I have nevertheless chosen the narrower title “trauma” in order to take the bull by the horns. If we narrow the issue down to the pointed topic of trauma, the thesis that I want to present comes out all the more clearly, my thesis that neurosis is self-generated, auto-poietic, and not caused by external causes. If a pathological condition were truly caused, it would not be a neurosis, a psychological illness, but some psychic disorder. And even in such cases where in a given neurosis one does not get the impression that it is due to a trauma, it must logically nevertheless be cured (and comprehended) at one focal point. It has one very specific origin, which, however, is not of an empirical-factual nature, but a logical one. It goes without saying that, in our context of a theory of neurosis, the word trauma must be taken in the soft sense of developmental psychology, not in the sense of real traumatic experiences such as torture or natural disasters and the like. We already know that neurosis is self-generating. It is a creative Work. But just like a work of art, it, too, is nevertheless embedded in and related to the external situation around it. It does not arise in a vacuum. The beginning and origin of neurosis is some disappointment, where “disappointment” basically means the experience that what had been one’s treasured truth up till now does no longer hold true. However, the point here is that this beginning is not the real beginning; this origin from a disappointment is

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precisely not the origin. The real beginning of neurosis is when in response to this disappointment a freely invented counter-idea or counter-truth emerges and establishes itself in the psyche of the person concerned, a counter-idea that has the character of a demand (“it must be thus”) which in turn functions as an abstract absolute principle. This principle is a new beginning intercepting the stream of events; it is a first cause that starts a new causality all of its own. So we see how the insight of neurosis as an act of freedom and the opposite idea that it responds to a given situation can go together. The response is not, like a reflex action, an automatic (natural) reaction to disappointment, but comes from the freedom and creativeness of “the soul.” The fact that there was a disappointing event is merely the occasion or opportunity used by “the soul” to invent and establish a new counter-position all of its own accord. 165 But first let us recall what the normal, the natural, response to disappointments is. In former times, and still today in developing countries, children died very frequently during the first years of life. A mother gives birth to a baby, but it lives only a few months and then dies. What a disappointment! But such a sad event was seen as natural. It is one of those things that can happen. If it happens you are terribly sad, you grieve, you wail, you go through the appropriate mourning ceremonies, you may be depressed for a while. But life goes on, the pain slowly, or less slowly, subsides; and maybe after a while a new baby is born and brings new hope and new joy. The natural psychological situation is that of a flow of events and an accompanying flow of corresponding feelings. Disappointments are like clouds, they come and stay for a while and then go away. Real disasters, like a terrible drought that causes first the cows and then the people to starve, floods in which thousands drown, earthquakes that ruin whole villages, even incredibly cruel massacres as some years ago in Rwanda will, in the natural psychological situation, be part of the natural flow of events. They cause pain; they also leave wounds, just like forest fires mar old trees and destroy the undergrowth; but life goes on. Psychologically, the enormous significance and power of the 165 Here we can remember Jung’s statement: “The psyche does not merely react, it gives its own specific answer to the influences at work upon it ... Culture can never be understood as a reaction to environment” (CW 4 § 665).

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archetypal forces Lêthê and lêsmosynê (forgetfulness) must receive our due acknowledgment. The natural psychological attitude expresses itself perfectly in the verse from the Book of Job (1:21): “the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord.” In Islam there is, in the same vein, the idea of Kismet that teaches people to resign themselves to fate. The natural situation is characterized by the fact that there is no disruption of the stream of events, no re-action, no re-sponse. The subject is contained in the flow of events, goes along with it and merely accompanies it harmoniously with its feelings and possibly with those culturally objectified feelings that are called rituals. Neurosis begins when a disruption takes place. The stream of events is stopped, the flow of time is arrested. How does this happen? The one disappointing event or condition is singled out, wrenched from, and protected against, the natural process that ultimately would inevitably end in forgetfulness, and is raised to ultimate importance. The one event is frozen, fixated and thereby made to last. It is held on to beyond its time. The first step in fabricating a neurosis is mutatis mutandis comparable to the historical event of the invention of writing. Before writing, there was only the natural flow of time. Psychologically there was only the Present and no history, no real sense of the past. The present is what is naturally, of its own accord, present in people’s memory, and as long as events stayed in memory, they were part of the present. In the end, of course, the event was forgotten, sooner or later, depending on how important or impressive it was. For how long it was remembered depended exclusively on its energetic power to impress consciousness. A war or a natural catastrophe like an earthquake that left many dead was naturally part of the present for a longer time than the ordinary or trivial events of daily life, like what one ate a week ago for dinner. But even disastrous events would after a few decades or a few generations sink into oblivion, be it that they were forgotten altogether or that what disappeared from memory was merely the one specific aspect of them that they had been real facts at a particular historical moment in empirical reality at a concrete place and that they had happened to concrete members of one’s own tribe during such and such a year. Instead, these events were sublated, distilled, i.e., absorbed into the

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timelessness, generality and ideality of a tale, a legend or a myth. This transformation is the logical step from the Particular to the Universal. The Present in this sense is not a small section cut out of the timeline, a section that is at one end preceded by the infinite extent of the past and will be followed at its other end by the likewise infinite extent of the future. If we wanted to represent in a diagram what sense the idea of the present in our context has, something like the figure at right might result. Every tip of the line implies an event in memory, and the farther to the left it lies the further it dates back in time and the more impressive, more powerful it must have been for consciousness. (Theoretically, this diagram should also be extended to the right in mirror-image, even if probably with fewer sharp points, because all expectations, hopes, programs and fantasies about the future are just as much part of the psychologically real present. But our topic here is only the emergence of history or the past.) The time of myth or fairytale, the “Once upon a time,” the in illo tempore (Mircea Eliade), or what Jean Gebser in his Ursprung und Gegenwart (1949/53, translated as The Ever-Present Origin) calls Ursprung (origin), is not the past, but eternity, merely the metaphysical dimension of the present; it is, as Sallustios166 and, similarly, Friedrich Schlegel167 said, the time of that which never happened but always is. Mythic man lived only in the present. 168 Myth and legend are the mode through which the present was retained as the one and only 166

On the Gods IV, 8. “What happens in poesy happens never or always.” 101st “Athenäums-Fragment,” my transl. 168 As we had heard from Luhmann in Part 2, ch. 6, the guiding difference in those times had been the (vertical) difference between ever-present eternity and time. “Time,” under these conditions, is the flux of the continually ongoing present. 167

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dimension of the real, and through which the emergence of the past (as history and what is bygone) was prevented. In other words, myth and legend prevented the rupture, the falling apart of the dimensionality of the real into two. Writing made all the difference. Now all of a sudden it was possible to single out a particular event and prevent it from being subject to the natural development of memory or to its being sublated into myth, by chiseling a report of this event into a stone monument in order to preserve the knowledge of it “for eternity.” In this way, the present (that is, psychologically, natural memory) as the hitherto exclusive dimension of the real was supplemented by a second dimension of time, the (newly invented) historical past, because a secondary, artificial memory had been added to it. Writing, of course, implies that the event thus retained in memory is an already interpreted event (the codification for the future of one particular interpretation of the event). Something analogous happens when a neurosis is created. There only are two differences. (1) Neurosis does not need to take a literal chisel and a stone monument to wrest a disappointing event from its natural fate of being subject to losing its power to impress consciousness more and more. This is because a consciousness which, as a modern one, is capable of becoming neurotic is so advanced that it does not need literal helps like chisel or pen, but has integrated, internalized the capacity to “write” completely into the form of its consciousness itself. The advanced consciousness is in itself and from the outset a “writing” (or “letter”169) consciousness. Writing and letter have been sublated and integrated by it. Just like an adult, at least an adult of former times prior to the time of pocket calculators, can count and calculate in his mind without the optical help of his fingers or an abacus, so it is on principle also possible for modern consciousness to commit an event to an artificial historical memory just by mental “writing.” The mental activity is its own chisel and the mind its own stone tablet onto which the chisel writes. (2) The other difference is that the kind of writing that created history was intended for a public, whereas neurotic writing is only read in the inwardness of a private self. The public does not get to see 169 “Letter” is used in the sense of written character, similar to how it appears in: “for the letter killeth, but the Spirit gives life.”

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the writing, but only gets to see and perhaps suffer from the effects that such a script has through the behavior of the neurotic. “The interiority of the private self” does, of course, not refer to the I. The neurotic’s I is precisely part of the audience excluded from the Sacred Festival Drama. For this reason, in the patient’s psychoanalytical treatment the alleged trauma must frequently be “made conscious,” recalled into memory. We have a beautiful caricature of this possibility of freezing a disappointing event in Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations. Miss Havisham’s wedding day has come. The invited guests are present, the table for the wedding dinner is splendidly set, a fancy wedding cake is ready to be cut. But the bridegroom does not appear; he has deserted her on the day of the wedding. Miss Havisham orders that everything in the dining room be left as it is; nothing is to be touched or removed, and she herself keeps wearing her wedding gown. So many years later the dinner table is still set for the wedding meal, but in the meantime covered with dust and spider webs; the wedding cake has been mostly eaten by mice, the clock in the room has long stopped, her wedding dress is worn-out. Her purpose had been to freeze the moment before the actual wedding, when she was waiting for the bridegroom to appear. Another story tells of a French couple of high society who had an argument. In the course of this fight the husband told his wife very crudely to “shut up!” Ever since that time, his wife ceased speaking. One tried everything to get her to speak again, her husband apologized, he and others pleaded with her, they tried to shock her—she would not open her mouth. She, too, singled out one out of many statements that had been uttered in the course of this argument and that had its place only in this one moment of annoyance; and she raised it out of its time to the elevated status of a motto or heading for the whole rest of her life. Long after this statement’s own time was over, she still kept its time alive and fresh, as if it had just been spoken, which, of course, was only possible through a tremendous effort of will and a great selfsacrifice on the part of this woman. For it meant, of course, that she had to renounce all claims to future happiness in life, even claims to at least some degree of ordinary well-being and contentedness—in favor of the happiness of the neurotic soul. There is a helpful expression in a poem by Robert Burns, “Tam o’ Shanter. A Tale,” that captures this emotion beautifully [I italicize the

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phrase important for us]: “Whare sits our sulky sullen dame, / Gathering her brows like gathering storm, / Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.” The word nursing reminds us of Jung’s dictum about neurosis, namely, that it is daily maintained or fed, indeed even generated anew. Both examples, the one about Miss Havisham and the one about the French lady, although rather sick, do not really display a neurosis since in these two cases the freezing of one moment is the result of a willful decision on the part of the empirical personality and explicit conscious behavior, whereas neurosis is the result of a decision or event that happens backstage, on the logical level, or in what Jung called the hinterland of the soul behind the empirical personality, who is then itself surprised by, and the victim of, the results that this decision generates. Nevertheless, exaggerated as these examples are, they serve well as bold-relief illustrations of what happens deep inside when a neurosis, a trauma, is fabricated. Inasmuch as neurosis is causa sui, we must take care not to walk into the personalistic trap and attribute this decision to the person who through it becomes neurotic. Neurosis is not the person’s doing. If it were his or her doing, it would not be neurotic, but merely a perhaps stupid, silly, or outrageous choice—just as Miss Havisham’s and the French lady’s choices are really stupid. There is, no doubt, the possibility that a person spitefully sticks to an opinion that he or she already knows to be not true. But neurosis originates because all of a sudden and out of nowhere (ex nihilo) a thought or concept (not an archetypal idea!) intrudes into consciousness, establishing itself there as an absolute principle (“principle” also in the sense of ruler, and “absolute” in the sense of unquestioned and radically unquestionable, totally self-evident, simply true, and as ruling over the whole man, homo totus). Here I return to my image of Athene who sprang into existence fully grown and in full armor out of the head of Zeus, her father. In the same way, the absolute principle that is at the root of neurosis ur-sprünglich springs into existence in that person, who thereby becomes neurotic. In describing his own childhood neurosis (which I mentioned earlier), Jung said that at its inception a (particular) thought (the one that was at the bottom of his neurosis) shot through him like a flash (MDR p. 30). This description hits the nail on the head. Neurosis is,

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after all, auto-poietic and not produced by the I. As causa sui it merely happens to the unsuspecting I. Only in the form of symptoms does it emerge for consciousness, but not together with the background processes from which it sprang. I suspect that what Jung describes is unusual. Normally, I think, the person is not aware, the way Jung was, of this suddenly upsurging thought. Indeed, the fact that Jung was conscious of it seems to me, conversely, to confirm that his was not a genuine neurosis. Rather, it had to a large extent been staged as a neurosis with the help of the conscious I, so that we have to view it as an (at least partly) egoic arrangement. This would also help to explain why this “neurosis” could be overcome so incredibly quickly and by the conscious I all by itself. In a veritable neurosis, the thought enters the scene as the event, or the incursion, of a hidden, unconscious decision to adopt a neurotic position or to pursue a neurotic program. In a true neurosis the absolute principle (this would be the equivalent to Jung’s suddenly upsurging thought) establishes its unquestionable rule so quickly that a thought cannot be explicitly thought by consciousness; it does not come into being, but its coming into being and establishing its absolute rule has always already happened so that it is not noticed. Its “birth” comes as something in the perfect tense. How else could it be a principle? Principles do not have an origin, but are themselves first beginnings. And the principle, once it rules, is simply “true” and this means that the person in whom it arose is totally enthralled by it, and what it is about is thus completely ego-syntonic. This has to be so because its rule consists in its having infected the very syntax of consciousness, so that the thought or absolute principle does not appear as a content of consciousness and thus not to consciousness. Therefore, there is no room for an internal debate about whether one wants to allow it into consciousness and to follow it or not. If and when it is there, it is simply there and exerts its unquestioned power. It exists as a totalitarian regime. And how else, if not through a “birth” in the perfect tense, i.e., one that has always already happened, could neurosis be causa sui? If it stage-manages, produces, and gives birth to, itself, a participation of the ego-personality is excluded. This feature, that neurosis happens to the empirical person, is the factual aspect that

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easily gives rise to the illusory appearance and misinterpretation on the part of psychology that neurosis is caused by external events, for example, by traumas. If I have a neurosis, it is not made by me, but it is its own origin. The absolute demand that is its core has totally captivated me, won me over for itself. I find myself in it, in the neurosis. I am transported from the sphere of my own best interests and carried away into the otherworldly sphere of “the soul.” The devil’s got into me, the demon we encountered in our first fairytale. This is the one side. But, reminding ourselves of what was discussed in the previous chapter, I hasten to add the other side, namely, that now that the concept or absolute principle that had breezed into me out of the blue170 has turned me into its playground, its executive agent and accomplice, it has become really my neurosis. Now I am called upon to assume responsibility for it. It is I who am totally captivated by the absolute demand. It is I who upholds and celebrates the absolute principle, who loves the demon more than myself. It is I who in rapt attention, and speechless from beatification, attends the Sacred Festival Drama. There is nobody else. This is why where there was It, i.e., where “the soul,” the absolute principle, was, there I shall be. Oportet me adesse. The initial self-enthronement of the neuroticizing thought as absolute principle amounts, negatively expressed, to an attack on the natural temporalness of life as such and, positively said, to an eternalization of this one moment of time by freezing it. The move is a vertical uprising in the literal sense of the word, a rise high above natural life, the “earth.” It is a logos move, a philosophical act, in some ways reminiscent of Eleatic philosophy (Parmenides, Zenon of Elea), aiming, as it does, at the wholesale elimination of change, flux, movement, coming to be and passing away. The neurotic “The Absolute” remains in the status of an eternal present, of eternal youth. Just like the ancient gods, it does not age. 170 “Out of the blue” describes the logical status of the neurotic counter-truth, its blowing into the mind that thereby becomes neurotic. Empirically, however, since neurotic truths are soul truths and soul truths are communal, it is, of course, possible that the particular neurotic truth has an empirical basis in the context of normal life, in the psychological climate of the neurotic’s social surroundings (e.g., his family) that may make the neurotic idea available, even offer it, make it suggest itself to the person who becomes neurotic by becoming absorbed into it and identical with it.

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And it does not age because it does not participate in life, in the further development and maturation of the empirical person. It is completely shielded—off limits to consciousness and to any living critical objection. The pain of a grief would normally diminish with time. The wrath of Robert Burns’ sulky sullen dame would normally cool down. But it is part of the nature of a neurotic complex that if and when it breaks out, it appears with the full impact and pristine freshness of something utterly new, “as glorious as on the first day.” But of course in neurosis, this eternalization and the totalitarian regime of the principle are paradoxically only partial, very specific, only with respect to the particular topic embodied by this event. In a person with a neurotic authority problem, the principle at the core of his neurosis will only make its totalitarian regime felt when it is indeed a situation of being told what to do. In other situations the person may be free to react normally. When there is a neurotic reaction, it is totalitarian. But this totalitarianism affects only certain areas of life (See above Part 3, chapter 4). This is the difference to philosophy, in which such a move would concern Being or reality at large. Philosophy moves in the medium of the Universal. The neurotic maneuver, by contrast, is, to be sure, a rise above the earth as far as the move’s content is concerned, but the move itself stays very much bound and attached to and focused upon a particular this-worldly event, topic or reality. It clings precisely to the realness and factualness of that which it raised above natural reality into the height of the atemporal. This contradiction between clinging to something factual, on the one hand, and being removed from earth and time, on the other, is characteristic of neurosis. Maybe this totalitarian rule is what the conventional theory of neurosis means by the mild, tame term “fixation.” But what emerges here, in contrast to the usual static way fixation is understood, is that fixation is an activity, the ever new exertion of power on the part of the principle, the singling out and eternalizing of one event as being of absolute importance, the chiseling this event into the stone tablets of memory so as to make the memory of this event indelible. A fixation is not something that was done to the neurotic by life, by the event itself, in the sense of his merely being a passive victim. Of course, he too is fixated (passive voice). However, he is the passive victim of fixation only to the extent that and as long as he fixates and keeps on holding

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on to, e.g., his favorite hate event and maintains his fixation. The logical or psychological moves one makes with respect to some outer reality create the psychological cocoon in which the subject itself will be encased. With your psychological actions you make the bed that you will lie in. Soul is self-relation, inevitably so. Of course, there is not a literal chisel, nor a literal stone tablet that would last for the ages; both have been sublated into the subjectivity of the mind, which is not an existing thing but the activity of thinking. Therefore it becomes clear once more that the fixation (the “inscription”), and along with it the neurosis, have to be maintained and re-generated anew every day. “The RAM” has to be refreshed constantly; if there is a power failure, what was in the memory will be lost. Neurosis is alive, it is an active doing and lasts only for as long as this doing continues. The (partial) arresting of the flow of time has the subjective correlate that now the subject itself (to the extent that it is neurotic) is no longer contained in the stream of events and merely accompanies the events with the corresponding human emotions, but that it has acquired a stable existence vis-à-vis this natural flow and above it. It has built itself up to the status of a rigid ego that has a time- and situation-independent attitude to the content constellated by the disappointing event. “Attitude” is actually the wrong word. It is more like an inflexible, almost automatic response to the respective content. This mechanical character is the natural result of the successful attempt to free the theme embodied in the disappointing event from being subject to the natural flow of time. But more than this: neurosis does not only want to have control over historical memory. It also wants to have control over (a relevant part of ) the future! Miss Havisham and the French lady who would not open her mouth again demonstrate this point. With respect to the one theme constellated by the disappointment, the whole future is being subsumed under the heading of the one frozen event. The one event becomes the umbrella for all of life. There is no real future anymore (in the sense of waiting and seeing what happens). The one frozen event from the past is turned into an eternal present that now sets the bounds within which any (related) new event will have to take place and be perceived. The future is now a priori closed; there is no room for anything truly new, a fresh development, a surprising new

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perspective; once and for all, all future events (in the relevant area) have in advance been locked into the narrow confines of the meaning provided by the one event that has been singled out and fixated. So what happens here is an uprising also in the ordinary sense of a revolution. Whereas normally any event is one small moment within the general flow of time, now one single moment of time has established itself as the limiting container for all time. In neurosis, time is pressed into the Procrustean bed of the pre-set pattern provided by a single one of its (time’s) own moments. An inversion, an involution of the whole into one of its parts. The question we still have to answer is what the specific content of the principle is that erects itself sua sponte in neurosis. The thought that at the inception of a neurosis unconsciously “shoots” through the mind of a person “like a flash” boils down to this: “This cannot possibly be true; it must not be true, under no circumstances, absolutely not. It must not be true (although I have experienced it as true) that I have been deserted by my bridegroom on my wedding day! It must not be true that my husband said ‘Shut up!’ to me. It must not be true that my mother does not love me. It must not be true that I am not the greatest. It must not be true that I have lost my childhood innocence and purity.” In the “cannot, must not” we see the unconditional character with which an untruth is established and held onto as the new truth against the (experienced, known) truth. In the most general terms the true content of the principle is only the abstract concept of the Absolute per se, unconditionality as such, absolute significance, whereas the specific content merely serves as a concrete empirical exemplification of and carrier for the absoluteness pure and simple. The true content of the principle is that it is one’s “ultimate concern” (Tillich). It is what is absolutely to be feared in a phobia, the purity that must absolutely be preserved in compulsive washing, “The Absolute” as the true food of Kafka’s “Hunger Artist,” as the right spouse for me, as absolute oneness in a symbiosis, etc. Precisely when it is a case of the idea of absolute closeness or oneness, the supposition might suggest itself that with “The Absolute” as “the highest treasure” of neurosis we are confronted with a regression into childhood. But this would be a total misconception of the nature of neurosis and of The Absolute. This Absolute never existed in childhood. It is a new creation, a new invention on the part of neurosis.

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The child’s unity with its mother was by no means anything like “The Absolute.” It was not supervalued. It was the child’s simple truth. With this idea of oneness, the child is quite realistically on the ground of its reality and completely adapted. It does not grasp beyond the real to something “higher” and counter-factual. Even in cases where the “good mother” with whom such a oneness could be experienced is missing, the child’s claim to this oneness is covered by its own nature. This claim has nothing in common with The Absolute of neurosis. Accordingly, there also is no need in the therapy of a neurosis for a “remembering, repeating” (since there is nothing that could be repeated inasmuch as neurosis is a new invention, a thrust out of reality into the soul’s outer space). In order for there to be the necessary empowerment that could enable the soul to come up with The Absolute in the first place, there must already be a consciousness that has stepped (or fallen) out of the small child’s simple truth, out of the innocence of having one’s place in this truth, a consciousness that, as an independent I, knows itself as standing vis-à-vis the mother as a separate external reality and capable of freely positing its own counter-factual “truth,” in other words, capable of “launching a satellite way up above the earth.” There must already be a sly, contriving consciousness. The child’s innocence—in the sense of the present context— consists in the fact that his relation to his mother is a self-relation. Psychologically, the small child does not have his mother vis-à-vis himself. It is not a relation to an Other, not an interpersonal relation. The small child is much rather in himself the concept of mother and seeks in the (positive-factually speaking, external) real person, as he relates to her, only the empirically real fulfillment of the concept as which he exists.171 In his mother (or any other main person to relate to) the child relates to his self, a self that qua child he does not carry within himself.172 The neurotic, by contrast, is himself a self, has his self within himself, and ipso facto he has others, and thus also his mother, psychologically as truly others vis-à-vis himself. 171 See my “‘Irrelevantification’ or: On the Death of Nature, the Construction of ‘the Archetype’ and the Birth of Man,” in: W.G., The Soul Always Thinks, Collected English Papers, vol. 4, New Orleans (Spring Journal Books) 2010, pp. 387–442. 172 This makes evident that the prominent term in psychoanalysis, “triangulation,” does not make sense. It shows itself to be born out of a social, not a psychological perspective, or we could also say: out of a people’s psychology rather than a psychology of soul. Socially seen, father, mother, and child are obviously three persons. But psychologically the father is the second, the other.

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In other words, neurosis is that event in which the general, objective character of modernity goes to the head of a person, namely the event that “[f ]or the first time since the dawn of history we have succeeded in swallowing the whole primordial animatedness of nature,” as Jung said, or rather “absoluteness,” as I would say, “into ourselves.” “The whole primordial animatedness of nature” means mythologically speaking its numinosity, logically speaking its character of “absolute significance.” It was wrenched from nature, from the cosmos, and was appropriated by man. In neurosis this objective appropriation is taken completely literally and subjectively: not as a sublation and concomitant integration into consciousness as such, as the mind’s and mankind’s logical property, an impersonal logical status (the sublatedness of the former realm of mythical, religious, metaphysical truths as mere “ideas” or “notions”). The neurotic appropriation is much rather construed as the personal and private absolute “conviction” exclusively in the individual neurotic about an objective unconditional importance (of this or that, some particular reality aspect), a “conviction” which thus also has to be personally acted out in positive-factual life—in the flesh and as empirical behavior. I put “conviction” in quotation marks because it lacks the logical, noetic, human character of a genuine conviction and is much rather like a natural fact. This is also why the “acting out” is likewise not ethical, moral or pious behavior on the truly human level, but takes the form of a natural mechanism, a kind of mechanical stimulus-response process. The problem of the absolute principle is that it is not a real entity, not an existing truth, not a given, a substance, nothing semantic, not a positively real. In itself it is nothing. It is merely psychological, virtual, thin air, logos-like. It owes its existence solely to a fabrication, to the act of removing itself from the stream of time. It exists only to the extent that it establishes itself as the absolute ruler over consciousness. But how can it establish itself as something positively real if in its very essence it is not real?173 How can it, as an intratemporal fabrication, become absolute, and how can it, within time, nevertheless completely shield itself from all temporality? By no means can it achieve this by 173 It is clear that the answer to this question is in outline the same as the answer to the question about the logic and the enabling conditions of “I,” the question how the thought ‘I’ (‘ich’) can be real.

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taking a position against other temporal events, emotions, thoughts, influences. For by fighting against them and isolating itself from them, it would precisely stay in a relationship with them and would therefore be relative, one party in the fight, not absolute. It can, within horizontality, only fundamentally rise above the horizontal as such and turn into something absolute if it at one single point in the time-line absolutely contradicts one single particular temporal phenomenon, in other words, if it flatly denies the latter’s being true. In this way it has established a counterposition to the temporal and wrenched itself from its own natural containment within the stream of time. It has made itself inaccessible and thus truly absolute. And only in this way can it become the ruler over consciousness despite the fact that in itself it is nothing. So we see that something real is indispensable. Through the negation, rejection, condemnation of this real the neurotic absolute principle can lift itself within time out of time and thereby catapult itself into positive existence as absolute. In order to be, the neurotic absolute principle needs to push off from something. And only as long as it pushes off from it, does it have this positive reality. The moment this “pushing off from ...” ceases, the principle is simply gone. In other words, it is not only so that neurosis “is maintained and indeed newly created every day.” We now also realize that and why it also needs to create itself ever anew: because in itself neurosis is nothing. It exists only as a (logical, not subjective, not behavioralemotional) defiance and spitefulness, a (logical) rebellion against something, as the latter’s “This must not be true!” For its own selfedification it needs the disappointing event, in fact, ever new events, to feed on. (However “to feed on” not in the sense of devouring them to nourish itself, but of rejecting them in order from this springboard to catapult itself out of the relativity and contingency of the stream of events into a real existence in the height and purity of abstract principiality and ideality.) Much like certain climbing plants need a tree or post to be able to creep up, so neurosis needs certain real events and the fury or pain that they bring as a support along which, and by means of which, it can work itself up into existence as something real, as positive fact. If neurosis does not find disappointing events, it is gone, unless, as sometimes happens, it creates, invents its own disappointing events

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out of the blue, for example by giving perfectly harmless events the nasty interpretation that a neurosis needs. But of course, if neurosis is dependent on disappointing events and feeds on them in the negative way of rejecting them, it does this pushing off only within itself. Neurosis is really a psychological illness: it is itself an instance of the realization of the constitutive methodical principle of psychology (that the psychological phenomenon has everything it needs within itself ). Neurosis has no real external reality that it would relate to; it does not react to truly external events. Rather, what it “reacts to,” what it rejects, and what it pushes off from, is the already sublated and interiorized “external event” (interiorized, or absorbed, into itself, namely neurosis, as a moment of itself, as its own property and as used according to its own needs and purposes, much like poetry speaks about so-called external events only as events already absorbed, and melted down, into its own imaginal world; or much like sandplay therapy, where the sand and the toy figures are not “external facts,” but receive their essence from within the fantasy to be displayed; or like the sounds language uses, which are not immediate physical events [mere noise] to which secondarily and mysteriously “meanings” are attached, but a priori sublated natural events, from the outset posited and employed as a medium of intelligible presence: phonems). It all happens “within the retort,” within the Notion of neurosis that, as a self, has or produces everything it needs within itself, even its realness. Neurosis “boots up”: it pulls itself up by its own bootstraps. A widespread view is that neurosis arises because a person is hopelessly overtaxed by an event or situation, so that by way of defense—simply in order psychically to survive at all—he or she has to escape into neurosis. But the disappointing or painful event, far from being an unbearable blow of fate, is, on the contrary, food and drink for the self-generating neurosis, a heaven-sent opportunity for the soul that wants to establish the absoluteness of an absolute principle, and an instrument by means of which The Absolute can establish itself as a real force. The emerging neurosis utilizes the event or situation for its own purposes. This disappointment, this insult, this betrayal, this disregard for my rights or my dignity, this threat to my purity or to my integrity, is simply too good to let pass, that is, to leave it to the natural flow of its own development along with

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everything else that happens in time. No, it has to be wrought from the stream of time so as to make psychological capital out of it. It has to be savored to the full. (Here we get an idea of what is at the heart of the phenomenon that psychoanalysis tried to explain with the concept of the “repetition compulsion.”) Because the disappointing event is so precious, it is not only frozen and eternalized, but also, in the spirit of defiance and spitefulness, systematically intensified, aggravated. The neurosis says, as it were, “What happened is not just naturally bad (or perhaps naturally terrible), no, I insist that it is absolutely evil, simply impossible, totally unacceptable.” In the last analysis, the event is set up as simply unimaginable, unthinkable. But of course, although for the time being the event may have shocked me out of my wits, it is not truly unthinkable. Rather, neurosis spitefully declares it to be unthinkable. “It must not be thinkable! I don’t allow it to be thinkable!” The unthinkable nature is an addition, an overlay. The declaration of the event as unthinkable is what robs the experienced truth logically of its truth character and thus makes the root thought of neurosis—“This must not be true!”—really true. If all there was were merely the “it must not be true!,” in other words, merely a “I do not want it to be true,” we would have only a subjective wish or prohibition and not a factual untruth. But a rejection is only absolute if it is not an expression of my subjective and momentary hatred, and thus dependent on my subjectivity and on the particular occasion or situation, but if it has the status of being objectively unthinkable, so to speak, the ontological impossibility of something whose factual existence, despite its decreed impossibility, is an outrage. The change from a subjective “it must not...” to an objective, real “it is not true” is made through the notion of the unthinkability of the event. Of course, the event is not unthinkable. Or it is only unthinkable within the particular neurosis. The untruth is artificially fabricated. It is an addition, and in it a spiteful obstinacy on the part of the soul manifests itself. The bad event must categorically be excluded from the range of possible events, from what is logically (and thus also ontologically) possible, excluded from the common ground of all reality, from reason and from being. Only in this way is it at the same time and on principle prevented from ever receiving a place in my imagination and from becoming integrated into consciousness. This exclusion is that creative

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act and that uprising through which The Absolute establishes itself as positively real, and, at the same time, it is the lever with which the disappointing event is deprived of its natural status as an event in the stream of time; it is divested of its relativity and contingency and elevated to the status of something Absolute. By intensifying the event into an absolutely unthinkable one, the soul kicks it down, way beneath reality, beneath the earth: out of this world. It turns it into the satellite that we have been talking about earlier. And ipso facto it establishes high above the world the absolute, the purity of a principle that is the exact counterpart to the unthinkably evil event. Both the unthinkable and the absolute principle are out of this world, equidistant from the earth. The one reflects the other, is identical with it, in the sense of being its mirror image. And they are simultaneous, equiprimordial: the negation of the disappointing event as unthinkable presupposes The Absolute just as much as the latter’s realness presupposes the former. Now that the event has been systematically transformed into something unthinkable, it has been turned into a trauma. The fabrication of a psychological trauma is now completed. Not that the event was a terrible disappointment, not that it was extremely painful, maybe even truly catastrophic, turns it into a trauma. Catastrophes are not unthinkable. Even if one did not expect them, could not possibly have anticipated them, even if consciousness as yet does not have any categories to deal with them, they can still be comprehended as belonging to the natural course of events and thus can slowly, painfully be integrated into consciousness. Even the danger of getting killed is not unthinkable and does not by itself lead to that psychological complication that would turn it into a traumatic event in the sense of conventional neurosis theory. What turns something into a psychological trauma (in contrast to a psychic, i.e., biological one) is that it is systematically given the status of something that cannot possibly and should absolutely not be integrated into consciousness.

*** The point that we have to make now is that, on the stage of consciousness already reached by the neurotic soul, it is already possible to think that this disappointing or terrible event happened; the latter

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is already imaginable. And only, indeed, precisely, on the basis of this conceivability of the event is the event declared to be unthinkable (which is what is neurotic about this declaration. If it were honestly believed to be unthinkable, it would be an error, but not a neurosis). In general we can say that, against appearances, neurosis is not conservative, not traditionalist. It is, for example, not the attempt to hold on to and prolong childhood truths way into the age of biological adulthood. In itself such an attempt would probably be problematic, but it would not be neurotic. What we have to understand is that neurosis cannot hold on to the tradition of childhood, because for it this tradition has precisely been ended, the rupture has happened, the disappointment, dis-illusionment is already a fact. More than that, the disappointment is not only a fact, it has also been comprehended to be an accomplished fact. A neurosis is erected on the foundation of the experience and clear knowledge that the loss has irrevocably happened. The cut is made. If the cut were not already made, we would, for example, have a childhood prolonged into the time of biological adulthood, but not a neurosis.174 This is why neurosis has to be understood as being born out of defiance and spitefulness, though of course not in an ego-sense of these words, as emotions of the person. Neurosis is not only contra naturam, but also against the soul’s own better judgment. The soul already knows better. It has experienced and has understood that a phase or period has definitively come to an end. It’s over, passé. But the soul refuses to abide by its own knowledge. The person is not divided from itself, dissociated in neurosis. It is not that “the ego” is split off from “the objective soul.” No, neurotic dissociation means that the soul is divided from itself. If there were really two, here the ego, there the objective soul, there would not be the case of a veritable dissociation at all. The soul denies its own knowledge. It digs its heels in at an obsolete form of itself, while in truth it is and has long been somewhere else. Miss Havisham did not leave the wedding table set because she expected her bridegroom to come after all. She knew that this wedding was canceled, that her being deserted was final. But she did not take no for an answer. Her subsequent behavior takes place precisely under 174 Mentally impaired people often remain childlike throughout their lifetime. But they are of course not neurotic.

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the presupposition that all is lost in this matter. It is as if she said, “I’ve got the idea. Yes, I have been deserted, but I hold on to this fact, onto this insult to me, and use it as a weapon; I use it to make psychological capital for myself.” Her reaction shows that she has already stepped out of the natural flow of events and thinks and speaks from a position outside and above it. What these (fictitious) words of hers express in view of her disaster is completely different from a possible utterance like this: “What happened is unbelievable, it can’t be true, I cannot take it in.” This would be a natural initial reaction from a position within the flow of time. It is normal to be shocked and overwhelmed by unexpected terrible events and to be at first totally incapable of comprehending what happened. This kind of reaction would precisely be part of how human feeling harmoniously accompanies the flow of events. But the neurotic soul has pulled itself out of the natural shock and instrumentalizes what happened. It no longer has a simple, naive relation to what happened, but a reflected, artful, contriving one. Inasmuch as one cannot defend an ideal, a harmony, an intactness that is already dead and bygone, and known to be dead and bygone, neurosis does not defend anything and does not return to anything. So if sometimes a neurosis may give the impression of being the attempt to return to a childhood paradise, this idea of paradise should not be confused with a mythical paradise, an archetypal image of paradise. Rather it is something new, a thoroughly modern invention of the abstract utopian concept of “paradise” secondarily retrojected into the past, so that the impression is created that one is really trying to return to something, rather than striving for a goal in a utopian future. The utopia camouflages itself as an old traditional value. In this sense neurosis has the character of a restoration. With this term I allude to a period in European history, the time after Napoleon. Officially, it was about the restoration of the ancien regime. But in truth, the French Revolution had happened, the monarchy had not only factually, but above all also logically been killed in the symbolic act of killing the French king and many of the nobility: psychologically, the ancien regime was irrevocably (and thus “irrestorably”) bygone. The tradition had been disrupted. This the soul had experienced and understood. It was no longer naive. So what the so-called restoration did was not a restoration in the sense of a repair or maintenance of

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some old tradition. Instead of a return to the old, what took place was a turning to something else that is the modern imagination, imitation, simulation, of the old. What really happened was the reactionary, spiteful175 new installation of the abstract concept of a decidedly former tradition, a ghost that is, however, passed off as alive. This installation happened across an undeniable historical gap and this means the psychologically real rupture. Mutatis mutandis the same applies to neurosis. The neurotic soul knows that it is already in the status of adulthood. It has lost its naivety. It contrivingly stages its Festival Drama of harmony or Childhood Bliss (if this happens to be what its particular festival drama is about) in the context and on the basis of its knowledge that it has already irrevocably crossed the border. 176 Only for this reason is the seeming “return” to childhood neurotic, whereas a simple holding on to childhood beyond its time is not in itself neurotic. And only for this reason does the absolute principle at work in neurosis have the character of a ghost, an underworld demon that has to shun the light of day. The labeling of certain events as absolutely unthinkable, which is an act of freedom, is, as I showed, indispensable for the establishment of the absolute principle as positively existing. But the abstract principle of The Absolute at the core of neurosis can have its positive realness only negatively: only through the (absoluteness of the) rejection and condemnation of a real phenomenon. The neurotic “The Absolute” as a principle is absolutely dependent on this empirical, contingent rejection of a real event or situation, which again displays the character of neurosis as self-contradiction. Only in the undignified, pathological, often silly and at any rate disgraceful form of neurotic behavior, that is, only as stinking water, can the neurotic soul’s highest value, the absolute principle, become positively real. Outside of neurosis it is 175

Again: not to be taken in an ego sense! Much the same applies to 19th century church religion. We have a striking example of the described restoration impulse in the titles of two multi-volume works of the Catholic theologian Joseph Kleutgen (1811–1883), who was decisive for the inauguration of neoscholasticism: Theologie der Vorzeit and Philosophie der Vorzeit. With the word Vorzeit (bygone ages; which is also a usual term for “prehistoric times”) Kleutgen openly, even if perhaps unintentionally, indicates that his attempt is one of an (of course impossible and thus merely simulated) return to something former across a real, already experienced and known historical rupture. 176

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nothing. It never becomes phenomenal, or epiphanic, a positive presence in its own right. It is present only negatively, in what it is absolutely not: symptomatic behavior. I stated that both the unthinkable and The Absolute are out of this world. Inasmuch as neurosis is the relation between, or identity of, the unthinkable wound and The Absolute, the human person drops out of this equation altogether. Neurosis is a self. It is self-sufficient. The person, rather than being the generating subject of neurosis, is involved only as the place where neurosis plays itself out and only as he or she who, in the hard currency of often terrible personal suffering and constriction, has to pay the bill for the stage-production of that Wagnerian Bühnenweih-Festspiel (“Sacred Festival Drama”) performed in his or her personal “Wahnfried” (“Peace from [or in] Illusion”) as which neurosis exists. The person does not appear in the drama itself as an integral part of it, is not playing a “role as one of the actors in [this] ‘divine’ drama of life.” He or she is merely in the grip of it. It is important to realize this. Events that disappoint, annoy, pain, wound, threaten me as person are ipso facto—at least potentially, if not already in fact—imaginable and thinkable and therefore cause only simple pain, simple sadness, simple depression, simple despair, simple anger or fury, simple fear—regardless of the degree of these emotions. They do not cause psychologically complicated, neurotic pain. As long as I as person am the subject that is “attacked” by the event, there is no room for the neurotic versions of these emotional states. But woe betide if the soul’s innermost dogma is in danger! Then it becomes serious! A neurosis or the experience of an event as “traumatic” (in the sense of neurosis) requires that what is threatened or wounded is my highest value, my secret dogma, my absolute principle, in short: my version of The Absolute, not me.177 But here we have to be on guard lest the formulation in the last couple of sentences allows the old misunderstandings to slip in again. There is, as we already know, not really a threat to, or wounding of, my supreme value in neurosis. It is the other way around: The notion 177 The fact that this distinction is a real, determining factor in human experience, self-understanding, and motivation is also the reason why it has always been relatively easy for some people to stake their lives for some cause, ideal, king, or god. The contra naturam “soul” and its needs rank higher than one’s natural survival interests (in the widest sense of the word). In neurosis this is still the case.

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of a terrible threat is needed and used for “inventing” and establishing my version of The Absolute in the first place. The celebration of this notion of wound or threat to The Absolute is the mode in which The Absolute triumphantly edifies itself, the only mode possible for its original self-actualization as a real power. The threat to my principle is what is absolutely unthinkable. And the arresting of the stream of time is the establishment of that dogma or principle that is violated by the disappointing event which is eternalized through, or for the purpose of, arresting the flow of time. The soul uses uroborically the event in order to erect that dogma that has always already been violated by this event. And because the event has been turned into one that violates my dogma rather than merely me, it has turned into a trauma, an event that inflicts not only a psychic, but a psychological, i.e., an indelible, absolutely intolerable wound. The ordinary pain or disappointment must be transformed into a trauma if The Absolute is to be established; but this re-interpretation is only possible on the basis and with the help of The Absolute. Neurosis cannot be causally explained. It is causa sui and all of a sudden intrudes into consciousness as a finished product. Because The Absolute can only become present as its opposite, as “stinking water,” as neurotic suffering, the person has to pay a high price for the realization of The Absolute. But the cost of the stageproduction in which The Absolute is erected and celebrated, the terrible price that the human being has to pay, is never a theme. Neurosis follows the motto: Fiat absolutum et pereat homo (May The Absolute happen even if it means that the human being perishes). After having given the neurotic trauma such a prominent place, I now must retract a bit. We need not literalize the neurotic trauma so as to restrict it to mean only the one big disappointing event in the past that initially gave rise to a neurosis. Many neuroses do not even work with the idea of a literal trauma, a one-time event in the historical past. Instead, they operate with the abstract, empty form or concept of trauma, trauma as a generalized style of thinking and experiencing. What emerges is: trauma not as the literal beginning, in the past, of a neurosis, but as its permanent construction principle, as the continual readiness to experience as traumatizing life events here and now, or certain prevailing conditions of earthly life, so that time and again any current small annoyance or threat in daily life can serve as the fresh,

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momentary cause of neurosis. And—because of the identity of wound and The Absolute, of stinking water and triumph—every time a person shows a neurotic reaction to life events experienced and utilized in this way, every time a neurotic symptom makes itself felt, we can know: NOW is festival time; NOW absolute importance, absolute meaning is happening, The Absolute is triumphing. Although, as we also already know, the whole effort of the celebration of The Absolute in the Sacred Festival Drama is totally in vain.

*** Having been brought, so to speak, into a psychologically “geostationary” position, the principle serves as (as if it were) a natural fixed star and not a satellite artificially launched into outer space. Thus we have arrived high up above the earth in the coldness of outer space. But we must not stay there. In order to understand neurosis we have to continue our move, but now in the opposite direction. Now, we might say, it is our task to comprehend how the absolute principle is turned into the ghost of the dead mother or the underworldly demonlover of the fairytales (if read as paradigms of neurosis)—into the demon of a neurotic complex. I begin again with natural psychic development. And since our Cinderella fairytale that served as one of our paradigms for the elucidation of the inner logic of neurosis introduces the theme of mother/stepmother, I will also exemplify normal development with the one topic of “mother,” despite the fact that as mother complex it is only one of many possible neurotic complexes or neurotic themes that could be used as examples, although a very prominent one. The same points that I will make could be presented analogously on the basis of numerous other complexes. Small children do not apperceive their parents as ordinary human beings with their own weaknesses and problems. Rather, for them the real people who are their parents are absorbed by the concept of father and the concept of mother.178 The child begins with concepts. It does not see through to the empirical human-all-too-humanness of the real mother. The smaller the child the less it is capable of distinguishing 178

earlier.

For the following discussion see also my “Irrelevantification” paper mentioned

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between the empirical person and the office or concept. It does not understand that its mother is just a human being who contingently happens to have the job of being mother to this child. For the child its factually existing mother is THE mother. The empirical person is totally subsumed under the concept, absolutely identical, amalgamated with it. This is how it begins: with the unio naturalis. In reality, however, this particular woman that happens to be this child’s mother might not even have wanted the child, or she may herself suffer from a mother complex or psychologically still be a child wanting to be taken care of herself. But the initial irrefutable assumption of the child is that the real mother is THE mother absolute. Likewise, the child apperceives itself as the absolute child. Both are, despite their being empirically existing persons, to begin with nevertheless sitting on the throne of the concept. They are majesties. The mother is the most beautiful, the most intelligent, allknowing, all-mighty ... So for the individual human being, early childhood begins with the concept as empirically existing. But what happens then? The child is exposed to the experience of its mother in daily life. A real person who is mother may perform this office very well, not so well, or miserably. But in any case, she is different from her office, different from the concept that she originally seemed to immediately embody for the child. So the child’s experience in the course of time will be the discrepancy between the concept and empirical reality, and thus a series of disappointments. If things go well, the child, as it is growing up, will learn to separate concept and empirical reality. Through the developing child’s learning from experience, a separation of the unio naturalis takes place. The concept is not destroyed, but slowly releases the human person out of itself, releases her from the obligation and constraint, in which she was originally held, the constraint of immediately having to be the concept, be THE mother. The mother is dethroned, but ipso facto the real mother can more and more be seen, and allowed to exist, as the empirical human being that she really is. Conversely, the concept moves up out of reality into ideality, THE mother is now only an ideal, a Platonic form, intellectual truth, a general guideline for how mothers should ideally be. Once the child has fully grown up to adulthood, he or she may agree with Jung that “a sensible person cannot in all fairness load that

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enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty, heaven and hell, on to the shoulders of one frail and fallible human being—so deserving of love, indulgence, understanding, and forgiveness—who was our mother” (CW 9i § 172). With such an insight the separation of the concept from the real person has been completed. But originally it had precisely been the nature of the child to load that enormous burden of meaning, responsibility, duty on the person. But this is not quite correct. The child does not load anything upon the mother. Rather, for the child, the real parents come cloaked in their concepts from the outset, or not merely cloaked either. They are unquestionably the embodiments of their concepts; they are the concepts as living, existing people. The beginning is amalgamation, absolute identity. The natural psychic development, as childhood continues, is thus the repetition in individual life of the mythical separation of Heaven and Earth. The identity is opened up; a distance and clearance is created within the original identity. The concept side of the identity moves up into heaven, and ipso facto the empirically real existence side can be seen for the first time as empirical reality, and the earth emerge as earth. The principle is distilled, vaporized, spiritualized into a veritable Universal, and the empirical becomes concrete individuality. If we now look back from here upon the neurotic holding on to a disappointing event, we immediately see that the concept or principle is not allowed to rise to heaven so as to take on the status of ideality. Behind the neurotic defiance and behind the neurotic declaring the disappointing event to be unthinkable there is, on the contrary, the insistence that the principle be an immediate empirical reality. So what actually is declared to be unthinkable and what is indeed prevented from happening through the neurotic freezing of the event is precisely the separation of heaven and earth, the opening up of a clearance, a free space between universal concept and empirical entity. This separation of the unio naturalis is what from the neurotic perspective must not happen under any circumstances. This is what must not even be thought. Neurosis wants the blindness, occludedness of the amalgamation. The concept is supposed to be a true principle in the sense of its immediate and unquestionable ruling over reality, that is to say, being immediately real in empirical life. My mother has to be THE MOTHER. And since she is not, as is already clearly known by

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the neurotic soul, she is only my evil stepmother. But my true mother, i.e., THE MOTHER, the concept of mother, is not thereby abolished. No, she is retained, even absolutely so, but she is now only the GHOST of my dead mother. So we can say that the concept is not allowed to turn into mindedness, spirit, into the fluidity of thought, not allowed to rise to heaven, but is held down in earthly reality and thus forced into the status of a ghost. Ghost instead of Geist, spirit, mindedness: this is how the demon or the neurotic complex originates. The ghost or demon in our fairytales (and in neurosis) is the concept or principle logically forced to be a living, existing presence in reality, but since he is the result of separation happening in and to the original absolute unity, of a detachment of the concept from the empirically real person, he can, of course, not be really real, not present in the flesh and in the light of day. As a result of this dilemma, and as its solution, we get a kind of compromise formation: a ghost that is the concept in the status of logical positivity and facticity, that is to say, the concept neither as empirical reality, nor as a concept released into the absolute negativity of logos, into mindedness. The positivized concept manifests in actual psychic life as the (however often incredibly powerful) reality of a mere claim, an empty demand, one known to be illegitimate (an illegitimate positivization: ghostly), but nevertheless stubbornly, even unconditionally insisted upon. For the child, the undivided oneness of concept and real person was not blind and occluded. As unio naturalis it was the first immediacy of concept or mind, of counter-natural soul. For this reason, the neurotic amalgamation must not be confused with the child’s unio naturalis, just like the glueing together of glass shards does not produce an unbroken glass. The neurotic amalgamation is the secondarily simulated, artificially forced, immediacy after the rupture and thus the insistence on the blindness of positive fact (symptom), the becoming unconscious of consciousness. What emerges here is the dialectic of the neurotic move of arresting the flow of time (with respect to the one particular topic in whose area the disappointment happened). The abstract concept of the neurotic “The Absolute” is the result of a self-contradictory movement. It moves simultaneously in opposite directions. On the one hand, it is the launching of a satellite high above the earth; it

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is the uprising out of the stream of events into the height of the absolute, of pure principiality. On the other hand, this very launching of the satellite is in itself the pushing-down of the concept, of something noetic, into the status of factual positivity or quasi-physical fact. Not first the one, then the other. No, the freezing of the event and the concomitant forging it into an abstract atemporal principle high above the earth is in itself the forcing and holding it down in the realm of earthly temporality, in the logical status of positivity and of the physicalness of neurotic symptomatology. Conversely—and this is the other side of the same contradiction—what thus appears as a quasi-natural fact has in truth nevertheless only the character of an absolute demand or claim about how real events or phenomena absolutely ought to be and how the subject must under all circumstances behave. Therefore it has the nature of an idea or thought: neurosis is the psychic simulation of physical positivity and necessity. It is the attempt to sink the mind and the metaphysical into the mindless status of positive fact. It establishes the vertical as something horizontal, the absolute as something relative, the unconditional as a silly tiny particular innerworldly and fundamentally temporal event or (alleged) necessity. The prevented, repressed natural separation of heaven and earth returns in neurosis in the totally other guise of dissociation, which is a devious contrivance. Dissociation is the positivization of the separation of heaven and earth. The vertical separation of ideal heaven above, real earth here below, of universal concept above and empirical person or entity down here, is now replaced by the horizontal split of day and night, of evil but real stepmother and dead but true mother, of yes, truly, but still more truly. It is a split into two positivized concepts. Only by means of a neurotic dissociation (instead of the true separation of heaven and earth, concept and reality) can the ghost be kept alive and the real mother be held down in the just as ghostly status of evil stepmother. Since the ghost occupies the same space, the same empirical world dimension as our commonsensical everyday truths (rather than being released into absolute negativity), and since he nevertheless knows that he is illegitimate and at all cost must shun the light of day, reality must be split into two total empirical realities and the subject into duo toti homines. The logical duplication of the

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world (in its totality!) is the only way the neurotic principle can survive, a principle that is neurotic because it refuses to be released into ideality, absolute negativity, logos—the ghost refusing to become spirit.

2. LOOPHOLES FOR THE GHOST. THE SUDDEN OUTBURST OF COMPLEX REACTIONS OUT OF THE BLUE We have witnessed the fabrication of a neurotic complex—the ghostly demon. It exists now. And immediately its negativity shows. In itself the complex is nothing, under normal conditions it is absent. It does not have a subsistence of its own. It is as if it did not exist. It needs a stimulus from, an affording occasion in, reality to be evoked, activated and thus come into existence in the first place. The complex as a soul phenomenon is totally dependent on such real occasions, affordances, for its becoming real. Only when the king and his councilors come to the princess and demand of her that she marry does her demon come into play. Only if somebody tries to give me orders does my authority complex wake up. Only if I have to use an elevator or enter a tunnel does my claustrophobia have a chance. The complex in the soul must dock to something in reality in order, as it were, to boot up, i.e., to pull itself up into existence “by its own bootstraps.” But once the occasion is given, the complex gushes forth in full force; it is as if a dam had burst. A complex often needs only a far-fetched analogy to a real occasion, a mere suggestion, in order to be tickled into being, but once this is the case it breaks out with all its might. The small gap between the platform and the first step of a train, for example, can in certain cases serve as an occasion to create a panic, a phobic fear of falling into the bottomless depth of an abyss. But the panic could not arise without this tiny suggestion from something real to which the complex can dock. This is in some way comparable to how on the mythological stage of experiencing the world, small cracks in the earth, for example, could serve as sensual aid (by no means as empirical proof ) for the idea of the underworld, or rather of a possible place of entry into it. Rationally, one knew of course that these cracks in the earth did not go infinitely into the depth and that they were not literally an access to the underworld. But this did not matter. The mythological conceptions did not depend on empirical verification. They were powerful

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enough in themselves. As soul phenomena they had everything they need, even their reality, within themselves. All they needed to be evoked was something in empirical reality as a kind of anchoring place or catalyst, and whoosh! they were, in their logical negativity, an actual presence in the mind. But once the complex has erupted, we know: now is festival time. We have suddenly switched over from the one total world to the other total world. Like Alice we have fallen through a rabbit hole into Wonderland. Now, when I explode because an authority figure dared to give me orders, now, when I am in a panic because I am in an elevator, or because I see a dog, or because of the crack between the platform and the train, now the power of normal reality is over; the workaday world and along with it the banality of everyday life lie behind us, and the curtain to the sacred festival drama has been pulled open. Now it is the time of the absolute principle, of absoluteness as such. We have entered the breathtaking sphere of the holy, the sphere of the ghost. We have magically flown from the day-world into the nightworld of the beloved demon. Now bliss rules. We experience highest meaning in highest intensity. Now life is worth living. We must not forget that what seen from the outside is the misery and pain of pathology is from the inside the absolute thrill and glory of the festival drama. We must not be taken in by the external impression. Neurosis is self-contradiction. But of course we must not forget either that the bliss that occurs in the other total world, the world of soul or night, is not an emotional experience (because then it would precisely belong into the first total world), but abstractintellectual, the notion of bliss, beatitude. Even the personality of the neurotic, which has its place in the first total world, will, as we know, experientially not be reached by the beatifying bliss nor witness the festival drama. It experiences only its effect. In neurosis, the triumph of the soul is the only thing that counts. It is rare that it is at the same time also a triumph of the empirical ego (as, for example, in Jung’s childhood neurosis, although, as I suggested, this was not really a full-fledged neurosis). Because the world of the neurotic complex and the world of normal life are two total worlds, they are mutually exclusive. This is why in the life of many neurotics the complex is normally absent, non-existent, and why, on the one hand, normal reason is absent once the complex

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has taken over and its festival is celebrated. So there has to be a total switching from the one world to the other if the other is to come into being, which implies that it totally replaces the first. For this switching to become possible, there have to be certain tiny bridges that lead from the one to the other, small cracks, gateways, loopholes, rabbit holes that provide an opportunity for this sudden falling from the one into the other world. Several different modalities of how the switch to the festival time can come about can be distinguished. 1. Reality or life provides the affording occasions that trigger the complex. It is as if the door to a cage has been opened, and now the tiger can jump out. The soul or the complex is often as if lying in wait for opportunities afforded by reality, small, in their own contexts insignificant, facts that are used by the complex to make a breakthrough into real life. Sometimes, however, the complex is so impatient that it creates its own occasions. 2. Rather than there being a complex like a beast of prey lying in wait for any opportunity that might offer itself so that it can burst forth, a second possible case is the presence of a sore spot, a soul wound, an Achilles’ heel, that the patient tries to cover and protect. And only when life confronts the patient with situations that touch the wound despite all protective measures does the curtain to the festival drama open. 3. A third possibility is that the complex is also not lying in wait, but that certain events in reality have such a seductive power that despite the rational resistance of the reasonable part of the personality the complex breaks through anyway. The temptation that the opportunity presents is too great to let it go by unused. 4. The fourth case: a real event is less a gateway offered by life than a catalyst that does not itself enter into the process. It is more like challenging, inciting material, needed and instrumentalized by oneself to work oneself up into a rage or into some other form of the festival drama. The event is used as a tool, a support, a practice object. This is why many neurotics are driven again and again to seek situations, people, or relationships that will predictably only annoy them. By the way, the opposite possibility exists too, namely that certain circumstances or conditions free a person from a usually persisting complex reaction. E.g., a student can normally not motivate himself

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to study or write his term paper. But if he is in a group with others, he all of a sudden can easily do the work that he could not do alone. At the beginning of this chapter I pointed out the negativity of the complex, that it is at first and normally as if non-existent. It only comes into existence through the opportunities in reality that trigger it. But this initial statement about the absence of the complex also needs to be taken in a deeper, intrinsic sense. If we compare it to the tiger lying in wait for an occasion to burst out of its cage, we get the impression that the complex is something substantial, a being, an entity. But it is in itself really nothing. There is no ghost who is merely sleeping, but ready to awaken. The absolute principle does not exist at all. The complex is only an instruction, an algorithm, a computer program, and it needs (a) the trigger and (b) the material substance of a real situation so that the program has something with which it can begin its work. And its work consists in creating, building up, the absolute principle for the first time. Each neurotic reaction is a creatio ex nihilo of the ghost, of the sacred festival drama that each time celebrates the absolute principle afresh. Each neurotic reaction is the original edification of the principle and starts from scratch. Only the program in its basic outline has usually been established and is repeated. So neurosis is essentially performative (one might even call it a performing art) and not an existing, continuous state. The basic score is there, but it needs the musicians to turn it into real music. However, in neurosis, the score provides only the general theme, whereas the actual performance is always an improvisation on the spur of the moment and with the particular requisites that this moment provides. As Jung said, neurosis needs to be daily maintained and generated anew. Once the moment of the complex’s performance is over, the absolute principle that has been originally established and celebrated in it dissolves again into nothing, and the only lasting effect is that each performance perfects the neurotic soul’s skill at improvisation.

3. HAVING THE RIGHT INSIGHTS BUT RENDERING THEM INEFFECTIVE For a neurosis to manifest, there must, as we have seen, be tiny cracks in the logical wall separating the sphere of the ideal (the absolute demand) from the sphere of the real, openings through which the

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complex, that is, the otherworldly principle, can enter the realm of existence or empirical reality. But for neurosis to persist, this bridge must be a one-way bridge only. Neurosis must safely lock itself in. A movement in the opposite direction, from empirical reality, from the normal, reasonable point of view to neurosis and into its core must be made impossible. Reason must not have any access to the performance of the festival drama. Part of initiations in ancient cultures was that the initiand had to leave the familiar world of his village and familiar ordinary thinking and venture forth into the unknown, the realm of mystery and the absolute. But this was only one side of the whole institution of initiation. Initiation also meant that the initiand had to return to his village and bring a spiritual boon from the other side back into ordinary earthly life. In neurosis this is impossible. There is no boon, only a loss. A high price has to be paid in real life for the luxury of entertaining a neurosis. This is naturally so, because thanks to dissociation as essential feature in neurosis, the complex suddenly, out of the blue, intrudes into or erupts in this world and replaces this entire normal world. It, the complex or the neurosis, has crossed over the border, but no human subject has, as is the case in initiation, gone over from here to there, a subject that could receive what it experiences in the otherworld of neurosis. And thus there is nobody who could bring anything beneficial back. In this regard, a neurotic complex reaction is just like a natural disaster, an earthquake that leaves a damaged earth behind. Volcanoes or floods (like those of the Nile river in ancient Egypt) at least bring fertile soil. Not so neurosis. In analysis we try to proceed in the opposite direction. We want to achieve that important insights into the functioning of the patient’s neurosis, insights gained in the day-world, be transported into the night-world, in which neurosis has its home, and take effect there. This, by the way, corresponds to one possibility in ancient initiations. We have many fairytales where there is an illness in the other world of the spirits that can only be healed by a mortal who on his way to initiation has crossed over into the other world. Faced with this motif that humans are needed for solving a problem that exists in the other world and cannot be resolved there by the otherworldly beings themselves, Jungians may be reminded of

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Jung’s thesis that God needs man in order to become conscious. This is a late echo of a very ancient thought pattern. But it is inherent in the very nature of neurosis that it does not want to become conscious, it does not want reasonable insights from the day-world to cross the border into the world of the absolute principle. Why not? Because that would automatically mean the end of neurosis, the relativization, indeed, killing, of the absolute principle, much like in the Enchanted Princess fairytale the young man coming from the day-world and with the day-world mentality cuts the demon’s head off and thus frees the princess of her neurosis. But neurosis is absolutely intent upon its self-preservation, if not even upon an increase of its degree of intensity as well as range of power. This is why there must not be a gateway from empirical reality to the sphere of the neurotic principle similar to the one that exists for the complex to enter this world of empirical existence. The bridge leading in this direction has to be dismantled. I say “dismantled,” because it does exist initially. It is part of the soul’s natural conversation with itself which goes in two ways, dialectically. So it takes some special activity to prevent a good insight gained in the day world of analysis (or in normal life at large) from crossing over and naturally taking effect on the other side. In a way, this point had already been illustrated by the Enchanted Princess who required that all suitors’ heads be cut off. We explained that the mere existence of “suitor” was tantamount to the refutation of the absolute principle. There is another story that illustrates this prevention of a crossing over from the day-world into the nightworld. In a way, this story is even closer to how in psychotherapy we often experience how excellent insights, a real seeing through the neurotic trap, are rendered ineffective so that despite this conscious insight the neurosis continues unimpaired. The story I have in mind is from Homer’s Odyssey. Penelope is the wife of Odysseus. Ten years after the Trojan war he has still not returned home, nor has there been a message that he is still alive. There are many suitors who want to marry the supposed widow. They are powerful and under the social conditions of the time she cannot refuse in the long run. So she resorts to a trick. She says that once she is finished weaving a particular cloth that she has begun to weave she will choose one

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In its own context, this is of course not intended to be a portrayal of a neurosis. But taken out of its original context, the weaving-andunraveling can serve for us as a wonderful description of the neurotic tendency and method to render ineffective insights already gained. Again and again one can hear patients in therapy state something like this: “I have understood this neurotic mechanism. But my understanding it does not change anything. I still have my neurotic symptoms. The insight did not help.” This is a trap. The reason why it did not make any difference is neither that the insight was not good enough, not the right one, nor that insights in general are not the right way to overcome a neurosis. Of course, many people think that insights are too rational and that to be cured, a neurosis much rather needs intensive emotional experiences, body work, a deep attachment to the analyst in a transference relationship, dreams with numinous symbols, and so on. But all that is not the point. The reason why an insight did not have any noticeable effect is that Penelope had been at work “during the night of the soul” undoing the insight that consciousness had elaborated for itself during “the day” and that it will return to “in the morning” so that it looks as if the undoing had not taken place. The patient still has and holds on to this insight and wonders why it did not work. The soul, as Penelope, prevented it from working, from taking effect—taking effect in that sphere where alone it was needed: in the night-world. That the patient, solely as waking consciousness, in other words, as part of the day-world, sees through the logic of his neurosis is as useful as having doctors and medication in the rich part of the world, but an epidemic in a remote poor country, or like having plenty of rain in Europe and disastrous droughts in the Sahel zone. In the case of neurotic patients, the unraveling therefore does not concern the content of the insight. The content is retained as it is. Rather, what happens “at night” is that the insight character of the insight is unraveled. Its content is insulated, the insight is reduced to

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something like a thing, cut off from its inherent effectiveness, its dynamic aspect, its natural heading toward a real result. It is turned into an aesthetic object, something to be passively looked at. But by themselves insights are subjects, not objects. They are active agents. In his “Reitergeschichte” Hugo von Hofmannsthal wrote the following sentence: “Das gesprochene Wort machte seine Gewalt geltend” (“the uttered word made its force be felt”). By the same token we could say that an explicit insight would naturally make its force be felt. Of their own accord, insights are like radioactive material. They radiate, they have their innate teleology, they want something, namely that they count, make a difference. But what happens in neurosis is that the insight is placed into an alchemical retort that, although it is made out of glass and thus transparent, nevertheless screens the subject who sees the content from an immediate contact with that content. Or with a modern image we could say that in neurosis the insight is placed into a Castor ®, a “Cask for Storage and Transport of Radioactive Material.” You can have this insight, even carry it around with you forever, but it does not do anything. This castration of the insight is, of course, part of the dissociation intrinsic to and indispensable for neurosis. The neurotic soul knows itself as living an untruth. The neurosis is not merely contra naturam (all soul phenomena are that), but also counterfactual. Neurosis is the soul’s self-establishment as denying and contradicting its own truth, the new status it has already attained in fact. Neurosis, as its own untruth, can only be if it succeeds in preventing the truth (and that also means: any insight into the truth) from having an effect upon itself as untruth. It must insulate itself. Without “Penelope” it cannot maintain itself, or, conversely, a main part of its “daily maintaining and generating itself anew” is the unraveling of any rational insight into its logical structure. I now want to describe how an uncastrated insight would normally unfold its force. At the very beginning, when you have an insight for the first time, it is something you look up to as if it hovered above your head. It is a complete surprise, something one had never thought of before, and as such fascinating, marvelous, liberating and vivifying. “Aha, this is my problem! Now I finally see what goes wrong. Great!” At first, the insight is still pretty far away, a content still looked at as an exotic object in front of consciousness. But the more consciousness,

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full of admiration, looks at this exotic object, the less exotic it will become for it. Consciousness slowly familiarizes itself with it. In addition, the insight is radioactive, it radiates. It infects the consciousness looking at it. Consciousness thus gradually integrates it into its inventory. The more this happens, the more the object ceases to be an object out there and high up above consciousness and enters the mode of consciousness’s own thinking, the syntax or logical constitution of consciousness itself. At the end of this process, the insight has exhausted its radiation, having spent it upon the subject. This means that the substance of the insight has fully come home to consciousness, having gone over from being the object or content of consciousness into being something like a category or instrument of the subject itself with which the latter can tackle its own experiences and thus also effectively reflect its neurosis. And thus there is now nothing to look up to out there anymore. Rather, the insight has become the ground, the standpoint, on which consciousness itself now stands. Faced with this insight that in this way has become consciousness’s own instrument, the neurosis dissolves into thin air.179 It cannot hold its place. Neurosis loses its hold over consciousness. It is this process that is prevented in neurosis. The insight is preserved (frozen) in its initial state of being an object far away in front of and above consciousness. The neurotic treats it as if it were nothing but a property, the possession of which he can enjoy. He does not see that insights are invitations or commands addressed to the I, who is to make use of them. I discussed earlier the necessity for the neurotic I to assume responsibility for his neurosis. Insights are of course not like drugs that you only need to swallow with a glass of water and then chemistry will do its thing without any additional activity by the human subject. Oportet me adesse. The inherent force of insights, their radioactive power, needs the openness of the mind that can be affected by them, that truly thinks them, actively. And thinking them means here above all comprehending them as consciousness’s own tools, its scalpels, and consequently also making use of these scalpels. 179 As Hegel said, “The wounds of the Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind” (Phenomenology of the Spirit, tr. Miller, p.. 407). This is the difference to psychic wounds. Even when psychic wounds heal we can still feel the scar they have left for a long time, maybe even for the whole rest of our life. But neurosis is a psychological illness and, as a logical dissociation, the work of the Spirit as well as an arrangement that needs to be daily maintained. As such it is simply gone when it is cured.

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Assuming responsibility for my neurosis could thus also be expressed as my feeling called upon to take the scalpel and bring it to bear upon the neurotic thoughts and my abiding by this felt necessity. The main work has to be done by the I. I said that if the I confronts its neurosis with its (correct) insight (we could also say that if the I confronts the enchanted princess with the cut-off demon’s head) the neurosis dissolves into thin air. The right insight, a true comprehension of the neurotic complication, is indeed a wonder weapon. This should, however, not be misunderstood as meaning that the whole neurosis would from one day to the next once and for all be gone the moment the scalpel is applied to it. The contradiction between these two ideas is resolved when we understand that neurosis is the unity of itself and its many concrete instantiations in actual life (the many outbursts of neurotic complexes and moments of other neurotic behavior). An insight gained about the functioning of one’s neurosis cannot be applied to the neurosis as such, as a kind of lump-sum application. It can always only be applied to a concrete individual manifestation of the neurosis in a particular situation here and now. Only here and now, only specifically, can we confront the enchanted princess in us with her demon-lover’s cut-off head, but not in general, in abstracto! And the dissolution of the neurosis into thin air due to the presentation of the demon’s head, or through the application of the scalpel or razor blade of our insight to it, also happens only to this particular individual instantiation here and now, whereas the neurosis at large will probably raise its head again still numerous other times even after its real dissolution in this one concrete instance. One of my training analysts and supervisors, Hildegard Buder, many decades ago used an excellent image. Neurosis, she said, is like a thick rope. Each time a good analytical interpretation that hits home with the patient cuts through only one single fiber of the rope. To sever the whole strand, of which the first fiber was only one single element, numerous interpretations are needed. But even if one whole strand is cut through, two other strands still remain intact, and so the rope will still hold. But once three quarters or so of all the fibers are cut through, the rope is apt to break. This would be equivalent to the end of the neurosis as a whole. So the patient needs to patiently (nomen est omen) apply the same insight gained in analysis a thousand times to each concrete manifestation of his neurotic thoughts, feelings

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or behaviors and undo it after the fact. The princess needs to be confronted with the same demon’s head again and again. But this is what is so frequently avoided. Good interpretations may truly become insights for the patient. But he does not go to work with it on the basis of the nitty-gritty concrete instantiations of his neurosis. He enjoys looking at it as if it were a precious gem. In other words, he stays in the mode of upward-looking, of merely sort of dreaming his insight, and, twiddling his thumbs. He waits for some miraculous cure to happen, which, to his utter astonishment, does not occur, even though, as he may protest, he is in analysis, comes regularly and accepts the analyst’s interpretations. But what needs to be seen is that “at night,” secretly, Penelope-like, he prevents the essential thing from happening, namely that the insight contained in those interpretations as a “day” insight is applied to the “night” demon; that it is used by him, by him as I, in the manner of a razor blade or sword to ruthlessly cut the neurotic complex’s head off each time the complex shows itself anew. The insight is reserved for “day” consciousness, and the “nightworld” neurosis is left to its own devices so that it can freely cause terrible trouble in the day-world. Both consciousnesses, that of the I and that of neurosis, remain neatly separated: dissociated. But then, this dissociation is precisely what neurosis is about.

PART 5

The soul issue, meaning, and purpose of neurosis as a cultural phenomenon

1. WINKELRIED. ZEROING IN ON THE SUBJECT’S SELF AS THE SOUL’S NEW BATTLEGROUND

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n an earlier chapter we saw how a neurotic trauma is fabricated, that is, how a disappointing or painful experience is converted into a trauma. It happened mainly by being frozen in the status it had when it first happened, namely as something absolutely shocking, disappointing, devastating, and by being declared to be flatly unthinkable. The psychological operations performed in this fabrication of a trauma are all directed at the event per se. It is what is subjected to a change. But the origin or fabrication of a neurosis has yet another essential aspect, the experiencing subject. And this is what must now be elaborated. For this purpose I start out with an image from history. On 9 July 1386, the Swiss Confederates fought in the great battle near Sempach against the Hapsburg army of knights whose leader was the Austrian Duke Leopold III. The Confederates were in a bad position. They could not break through the wall of enemy pikemen. In this critical situation, so legend has it, one Arnold Winkelried, a peasant from Stans, extending his long arms as far as he could reach, grabbed as many

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enemy lances as he could, pushed them together into one bundle and rammed this into his own chest, exclaiming before his death: “A pathway for freedom!” He thereby had made an opening into the Austrian phalanx through which the Swiss could enter and attack. In this way Winkelried had prepared the victory of the Swiss Confederates. Leopold III, by the way, fell in this battle. We are of course not concerned here with this battle itself or Swiss history. Also, the fact that there is no evidence that this report is historically correct and even the fact that the very figure of Winkelried may be no more than legendary does not need to disturb us in our endeavor. What we can use for our purpose of comprehending neurosis, and what is valid for this completely independently of the question of historical facticity, is the impressive image of Winkelried’s deed. It has two moments: first, the gathering, bundling and redirecting of enemy spikes solely upon himself, and secondly, his self-sacrifice. I am very well aware of the fact that the legendary figure is done an injustice if one tries, as I will do, to use it to illustrate aspects of neurosis. As in the cases of the fairytales that I used earlier, I am conscious of the fact that using the Winkelried image amounts to repurposing it. But no disparagement of this figure in its own right as part of the historical legend is intended. We can conceive of an event experienced as disappointing or devastating as a wall of enemy pikemen. For any disappointment is experienced as an attack. What is decisive, however, is that it is not an assault by enemy soldiers, and not an assault on me as person, but rather a logical attack. For inasmuch as the event proves to be disappointing it is directed against a wrong idea, expectation, belief, i.e., an illusion, in which I had been enveloped or to which I had succumbed. Seen in this light, the disappointing event is in truth much like an argument in a discussion that refutes or disproves a conviction held. It provides for consciousness the necessary dis-appointment, disillusionment, the uncovering of an erroneous assumption, a deception, bringing to light the fact that one had been on the wrong track. Thus the point of this “assault” or “attack” is not power, not victory or defeat, but truth, insight, cognition, to be taught better. The two “armies” opposite each other (if we apply for the time being the battle situation of our Winkelried image) are one’s own view about some reality, on the one hand, and the “thesis” about the same

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reality inherent in the experienced real course of events. It is the contrast between two theses, positions—quite objectively, impersonally. The issue at stake is therefore solely: is this or is that how it is in truth? The subject, the human being, by contrast, completely drops out from this conflict. The experiencing subject is merely the location where the “battle” between the two positions takes place. This is the first point to be made. The second point is that in such cases it is always the “enemy party” (the experienced event) that has truth and reality on its side. That is to say, here the battle does not still lie ahead; the outcome is already decided: my illusory assumption has already been refuted by the factual experience. The “enemy” party has always already won. So there is no need for any further action or fighting on the part of the human being. He must not, as our present-day unpsychological slogans demand, “work on himself,” verarbeiten (process) the experience. He does not need to do anything. This is because the actual work is, conversely, performed here by the experienced reality itself. And its work is work on the illusion (not on the person who has the illusion, not his or her humiliation). The experienced reality works off the false expectation all by itself. Of course, by refuting the illusion through real fact, it at the same time also gradually works on the consciousness that has the false attitude. It teaches it about how it will have to think in the future. The experienced truth which is inherent in the event that has occurred all by itself does its alchemical work on consciousness. It is like an acid or lye poured over the illusion and eating it away. One does not have to do anything oneself. Each experienced reality that contradicts our expectations is in this sense not only a positive fact. It is also a linguistic happening, inasmuch as it contradicts or refutes the opinion held by us. It is something that carries in itself a logical consequence for consciousness, that is, it contains an internal dynamic, indeed, it has a “will” of its own. It wants to be released into its being true. It wants to be acknowledged as true. It wants to be thought. This is its “aggressiveness,” its spearhead. a) The Winkelriedian principle: from truth to “I!,” “Me!” But in this situation it is also possible for the soul, in analogy to what happened in the battle of Sempach, to intrude into the selfsufficient objective course of events and interfere with its inherent

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dynamic or teleology. Like a Winkelried it can deflect the spearhead of the experienced reality, which is actually directed against the illusion, away from the illusion and instead direct it against itself, “ram it into its own chest.” It can intercept the autonomous momentum of what has been experienced, draw it upon itself, absorb it into itself. “Itself” means: the soul as represented by the human subject (since the soul itself, as absolute negativity, does not exist. It is only present in reality in and through its own speaking, in and through what it has made really existing human beings think, feel, do, and produce). This deflection of the spearhead of truth upon itself, defined as human subjectivity, is, so to speak, the argumentum ad personam in reverse. In logic and rhetoric we understand by an argument that is directed “against the person” the tricky device (if used intentionally) or mistake (if it creeps in) of trying to defeat the thesis of one’s opponent in a discussion by attacking the opponent himself as person, instead of refuting the legitimacy of the objective content of his thesis. An example would be: what he said cannot be true because he was once in prison / he is gay / he is a rightist / he did not even graduate from high school. The actual issue of the discussion is then no topic anymore. The maneuver of the argumentum ad personam, when it happens in rhetoric, successfully diverts our attention away from the thesis at issue to the character or life of the other person who expressed this thesis. By contrast, when the soul follows Winkelried, it distracts from the issue that is at stake between itself and the real event (as the equivalent to the opponent in a discussion) by precisely redirecting the attack upon itself (as embodied in the human subject, the person). It rams the refutation of its opinion or expectation that reality brings as a spear into itself, establishing the person as target. In other words, the soul’s argumentum ad personam is the reverse of the rhetorical argument because it does not attack the other person, but the self of the subject who uses it. We can say that it occurs in combination with the mechanisms known from psychoanalysis by the names, “turning round upon the subject’s own self ” and “identification with the aggressor.” How does this Winkelriedian argumentum ad personam show itself, how does it happen? As a first approach to an answer I will use as illustration a phenomenon that belongs to a more superficial level than neurosis, a phenomenon familiar from ordinary daily life. We can call

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it emotionalization. What I mean is a reaction to disappointing events in which the dis-illusionment that would be the inherent natural effect of the event is now replaced by subjective sentiments, sentiments such as the personal feeling of disappointment / frustration / despair / depression; resigned suffering; loud wailing and complaining; anger and rage; feelings of one’s own worthlessness, inferiority, and guilt; feeling hurt by this alleged narcissistic insult, etc. Personal suffering, woundedness, pain, feeling slighted, rage, and emotional sentiments in general are nursed and cultivated, and the cult of these emotions is used much like sandbags against canon balls, in order to let the impact of truth be absorbed by them so that its actual purpose is frustrated. The thrust of the experienced event, which in truth is directed against certain expectations, convictions, dogmas believed up until now, sinks into, and disappears in, the plastic foam of one’s own bad feelings. The impact of the experienced (new) truth is intercepted, deflected, and thus checkmated. It is disposed of as a subjective emotion or emotional state. The experience cannot hit home. It falls flat. What actually would amount to a simple cognition of the truth is put onto the person as the person’s unacceptable pain. The person’s suffering from guilt feelings, despair, and anger as a defense against the simple knowing of the truth. Now it is I who am devastated, not my illusion. Indulging in one’s subjective misery is a way to render a possible insight ineffective, nay, an insight that has already happened. In the same way it is also possible to immunize against a criticism raised against oneself or, in analysis, an interpretation given by the analyst. The point of the criticism or interpretation is redirected away from the issue to the person’s self. The person evades into sentiment, dwells on the pain of feeling insulted. Actually, the simple question that would have to be raised and answered in such cases is whether the criticism was factually justified or not (a critique could of course also be mistaken). With this focus on the validity of points made, the person whose view or behavior is criticized would be entirely left out of it. But instead of this question aiming for insight, we all of a sudden have a human-relationship problem. I feel attacked by the criticizing person or the interpreting analyst, not loved, not respected. I feel not acknowledged as being infallible. This is due to the systematic Winkelried-like redirection of the criticism’s or interpretation’s point away from the issue and towards one’s own self.

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One voluntarily focuses the spears upon oneself and rams them into one’s own chest, exclaiming, as it were, “A pathway for my ego (my feeling attacked, my suffering)!” The assault, humiliation, or insult character is homemade, because it is oneself who is actively grasping the spear and pushing it into oneself. The (unconscious) purpose of this artificial maneuver is, of course, to zero in on oneself, to put oneself, the I, one’s own subjectivity, psychologically into the limelight, where “psychologically” means that the grandstanding and puffing up of the I happens within the economy of one’s own psyche, exclusively for the benefit of the soul, rather than in the social arena for the “benefit” of the people around oneself. The “Winkelriedian” emotionalization is in the service of the modern soul’s project of establishing itself—in its present-day form as private, solitary subjectivity and personalistically conceived individual—as the focus and target, the new battleground where the essential action is.180 One favorite way of intercepting the logical consequence of an experience or critique is feeling guilty. One puts on sackcloth and ashes and condemns oneself globally (“mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!” “I am so bad!” “I cannot do anything right!”) so that one’s concrete wrongdoing or erroneous belief—the real issue—gets away unscathed. Nowadays society, and even the courts, expect murderers and other criminals to demonstrate how guilty, how much remorse they feel, how much they regret having done whatever they did, and, above all, to apologize to the relatives of the victim for the pain they caused. This show of feelings is by no means a case of Nietzsche’s “Pale Criminal” who after the fact does not show himself to be up to his own deed. No, it is something totally different: society demands that the criminal contribute to 180 Modern psychology at large, inasmuch as it zeros in on the individual and thus is fundamentally personalistic, falls for the described ritual operation of the reification and reduction of the whole level of truth to the personalistic point of view and promotes it. We could also say: it exists as the promotion of it, or, to be more precise, it is its blind executing agent. But not only psychology, modern society as a whole is more and more becoming psychologized. And, especially by means of television, it progressively, piece by piece, itself psychologizes the experience of all of life in this personalistic sense. This is a gigantic collective transformation, translation, and decomposition process: the appropriation through swallowing of the advent of truth by the individual human being in his positivity and the conversion of truth itself into the facticity of subjective sentiments, emotions, or emotional states.

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the modern cult of rendering the simple truth ineffective by dwelling with subjective feelings so that in its stead the personalistic inner of the modern subject can be established or reconfirmed as the new absolute center.181 As a (certainly extreme) counterexample for a mode of being-inthe-world characterized by an openness to the advent of truth and its striking the human subject let me cite an ancient poem. It is an extreme example because it shows the decidedly heroic stance characteristic of the age of the Germanic Migrations, but is far removed from the attitudes of later, let alone modern, times. In the “Lay of Hildebrand,” a text written in Old High German alliterative verse, after thirty years of separation a son (Hadubrand) and his father (Hildebrand) encounter each other in battle, probably as chosen champions of the opposing armies. They don’t know each other, but after the son mentions his own name and whose son he is, his father realizes that he is confronted with his own son. But since the son has the firm belief that his father is long dead, he does not believe Hildebrand’s assertion that he is indeed his father. So the father is forced to fight against his own son, which means that he either might kill him or be killed by him (the end of the poem is lost). The lay says at the point when the hopelessness (from Hildebrand’s point of view) of the situation has become apparent, “wêwurt skihit” (woeful fate strikes), but we could also render this phrase with the words by Hölderlin from his poem “Mnemosyne,” “... es ereignet sich aber / Das Wahre” (“yet Truth is happening”). Human existence encounters here, and relentlessly exposes itself to, the “assault” of truth. Fate or truth is happening, in contrast to the subject’s zeroing in upon itself as the traumatized, hopelessly overtaxed, or innocently suffering victim. What I described so far is only a preliminary, introductory illustration of an analogy to the psychological argumentum ad personam, an illustration taken from ordinary life. The emotionalization 181 At the same time, there is a reversal from passive to active. An “experience,” that is, a being worked upon, being taught better, is turned into a doing performed by oneself, even if it is a paradoxical Winkelried-like doing that, as a self-wounding, includes suffering. One takes direct control of what actually would be an effect to be suffered (to be bravely borne, shouldered). Or what would be one’s having to suffer the autonomous effect of a real experience is replaced by the oxymoron of a self-inflicted suffering. At least in this specific context Jung’s (generalized) dictum from a different context is proven right that “Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering” (CW 11 § 129).

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discussed, although it is doubtlessly Winkelriedian, is a surface phenomenon that belongs to the general social sphere and to the life of the psyche of the human animal. Although an integral part of the soul’s logical life on the larger collective level, it is still far removed from the innermost processes and meaning of neurosis as a truly psychological illness, a manifestation of soul. Neurosis is precisely not about human emotions and feelings, and conversely, emotionalizing cannot explain, or be an instrument in the fabrication of, neurosis. Neurosis is not about the neurotic—the prôton pseudos of therapeutic psychology is not to have understood this—, it is not interested in his life problems or his individuation. It is not concerned with people as individuals and their behavior or motivations, not with ordinary human concerns, worries, hopes, wishes, fears. People do not even count. They are merely used by the soul for its purposes. b) Acquisition of the logic of subjectivity Neurosis is about the (i.e., the establishment of a new) Concept of man as such, about the logic of human existence and being-in-the-world. It is about the subject as such, not about human subjects in the plural or as so many individuals. “The subject” belongs to the logic of the soul; “human subjects” refers to something existing in the empirical world. As we know, neurosis represents an absolute riddle, a riddle even to the neurotic person. The makings of a neurosis and where it is moored are not visible to the ordinary eyes. It is made and moored in the night-world (the logic of the soul), not in the day-world (empirical reality). Only the neurotic symptoms are visible and experientially accessible (because they show themselves in empirical reality). What really counts in neurosis, however, takes place in the cold logic of the soul and is, as all psychological life, about concepts, their transformation and further-development: the concepts in which and as which people as well as societies, unwittingly but partially also wittingly, live. As a Work, neurosis is a ritual in which the objective soul works out for itself, and in fact realizes, a project of general importance and tremendous proportions. The emotionalization of experience that we talked about is part of the same project, but remains on a decisively subjective and psychic level and as such is part only of personalistic psychology. It is always I who feel angry, guilty, worthless, etc. All such sentiments are

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expressions of the subjective psyche (even if the emotionalization process as a whole is in the service of the modern soul’s logical life) and have the purpose of putting the I in the center, establishing it as the central focus. Neurosis goes fundamentally beyond this emotionalization and fundamentally deeper because it, as it were, interiorizes into itself what in the described emotionalization process are merely subjective emotions, making itself logically independent of the subject. The neurotic does precisely not say: “A pathway for ME, my ego!” He unwittingly and unintentionally IS, happens to be, the soul’s new battleground. Neurosis is characterized by objective symptoms that come with autonomous necessity and are foreign even to the very subject in whom they occur. The subject feels compelled and helpless over against them. The neurotic pathology is a real Other for the I. The symptoms have the character of objective facts or events. This means that in neurosis the translocation of the soul from the sphere of the absolute negativity of truth into the sphere of positivity and of the immediate presence of The Absolute is successfully accomplished (whereas in the emotionalization process it gets stuck in the subjective sphere). Harking back to Goethe’s “Der Dichtung Schleier aus der Hand der Wahrheit” (“the veil of poesy out of the hand of Truth”)182 we could formulate by contrast that neurosis is the accomplished realization of immediate presence at the cost of truth. In order to get a bit closer to the deeper psychology of the project that the soul pursues in neurosis through its Winkelriedian ritual, we have to leave human emotional life and interest in people, in neurotics, behind and start at a historically deeper point that has an essential bearing on our topic of the psychology of the Winkelriedian move. In an earlier study, 183 I used the well-known World War I poster by Montgomery Flagg that shows an Uncle Sam who is pointing his finger directly at the viewer of the poster and telling him: “I want YOU for U.S. Army.” I used it in order to illustrate one aspect of that earthshaking 182

From his poem “Zueignung” (1784). Wolfgang Giegerich, Drachenkampf oder Initiation ins Nuklearzeitalter. Zweiter Band der “Psychoanalyse der Atombombe,” Zürich (Schweizer Spiegel Verlag) 1989, Chapter “Die Abschußbasis,” pp. 63 ff. This chapter has been published in English under the title, “The Rocket and the Launching Base, or The Leap from the Imaginal into the Outer Space Named ‘Reality,’” in: idem, Technology and the Soul, New Orleans (Spring Journal Books) 2007, pp. 117–135. 183

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revolution—over against the mythological, polytheistic world—that happened with the emergence of Christianity on the scene. Much as this imaginal Uncle Sam within the image breaks through the image level of this poster (sort of penetrating through, and coming out of, the paper on which the picture is printed), and much as he directly confronts the empirically real viewer outside the image, as if he himself were standing vis-à-vis him in the real world, and as he addresses the viewer expressly in his singular individuality, in his thisness, claiming him for U.S. Army, so also says Christianity to each particular individual, so to speak holding a gun to his head: “Jesus Christ wants YOU!” Christianity, too, fundamentally shoots through and breaks out of the image level, that is, the reality level of the Imaginal or Mythical, tearing it asunder, leaping ur-sprünglich into outer, non-imaginal, empirical reality, an outer reality that is only engendered through this very leap and that only after this creative leap can be called “outer.” It is the world of positivity. Christianity does not merely present impressive images and ideas, trusting that their own inherent suggestive power (Jung) will all by itself take hold of the consciousness of people from within, on the level of the imaginal sphere or the logic of the soul, captivating, winning consciousness over for them. No, it reaches out of the imaginal sphere into the empirical world, into the “day-world” that we know from our fairytales. It directly addresses and tries to seize the empirical human subject as the positive-factually existing person that he is. It demands a decision by this person in the “day-world.” This astounding process is inherent in the logic of Incarnation. Incarnation in the Christian sense is the decided crossing over from the imaginal sphere into empirical reality. It amounts to a point-blank

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identity of the empirical man Jesus with the divine Son of God, the Christ. Identity! Not an epiphany of the divine in the empirical human being, nor an avatar in the sense of a descent of God into human form. The man Jesus is not the human form of the second person of the Christian deity. He is the contradiction of veritable earthly man AND at the same time veritable God, a conjunction of radical opposites. For this reason the Bible is full of identification statements. “This is He on behalf of whom I said, ‘After me comes a Man who has a higher rank than I, for He existed before me,’” John 1:29. “This is he that came by water and blood, Jesus Christ ...,” 1 John 5:6. “For this is he, of whom it is written, Behold, I send my messenger before thy face, which shall prepare thy way before thee,” Matth. 11:7. “Therefore let all the house of Israel know for certain that God has made Him both Lord and Christ—this Jesus whom you crucified,” Acts 2:36. “I am He who testifies about Myself,” John 8:18. Jesus in his positivity IS Absolute Negativity, namely Christ. This is, as it were, “Winkelried’s” move (the way I construed it for our purposes) avant la lettre. The whole weight of the metaphysical dimension, of the divine, of the absolute, is stuffed into the one point of the strictly empirical, historical Jesus—without letting him thereby lose his empirical humanity. The last point is crucial. The same movement of taking something, here a burden, away from the infinite number of all people in the world to whom it really belongs, of gathering it and storing it all in the one person of Jesus Christ is also performed in the much-quoted idea, “Cast all your care on him” (1 Peter 5:1). Similarly, the Biblical saying, “Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), displays this dynamic of absorbing into one point, one individual, something that used to be spread out over all the world. In the actual history of Christianity this logic did, of course, not fully come into effect for a long time, because for centuries the consciousness available at the time still held down the logic of Christianity in the status of a religious creed and piety that people had, in the form of a literal religion and religious practice by people. It needed the spiritual integration work of centuries until the truth of Christianity, its Spirit or this logic, came home to itself as something in its own right and released itself into its truth as an autonomous, objective psychological reality independent of people’s subjective faith,

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and until it thus became the real logical constitution of consciousness and reality as such. It is the early-modern (neuzeitlich) epoch of the history of the Western mind (roughly from 1400 to 1800 A.D.) during which this logic gradually freed itself from its containment in the shell of the inwardness of personal faith or subjective attitude and came into its own as a general objective reality independent of one’s creed. The moment that this process was concluded, the moment that the logic of Christianity had finally come into its own, around 1800, the early-modern epoch was over, releasing a new epoch out of itself, namely, modernity. The character of “external” or “outer” reality and positivity, the discovery of the “secular” world and man’s settling in it (“secularization”), is one aspect of this process. Another side (equally obvious) is the infinite value that the individual soul, the individual human being, received through this direct focus on the individual in his thisness and positivity. “Jesus Christ wants YOU!”—this zeroing in on the individual in his individuality is a Christian specialty. In Part 2 above on the historicity of neurosis we already discussed the gradual growing of a distinct awareness, and the selfrealization, of the idea of individuality from the Middle Ages onwards. We saw how with the beginning of the 19th century man had logically in fact become an individual. The stage of subjectivity had indeed been reached historically. The breakthrough from containment in the intralogical level of the concept into literalism, positivity, and immediacy is completed. The individual has positivistically been established as the focal point, the locus or battleground where “the essential decisions” happen, the locus of what formerly would have been the locus of truth, 184 of metaphysics, or also the locus of what Jung called “the symbolic life.” What once upon a time, as the form of truth and the logic of reality, used to be released into the whole extent of the world, spread out over all of nature and the whole people and thus was of a cosmic and societal dimension, is being contracted into one point, into the individual 184 “Truth” in such contexts should not be confused with unchangeable, once and for all given definitive “truths” in the plural, i.e., “dogmas,” true propositions,” “scientific truths”, etc. Truth as implied in the present context is logically absolute negative. It is the medium or element in which humans and the world have their place. And it is in itself alive. That is, it can change, develop: it is essentially historical.

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empirical human being in his positivity and isolation. Each individual as this human being that he is becomes the zero point of the entire system of coordinates of reality, the locus of truth, the place of “the absolute.” Truth itself is thus positivized, made into an individual singular entity in the world. c) The materialization of the logic of subjectivity This individuality and subjectivity affected, however, only “consciousness as such.” It concerned the general constitution of man in his self-understanding in modernity, the concept of the existing Concept of man. It remained on the level of personal attitudes, subjective feelings, actually held philosophical views. It was a way of thinking and of experiencing oneself and the world. What I described still represents only a “story,” that is to say, it still remains enclosed within the imaginal or logical sphere. This concept itself, however, had not yet freed itself from the experiential and attitudinal level, from the subject. It had not yet become an objective reality independent of what people think or feel, an equivalent to a fact of nature. As long as it remains a subjective conviction, feeling, stance, the logical shift from the logical into positivity is paradoxically itself still only an idea and remains within the logical sphere. Where does the idea of this positivization itself become a positive-factual reality? The answer to these questions is: in neurosis. And the question of the literal realization of this positivistic individuality in neurosis is the point at which the image of Winkelried’s deed, stemming from a completely different context, comes into play. Neurosis is the event of “Winkelried,” it is the positive-factual happening of the literal sinking of “The Absolute” into an empirically real solitary individual, into it as a positivity. In neurosis “The Absolute” becomes real as the objective facticity of neurotic symptoms. Neurosis as pathology, as phobic fears, obsessive thoughts, compulsive behavior, etc. IS the materialization of “The Absolute” and thus its positivistic presence as mere fact. If we dwell with the two illustrations that we use as visual aids for the essential changes, we see that this process has the two complementary sides, which I represented by means of Uncle Sam and Winkelried. In the case of “Uncle Sam,” a claim, if not an assault, comes to empirical man from outside of his empirical reality, from the imaginal or logical sphere, whereas “Winkelried,” as the paradigmatic

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figure or concept of empirical or civil man, of his own accord directs this “attack” upon himself and rams it into himself. Winkelried construes himself as target, the bull’s-eye target in the strict sense of sole focus and aiming point. Uncle Sam breaks through the image (or concept) level and points at the individual in his singularity. And then, in a second act, this spear (Uncle Sam’s index finger) is grabbed by Winkelried, who rams it into himself. Uncle Sam’s YOU finds its complement in a “Yes, here I am!,” “I report to duty!” (the “I,” Latin “EGO,” must be thought of as being just as capitalized as the “YOU”). Uncle Sam reaches out of the image or concept level, out of its negativity, into positive reality. And this hand is grasped by the person who from the outset has its place in positive reality. In Jung’s theory “Winkelried” expresses itself in the idea that the individual “is the makeweight that tips the scales” (CW 10 § 586) and that “Essential is, in the last analysis, only the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place [...].” 185 This is an enormous process. It amounts to a radical, unheard-of redefinition of man, a reconstitution of the concept of human existence and of the mode of human being-in-the-world. All previous changes of the constitution of consciousness, even when they were truly revolutionary (such as the transition from the constitution of consciousness of the mythological and ritualistic cultures with their drômena and legomena to the stage of reflection and thought, or from the imaginal to representation and to concept, or from polytheism to monotheism, or from Universal to the Individual) nevertheless still remained, as purely intralogical status changes, on the level of the concept. This is so although they always revolutionized at the same time both the consciousness and self-conception of man, on the one hand, and reality, the constitution of really lived life, on the other hand. But with “Winkelried” something incredible happens: now there is a leap out of the sphere of the concept into the immediacy of the positive-factual bodily existence and physical enactment of life of the empirical individual human being, his behavior, suffering, and his attitudes. The concept incarnates itself, turns into a positivity, materializes itself. 185

GW and CW 10 § 315; the first sentence is my translation.

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This is what fundamentally distinguishes neurosis from traditional manifestations of the absolute, as, for example, its manifestation in holy men, in saints, in Indian avatars (such as Sathya Sai Baba, 1926– 2011), in gods appearing in human or animal shape. In manifestations, too, there is, to be sure, something empirically real. But in it something higher, otherworldly, precisely manifests rather than being a literal fact. It merely, if I may say so, manifests: the manifestation is dependent on a truly receptive, believing, convinced consciousness, a consciousness that has been spontaneously won over by the suggestive power of the appearing person or event and sees it as a manifestation. In Hegelian terminology we could say that in manifestations, the absolute is only an sich (implicitly) or for consciousness. It is not for itself. The latter, its being for itself, however, is the case in neurosis. The neurotic symptom does not require our, or the neurotic’s, believing and appreciating it to be the presence of “The Absolute.” It does not require being seen and understood in this way by anybody. It is not a subjective thought or feeling. It simply IS “The Absolute” all by itself, its immediate presence, objectively, as a fact, the fact of a overwhelmingly real symptom. It exerts its absolute power completely irrespective of what any consciousness may think or believe or feel. It doesn’t give a damn (if I may say so) about what we think. The neurotic symptom simply happens, with inevitability. This is what makes it literally absolute, unconditional, and fundamentally objective. Whether you call it a “mania or a god” (CW 13 § 55) is totally irrelevant, just as it is irrelevant (or only of importance for the subjective, private entertainment of people’s consciousness) whether you call an earthquake the voice of god or something caused by some empirical movement of continental plates. The damage and the inevitability are the same. In neurosis “The Absolute” is present simply as a fact, a fundamentally dumb fact outside of the sphere of intelligibility, not so different from earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or other facts of the physical universe whose mechanics can potentially be understood by science, but themselves are devoid of anything intelligible. Absolutely nothing manifests in neurosis or neurotic symptoms. No “meaning,” no revelation, no higher reality. Also no ulterior purpose (such as when Jungians conceive of neurotic

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pathology as a first transitional phase of the individuation process). Just a stupid symptom, and just the absoluteness of the positive facticity of this stupidity. “The Absolute” in neurosis exists as the sheer absoluteness of a fact. And yet, it is, of course, precisely not a full-fledged physical fact, not totally devoid of intelligibility, but much rather the contradiction of something highly intelligible (the metaphysical “The Absolute”) forced, through an artificial Winkelriedian contrivance, down into the reductive status of positivity and total senselessness (mere facticity). The soul’s point with neurosis is precisely its having depleted itself of all meaning and reduced itself to the zero-stage called positivity, naked existence per se (i.e., positive existence of nothing substantial). Neurosis is the one point, the one empirical phenomenon, in which the new Concept of the human soul and the modern logic of human existence as totally sunken into sheer positivity and reduced to zero manifests itself objectively in unadulterated, literal, exemplary form. The fact that the neurotic symptoms are foreign even to the very subject in whom they occur and that the latter feels helpless vis-à-vis them reminds us of the dissociation that goes on in a really existing neurosis, the dissociation between the soul and the ego-personality, between the demands of The Absolute and everyday pragmatic, commonsensical concerns, between the night- and the day-person, Mr. Hyde and Dr. Jekyll. It is the Winkelriedian act, the soul’s argumentum ad personam, that inevitably leads to and performs the dissociation: both are concomitant. The moment that The Absolute is immersed into positive-factual reality and neurosis established, the moment that the logic of incarnation becomes an objective fact independent of what the subject thinks or feels, this subject has to split apart into two unbridgeably dissociated partial I’s that are deaf to and ignorant of each other. This has to be so because the subject cannot have this absolute importance of being the locus of The Absolute as long as it exists as encompassing subject, as homo totus. It can have this unheard-of importance only neurotically, only as Mr. Hyde, as the split-off night-person. For if the subject as the whole man were fully conscious and explicitly lived this absolute importance, it would have destroyed itself as respectable subject. By openly coming forward and owning up to this importance it would show itself, not only before others, but also

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before itself, as hopelessly inflated, deluded, perhaps psychotic. The thesis of the individual subject’s central importance could not hold up. Too well the subject knows, too deeply it has experienced, its human, all-too-humanness, its relative insignificance and fallibility, to fall for this thesis. It would immediately see through it as a lie. At best it could entertain such a claim as its own wishful thinking, a pleasant dream. But here, in neurosis, it is supposed to be seriously entertained, in all earnest. It is supposed to have the status of an unshakeable immediate present reality. This extreme importance can only hold up if it, on the one hand, and the subject, on the other hand, are totally immunized against each other, in other words, if this importance is given the status of a secret even for this subject itself. That very subject that actively accumulates all “metaphysical” importance in or upon itself, must, in doing this, stay unwitting and totally innocent, nothing but an ordinary, down-to-earth and reasonably thinking civil man (Mr. Jekyll, the day-person). Only by absolutely hiding its own Winkelriedian doing from itself can the soul perform it and get the benefit from it. Winkelried is dependent on neurosis and can take place only within it. Therefore the “person” who as “Winkelried” grasps “Uncle Sam’s” extended hand is not a concrete human individual, not the neurotic. It is the Concept of person, the Concept of homo totus. Both Uncle Sam’s claiming the YOU and the I’s reporting to duty in response to this summoning occur within the logic of the soul, completely hidden (dissociated) from the self-understanding of the empirical human being in whom this dual process takes place. The creation of the positive facticity and objectivity of “The Absolute” in the shape of neurotic symptoms happens in the hinterland of the soul’s absolute negativity, “behind the scenes.” The neurotic in actual reality finds himself in this Concept as his reality. Using the imagery of the Enchanted Princess fairytale we can say that it is the demon who says: “I want YOU as my bride-beloved!,” and it is the princess as the night-world person (completely dissociated from her as day-world person) who answers: “Yes, here I am, forever yours!” Whereas the princess as day-world person is completely unaware of this handshake and has nothing to do with it. The reason why this has to be so is, of course, that all this happens in a post-metaphysical age, in the world of exclusive horizontality.

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During the time of metaphysics the fundamental difference between the ultimate, infinite truth, on the one hand, and finite, imperfect empirical reality subject to contingencies, on the other hand, was objectively provided as an ontological if not cosmological given. Therefore the soul could simply and legitimately avail itself of this difference and release itself (and its fantasies) into it. But in the world of horizontality, of positivity and facticity, the difference has to be positive-factually established in each case as an empirically real dissociation. An imitation of verticality within the world of horizontality can only be brought about through an absolute exclusion, tabooing, concealment. Neurosis means that inversion or swallowing through which the whole is reductively construed as an internal part, a mere moment: the whole man, homo totus, the encompassing subject, the existing Concept, is reduced to a partial I that is radically repressed, i.e., excluded from consciousness and from the participation of the soul’s continued development. A prime example of this inversion, even if only on the level of theory, is the Jungian Self, the wholeness of the personality, which has to eke out an existence in the absolutely hidden underworldly dungeon of each person’s inner, in “the unconscious.” Only imagine: the self! The place of what formerly was the comprehensive subjectivity as a surround remains empty, no, it has even altogether disappeared from the system of the personality. It is no longer a “slot” or “office” within this system waiting for a new incumbent. Indeed, it is not even missed anymore: because it is now thought to be something in the person (and to be a something! A particular content, an object to be experienced. And a content whose wholeness consists in nothing but that it is semantically called “the whole”). We could express the same reductive inversion process in three other ways: the very subjectivity of the subject has been turned into an object within the subject; the soul’s absolute negativity has been redefined as a positivity; and the wholeness as the syntax of the subject has become semanticized.

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2. THE THEOLOGY OF NEUROSIS AND “THE NEUROTIC” AS THE FIGURE OF EXEMPLARY MAN

Individual neurotics, inasmuch as they are the real empirical presence of the neurosis in particularized form and inasmuch as the logic of the individual as battleground and “makeweight that tips the scale” has become an objective fact, are in their neuroticness exemplary people.186 They unwittingly and unintentionally, indeed against their own volition, live the truth,187 and they live it for all the other people who are not neurotic, for society at large. They live it literally, so that the other people may be free from having to live it. In the modern post-metaphysical, post-religious world, the neurotics are logically much the same as what, in religious times, hermits, priests, monks and nuns, holy men and woman were, who lived for society as a whole— for all the other people, so that they might be free to live for the pursuit of their livelihood and ordinary human happiness—an exemplary life solely devoted to what Jung called “the symbolic life.” As hermits or monks, they were, as Hegel put it,188 “sacrificed by their people and exiled from the world to the end that the eternal should be contemplated and served by lives devoted solely thereto.” Neurosis, too, or the neurotic soul, exiles neurotics from ordinary, healthy life and forces them to live the counter-natural, unproductive, even sick life of the celebration of the neurotic “The Absolute,” of the absolute zero of meaning in its positive factual and literal existence. This is the difference to what Jung had in mind with the symbolic life and Hegel with a life devoted solely to the contemplation of the eternal: Jung’s and Hegel’s ideas were concerned with the devotion to absolute negativity. Neurosis is therefore the reversal into the opposite of the religious life, because as the positivization of absolute negativity it is both the positivized absoluteness (of absolute negativity) appearing 186 But this should by no means be understood in the sense of Jung’s personalistic statement that the neurotics are “actually human beings of a ‘higher’ type,” “driven towards higher consciousness by an irresistible urge” (CW 7 § 291, transl. modif.). Whereas my statement is about the figure or image of the neurotic, Jung’s statement is about real people who are neurotic. 187 The particular modern truth about man or human existence, not that truth we talked about earlier (the truth of the experience of life that comes as an “assault” to the human subject). 188 Hegel’s Science of Logic, transl. by A.V. Miller, Atlantic Highlands, NJ (Humanities Paperback Library) 1989, p. 26.

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as the absolute compellingness and inevitability with which neurotic symptoms invade the neurotics’ conscious, goal-directed, normal life, recklessly claiming them for the neurotic soul as its executing agents, AND the negativity aspect (of absolute negativity) positivized as nothing, namely as the total senselessness and meaninglessness, the silliness, of the symptoms. What we have discussed so far allows us to give a psychological interpretation of neurosis. Neurosis as a decidedly modern phenomenon is the veri-fication of the Christian Incarnation. Just as I said above, that what I described still represents only a “story” and “Winkelried” is himself no more than an image, so Jung insisted that “Christ as understood by the Church is to me a spiritual, i.e., mythological being; even his humanity is divine ...” (Letters 2, p. 164, to White, 10 April 1954). That is to say, even the man Jesus, even the historical Jesus, is mythological, imaginal, or divine. I think this is true for historical and Church Christianity. We just need to look at the paintings of the nativity scene. Actually, in tune with the idea of kenôsis (the divine Son’s emptying himself of his divinity, Phil. 2:5-8), Christ is born under the most undignified, lowest possible conditions, homeless, in a stable, between ox and ass, placed in a manger! But the Christian imagination as documented in the paintings of the Middle Ages and later nevertheless shows the sublime glory of this baby Christ and the whole nativity scene, with halos, angels, the rich beauty of Mary’s cloak, her purity and being untouched by her miserable surroundings. Obviously, even Christ’s earthly humanity is divine (in the traditional Christian imagination). In neurosis, however, the Christian Incarnation, which at first was only a notion, an idea, had itself become incarnated. In each neurotic the logic of the Incarnation exists in the flesh. Instead of an incarnation of the Incarnation, i.e., the application of the concept of Incarnation to itself, we could even speak of the interment of the Incarnation, its burial in earthly reality (terra). This is why neurosis sticks with the misery which shows itself as nothing but misery, only as the undignified, disgraceful form of the stupidity and banality of symptoms. Neurosis is the positively existing Concept of the Incarnation, its having come down to earth. Incarnation of the Incarnation means its positivization, literalization, its presence as fact.

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In this sense, the neurotic (to the extent that he is neurotic, not he as he is in his normal phases or aspects) is the positivized copula, the literalized Atlas or Jesus Christ. But whereas the real Atlas as the fundamentally mythological copula (the copula that belongs to the sphere of the soul and thus to absolute negativity) held the psychic opposites, Heaven and Earth, apart, and whereas in Jesus Christ the human and the divine were, despite their conjunction, neatly distinct, in neurosis as the incarnation of the Incarnation the opposites are shortcircuited. They collapse into each other. Nothing is opened up. There is total coagulation and self-occlusion. Interment, after all.189 The literalization of the copula, of the “This is He,” has the consequence that the coniunctio oppositorum performed by Atlas (which is the contradictory unity of the unity and difference of the opposites) is reversed into neurotic dissociation. Just as the separation of the opposites makes paradoxically their coniunctio and the copula possible, so the very copula (vinculum, ligamentum), when coagulated and collapsed into itself, paradoxically produces the unbridgeable difference (of the literal identity [short-circuitedness, not unity!] AND difference of “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” disgraceful symptom and Sacred Festival). Jung, at least the Jung of the Red Book,190 insists: “You should all become Christs” (p. 234b). The Red Book blames Christians for waiting “for redeemers who should take the agony on themselves for you, and totally spare you Golgatha” (p. 254a). “To be Christ oneself is the true following of Christ” (p. 254n). We see from these ideas (as well as from Jung’s critique of the Church view of Christ in his cited letter to Victor 189 We have to distinguish this interment both from prehistoric and ancient burials of kings and nobles and from the burial of Christ. In those prehistoric burials it was the glory of the kings or noble persons that was interred, namely, in the shape of precious treasures as grave objects or, as in Egyptian pyramids the highly artistic adornment of grave chambers. Interment here means: sensuous, ritual representation of absolute negativity and celebration of its glory. When Christ was buried, it was the tormented body of the Crucified in his misery that was interred, without precious treasures or adornments. But here, too, absolute negativity soon showed itself, however, in no longer sensual, but logical or spiritual form: in the dialectic of the empirical side (the empty grave with nothing to show, i.e., empirical, literal nothingness) and the metaphysical side (the glory of the Risen Christ). Interment in neurosis, by contrast, means positivity, disappearance from sight and actual experience of the glory of the Sacred Festival in its own impenetrable darkness and solidity as “earth” and “fact.” 190 C.G. Jung, The Red Book. Liber Novus, edited and introduction by Sonu Shamdasani, New York and London (Norton) 2009, “a” and “b” after page numbers mean left or right column respectively, “n” means footnote.

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White) that Jung is captivated by the vision of an application of the incarnation to itself, that is, the idea of the incarnation of the Incarnation or the positivization of the copula. Jung wants to take the “humanity of Christ” out of its status as a “spiritual, mythological” or theological idea (a dogmatic idea), i.e., out of mythology’s Heaven, and stuff it into each literal positivistic human individual (i.e., mythology’s the Earth)—an undoing of the separation of the World Parents. With respect to its form, Jung thereby performs the Winkelried move. But only with respect to its form. For his idea remains precisely in the same spiritual status for which he criticized the Church idea of Christ, inasmuch as it is only an idea or fantasy of his, something preached (“You should all become Christs”), which ipso facto shows that it is not realized, not made true, not simply fact. The literal positivistic human individuals are not Christs. Jung merely moved within his theological fantasy or theory from the idea of the historical Christ to the idea of the concrete human individual here and now as “the makeweight that tips the scales” and “the measure of all things” (CW 10 §§ 586, 523). He merely “dreamed” and “preached” the incarnation of the incarnation that he longed for, just as he wanted to “dream the myth onwards.” But he did not manage to actually reach the real individual. Here neurosis is superior. It does not claim, wish, or preach. It does not dream or talk about anything that “should” or “ought to” be. It simply is. Thus it is the real Winkelried, Winkelried as real event and fact (in contrast to the mere mental idea of Winkelried). Neurosis succeeds, has always already succeeded, in ramming its “The Absolute” into the chest of the real human being in whom it makes itself felt, without in the least being dependent on and involving his subjective thoughts and feelings. Its supreme idea appears with brutal power as accomplished fact and literal reality (“neurotic symptom”) in the literal individual. Neurosis is the veri-fied incarnation, and the neurotic is the positive-factual presence of the positivized copula. In neurosis the move of the “battleground” of “the metaphysical world” (or of “the light’s fight against darkness”) “into the inner” of the human soul (CW 13 § 293, transl. modif.) has indeed been accomplished, really performed. Neurosis is the veri-fied incarnation of the Incarnation not only because of its formal positivity-and-facticity aspect, but also because of its second semantic aspect, its depleting itself to total senselessness.

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For the Incarnation does not merely mean the entrance of God into the empirical world in the person of Jesus. This is only its first beginning. The fulfillment of the Incarnation in the Christian story is only reached with the fulfillment or absolute culmination of the kenôsis, and it happens with Christ’s experience expressed in his last words on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”191 The loss of God, of the ground of all meaning, throws the Crucified totally back upon himself as atomic individual and upon his human, all-too-humanness. By representing the empirically real total emptying of all meaning, the soul takes in neurosis the kenôsis literally upon itself and not only incarnates the Incarnation also in this respect, but also completes the Winkelriedian move. The figure of the neurotic as exemplary man no longer has his place in the concept, in truth. He stands conceptless, unaware, disoriented out in the open192: because he himself became the locus and container of the concept—in his inner, his “unconscious”—, the container of that concept which previously had always been the encompassing medium or sphere of his existence, and had been “encompassing” because of its absolute negativity. Hölderlin (in his poem “Blödigkeit”) had asked, “Geht auf Wahrem dein Fuß nicht, wie auf Teppichen?” (“Does your foot not walk on instances of truth, as if on carpets?”). The softness of carpets in Hölderlin’s poem points to the absolute negativity of truth. Today, Hölderlin’s question must be categorically denied. Now truth is the positivistic event of strong emotions in me, my grief, my depression and despair, my anger, my traumatization, my excitement, thrill, entertainment, fun, peak experiences, etc. And whereas the image of the carpet expresses the fact that for Hölderlin truth is still the infinitely extended ground of man’s psychological existence, truth now has receded into the pointlike, momentary positive-factual events of strong emotions and symptomatic behavior in the solitary individual (as well 191 See on this point my “God Must Not Die! C.G. Jung’s Thesis of the OneSidedness of Christianity,” in: Spring 2010, Vol. 84 (God Must Not Die! Or Must He?), Fall 2010, pp. 11–71. 192 We may here recall Jung’s view about the extra ecclesiam state, although his view has a different background and, within the horizon of his thinking, a different intentionality: “... well, then you are legitimately extra ecclesiam. But extra ecclesiam nulla salus; then things really become terrible, because you are no more protected, you are no more in the consensus gentium, .... You are alone and you are confronted with all the demons of hell” (CW 18 § 632).

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as in the masses of solitary individuals). It is the truth of modern human existence that the dimension of truth has been abolished. With the Winkelriedian appropriation of the kenôsis by the soul in neurosis we come back to our interpretation, presented in Part 1, ch. 5 (“Morbus sacer”), of the figure of the neurotic as real-life image of the suffering God-man in the shape of a servant. But I should not speak of an interpretation. When, for example, according to Marx the truth about man as wage laborer is, “that his activity therefore appears to him as a torment, ..., his life as a sacrifice of his life, the realisation of his nature as making his life unreal, ..., and he himself, the lord of his creation, as the servant of this creation,” 193 then this is a clairvoyant interpretation of the valid form of existence that Man found himself in during the 19 th century. Whereas most of the time during this century exemplary (i.e., truly productive) Man was imaged in the figure of the artist, for Marx the laborer is the figure of the truly productive and thus exemplary Man. The laborer, Marx realizes, without, however, using this expression, is the suffering God-man in the shape of a servant, inasmuch as he is the lord of his creation, but appears as the servant of his creation, he suffers (his activity is torment), he realizes his existence by sacrificing or losing his life. All this is the interpretation by a great mind, and it has its place in the interpreting mind. But there is no need to interpret the neurotic as the suffering Godman. In him this interpretation is itself a lived reality, an empirical fact and precisely no longer an “interpretation of ....” It has become objective. By this I do not merely mean to refer to the fact that this interpretation is not in the consciousness of the neurotic; that he does not see himself as God-man in the shape of a servant and maybe has not even the least idea of such a concept; that he by no means identifies with this figure. To the extent that he is neurotic, he is the being-identical with the God-man. He has to live it objectively, without himself having the least idea about it. 194 The identity lives itself out in him. 193 Karl Marx, “Auszüge aus James Mills Buch ‘Éléments d’économie politique,’” MEW, Erg.-Bd. I, Berlin 1973, p. 451. Engl. transl. (by Clemens Dutt?) according to http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/james-mill/index.htm. 194 Just as until recently man lived on the basis of his genes, cells, hormones, etc., without having any inkling of them.

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But all this he still has precisely in common with Marx’s wage laborer. What makes the figure of the neurotic truly stand out and gives it singular significance (over against the figure of the laborer as well as that of the artist) is that the neurotic symptom itself performs this “interpretation.” It exists as this interpretation. The neurotic symptom is neither a natural event or phenomenon (like earthquakes or pneumonia), nor a historical fate or a social condition (like the situation of the 19th century wage laborer). Rather, precisely as positive fact it is an arrangement, a mise en scène, a sly counter-factual production by the soul. Neurosis is the self-representation or selfdisplay of the interpretation or concept “suffering God-man in the shape of a servant,” this interpretation as an empirical reality in its own right. In neurosis this concept gives itself its physically lived factual reality. This is why it needs no interpretation. It has its interpretation in itself, as its very essence and internal cause. And precisely for this reason neurosis is the fully incarnated Incarnation. The concept has totally come home to itself. The word, the interpretation, has become flesh. Neurosis is therefore enfleshed theology, but as such precisely no longer theology as a faith or doctrine, and not as anything religious or sacred. There is no relation to God in it, no upward-looking or worship, precisely because it is enfleshed and interred (materialized) theology, theology positivized as quasi-natural fact and immediacy. For Marx the 19 th century reality of the laborer came first, his interpretation came thereafter. In neurosis this “first and thereafter” have been collapsed into one, which is why neurosis is fundamentally unillumining, occluded, dumb (whereas Marx’s interpretation provides a great insight). Neurosis is, so to speak, a hysteron proteron. The “interpretation,” the “arrangement,” comes (at least logically) first, although factually both moments are, of course, equiprimordial. “The suffering God-man in the shape of a servant” in neurosis shows in the simultaneity of supernaturally beautiful bride of the prince and disgusting cinderella; of delusion of grandeur and feeling of total worthlessness; of celebration of the Sacred Festival Drama and the disgracefulness of the pathological character and the stupidity of the same; of fiat absolutum et pereat homo. They are the lived truth and reality of the neurotic person.

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If, as we said in Part 1, ch. 5, man is, in neurosis, the slave shape of himself as the absent God, then this indicates that in modernity the Incarnation, which culminates in the loss of God, has historically been fulfilled and made true, that, furthermore, the absence of God was also keenly and painfully felt, but nevertheless not allowed to be true, not allowed to be released into its being true. A life without God seemed to be unthinkable for the soul. The latter held on to the idea that it is indispensable to have a God. But how could the presence of God become real if the absence of God had been the soul’s own real experience? The possibility chosen by the soul was, so to speak, to take the bull by the horns: to expressly seize precisely the really experienced absolute absence (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”) and the absolute alienation of the divine shape into the servant shape and to interiorize them into the very core of the soul as its very being, to adopt them as its actual bodily existence—to become identical with them. Small wonder that in neurosis the soul performs the expulsion of man out of his ordinary state of being exposed to the flow of time and the “Eleatic” freezing of time into absolutely perpetuated disappointment (Part 4, chapter 1). There must not be any facing of fate and simple resigned suffering from the experienced misfortune. Neurosis lets the soul evade objective experience for the subjectivity of infinite pain feelings, and redefines the misfortune as unthinkable. Only in this way does it become absolute and turn into the “crucifixion” of the “God-man.” But thereby, through the crucifixion, the soul paradoxically (Kierkegaard), and only paradoxically, immediately turns into the Risen, Resurrected One. Thus “God,” too, is rescued, because in the suffering servant shape the soul as human subject is the incarnated presence of the absent God. That this has the character of a paradox means: this is not, as in classical Christianity and in metaphysics, the dialectic of crucifixion and exalted Christ, but the neurotic dissociation of both extremes, a flat identity divided by the modern unbridgeable difference. The “paradox” and that “leap” that for Kierkegaard was still lying in the future and was seen as a task to be achieved, have become in neurosis an always already really existing logical structure, the structure of neurotic dissociation. Neurosis is the

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Kierkegaardian leap, but not, as in Kierkegaard, deferred into the future as an act to be performed and not as a utopia, but as hardcore permanent being that re-enacts itself ever anew. As a “leap” it is not transition, not transformation, not a process of sublation, but paradox: a simultaneous positing of an unbridgeable hiatus in the sense of the modern intentional logic of the function (Frege, Husserl) and a standing on both sides at once. This is what “Winkelried” achieves: the seizure of the unthinkable loss of God and its absolute absorption into the self195 and thus the self ’s identity with the suffering God-man in the empirical-phenomenal shape of servant who in his “crucifixion” celebrates his absolutely hidden exaltation as the risen Lord of the world. It is, we might put it, the realization/“verification” of Kierkegaard’s thought, the conversion of what the latter thought into immediate positive-factual being, into lived, unreflected reality. What in Kierkegaard was an envisioned program has become a realized product that can be manufactured by the soul as if on a conveyor belt in countless individuals. The neurotic does not know anything of this. He is solely concerned with, driven to be concerned with, the specific topics of his symptoms, the dog to be avoided, the hands to be obsessively washed, the rage to be shown at authority figures, the vomiting of the food eaten, etc., symptoms in which, as tiny particularized and banal everyday-life exemplifications, the Kierkegaardian theology is in fact enfleshed, but also precisely disappears from sight (selfocclusion). To the insight that the neurotic does not know anything about this theology at work in his neurosis, we now have to add that he does not have to know anything about it either. He must merely be freed from his being identical. It is not the idea of the God-man in the shape of a servant that needs to be redeemed and emerge for the neurotic in a different, purer, more sublime form. On the contrary, it must be let go of altogether, so that the neurotic can again become simply a human being who knows that “I am only that!,”196 neither servant-shape, nor God-man. Instead of, just like that, ramming in Winkelried manner the spearhead of the 195 196

“Self ” here and throughout not to be confused with Jung’s idea of the Self. C.G. Jung, MDR p. 325.

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experienced absence of God into its own chest and in this way positivizing it, the soul must learn to let this absence simply be and prevail; to release it into its absolute negativity. 197 An ever new relentless distinguishing himself from that which in concrete practical reality prevents the neurotic from “simply being only that” is in principle all that is needed for the liberation from neurosis. Through the pathological and disgraceful character inherent in the neurotic identity with the God-man in the shape of the servant, neurosis has discredited itself and reduced itself to absurdity. The soul has objectively demonstrated to itself the ghostliness of the attempt not to let the in fact already experienced absence of God be the valid truth, through a Winkelriedian kind of “identification with the aggressor.” And this may even point to the historical meaning or purpose of neurosis: a last desperate indulgence in holding on to the insistence on presence as the only possibility left, as an attempt of a rescue of the old religiousmetaphysical mode of being-in-the-world, an indulgence which, however, openly demonstrates as untenable that very presence that is at stake and the holding on to it as simply sick—neurotic, after all. And thus its real-life self-refutation. In therapy there is no need to immerse oneself in the least into the theology that is the psychological background of one’s own concrete complexes, because this would only mean feeding them even more, boosting them up, and upholding their “sacred” character once more. On the contrary, demythologization, demystification, desacralization—and thus also emancipation from the soul—are the watchwords. All one’s concentration has to go to the “only that!” It needs to be given all the weight. Everything else must be seen only to the extent necessary for becoming able to explicitly cast it off. 197 The “only that!” is the non-neurotic incarnation of the Incarnation.—Christianity and metaphysics, by contrast, do not live, do not have to live, with or in the “only that!” From the outset they authentically have a God and know man to be the child of God and to be redeemed. They hold Heaven and Earth apart, performing the dialectic of the unity of unity and difference of the opposites.—Jung’s scheme is again different. He wants man to become aware of and integrate the Shadow (Evil) and thereby redeem the fundamentally unconscious God. Structurally, this his scheme follows the logic of dissociation and interment. His Good-Evil opposition is the theoretical equivalent of what in neurosis is the enfleshed relation of empirically accessible disgraceful symptom and inaccessible glory of the Sacred Festival.

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The question whether the “only that!” is the last word, or perhaps not,198 does not arise—unless one has in fact already freely and relentlessly settled in the “only that!” First, all the old bills have to be paid.

3. THE SOUL PURPOSE OF NEUROSIS AS A CULTURAL PHENOMENON Neurosis is not merely a personal illness, a mishap that needs to be understood strictly in terms of the individual suffering from it, that is, in terms of the patient’s life history, psychic predispositions, and his social environment. Neurosis is also a cultural phenomenon and as such has a cultural function, a function that realizes itself through all the many individuals who become neurotic, who serve, we could almost say, as its, neurosis’s, “pawns.” 199 In order to understand something of the cultural function and telos of neurosis, we have to return to the idea of its restoration character. I pointed out that the neurotic soul already knows that “the loss” (of the “ancien régime”) it 198 Jung, at least, thinks (ibid.) that it is not the last word, and rightly so! Man only fulfills his humanity if he succeeds in transcending it, if he transcends his human-animal nature. “L’humain n’est humain que par ce qu’il suggère de surhumain, et celui-là n’est vraiment homme qui ne se transforme d’homme en plus qu’homme” (Valéry). Let me insert here, merely by way of a pointer, a quote from a paper of mine about the Greek god Pan’s incapability to catch up with the nymph Echo. I wrote (in: W.G., The Flight Into the Unconscious, Coll. Engl. Papers, vol. 5, New Orleans, LA [Spring Journal Books] 2013, p. 228.): “This incapability is due, I would say, to Pan’s impotence to really love. Real love would give him wings with which he could go beyond himself, follow Echo and actually reach her. But with his goat legs, he can only be potent in the tangible sphere of sexual desire and thus, after Echo’s self-transcendence, has to stay empty-handed on the ground.” Everything that serves the gratification of our material needs, our work and success in industry and in economic life at large, is no doubt very important. But even if it requires the greatest intelligence, high academic training, and extraordinary skills, it nevertheless has its place only on the lowest rung of the hierarchy of human activities and experiences. Although it is very different, in particular content, from the interests of goat-legged Pan and his modern variant (man out for fun and entertainment), it occurs on the same level on which he lives. True humanness has not yet been sighted. It comes only into play when something is done for no pragmatic purpose at all, as an end in itself: “not for any practical gain, but for the sake of blessedness” (Hegel), we could also say: for the presence of truth. The questions, of course, are (1) how this selftranscendence can legitimately take place under the conditions of modernity and (2) whether Jung’s particular proposal (in terms of “the limitlessness of the unconscious” and “the Self”) is based on the full payment by him (and his followers) of the bills that modernity presented to him (and us). Concerning the first question, one essential point is that modern man can no longer have his self-transcendence (as a mythic, religious, or metaphysical presupposition or belief system), but now, as born man, has to be it, through a logical act of self-constitution. 199 On neurosis as cultural phenomenon, as the neurosis, see esp. Introduction, ch. 2, and Part 6, ch. 1.

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is concerned with and troubled by has irrevocably happened and that it is already in the status of modernity and adulthood; it operates from the standpoint of this knowledge. I also showed that if a neurosis gives the impression of wanting to hold on to a childhood paradise, the “childhood paradise” that it is allegedly defending is, rather than an archetypal truth, a thoroughly modern idea, a new invention, an abstract utopian concept of a “childhood paradise,” that is merely retrojected into the past. Now we can add that the childhood-adulthood opposition must primarily not at all be seen in biographical terms, but historically and culturally. Neurosis as such is solidly standing on the ground of modernity (and thus also of psychological adulthood). This, its standing in modernity and adulthood, means that man is no longer (and has been comprehended as no longer being) the child of God or gods. Nor is he still the child of Mother Nature, as he used to be in all periods of pre-modern times (i.e., during the time of myths and metaphysics). The sympathetic unity with the world has been lost. Man stands, on the contrary, irrevocably vis-à-vis the world and above nature, which conversely has become, now in its guise as the modern “environment,” his problem child that needs to be protected by him. He has been thrown back upon himself, is no longer embedded in nature as the metaphysical ground of existence, which in turn is no longer grounded in the divine ground. It is adulthood in this sense that has been objectively reached and it is correspondingly childhood (in this sense) that lies behind man. Man now has come of age and become an adult in a supra-personal, historical sense: in his Concept. As long as man had metaphysically and practically been the child of nature and of the gods, childhood was not glorified and deemed important. One did not long to go back to childhood or experienced adulthood as a loss of childhood. Augustinus even said that it would be better to be dead than to have to go back to childhood, which appeared to him, and probably to many others too, as a horror.200 The fact that since the Romantics, childhood has, by contrast, often become identified with the idea of a kind of paradise, betrays the modernity of this idea of paradise. It betrays that it has its origin in a situation where man is placed into an infinite openness, into the gap or lacuna 200

Augustinus, De civitate dei, book 21, chapter 14.

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of a difference, différance (Derrida), Unterschied (Heidegger). Human existence in modernity is not metaphysically grounded, but in its depths knows itself to be existence over an Abgrund, an abyss. The feeling of this openness, difference, abyss can produce utopian hopes and ideological ideas by way of compensation, such as the idea of a paradise, which—since in positivistic modernity, bound to the Abgrund, paradise cannot be understood anymore metaphysically as the ground of existence—had to be projected on something empiricalfactual to prop it up. Anything not positive-factual had become unacceptable, mere superstition or illusion. Verticality had become equal to irreality. The vertical guiding difference concerning the understanding of time, namely the difference between ever-present eternity and the temporal or secular, made way for the modern horizontality for which the present is defined by the guiding difference of past and future, as we learned from Luhmann. In each individual’s personal childhood modern man had the empirical experience of something that had been irretrievably lost for every adult. As such the idea of childhood offered itself as a perfect object or foil to project (or rather retroject) the new utopian longings upon. The former metaphysical notion of childhood (“child of God”) was translated into the language of everyday reality and identified with the literal empirical childhood on the horizontal timeline. This is how a theme that concerns the logic (metaphysic, psychology) of human existence and humanity at large has been stuffed into the narrow confines of personal biography and has, at the same time, become positivized. Personalistic psychology to a large degree owes its existence to this development. Man now has come of age and become an adult in a supra-personal, historical sense and has ipso facto left childhood irrevocably behind (in the sense of being a child of nature or gods). We could describe this revolutionary rupture in history also in other terms. Such a description would point to the revolution in logic that happened during the 19th century. Whereas once there was the copula in metaphysical logic (the logic of the judgement), modern man with his functional logic (Frege) has a lacuna instead. The copula, the conjunctive bond that reflectively joined the world together with itself, has been lost. Otherness with a capital O, an unbridgeable difference and différance, rule.

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By way of a third description we could say: Modern man has no longer any substance. Along with Mother Nature and the divine ground of nature herself, substance or semantic content as such have been lost. Man is already on the level of logical form, the level a syntax. He is already spirit and no longer, substantially, the child (Son) of God. A fourth way to describe this fundamental change would be to say that man has come down to earth from outer space, from his original “E.T. existence,” which now, from the standpoint down here, is viewed as an existence in cloud-cuckoo-land. He has begun to see himself as belonging to the animal kingdom and has taken off his mythical garments, the garments that metaphysically he used to wear while he was still a descendent of the gods. He has lost all his higher aspirations and higher illusions, living only according to pragmatic, if not cynical principles, that is to say, not according to principles at all, but guided by his immediate empirical interests. 201 All these are different ways of describing the same fact: that man has come down to earth and grown up to be an adult in the human history sense. However, the fact that this is the fact is psychologically not enough, not sufficient for the soul. A factual event, and thus also this new fact in the history of the soul, is psychologically just a beginning. A fact qua fact is external, and this means external to the soul. If the fact is relevant to the soul (which it is, of course, in the case of facts in the history of the soul itself ), then the experienced fact needs to come home to the soul, needs to be inwardized in addition to merely being a fact, or having happened as event, or subsisting as a reality. It has to be exchanged from the currency of the physis into the soul’s own currency. Consciousness has to appropriate it, make it its own. The situation that it factually finds itself in has to be integrated: become decomposed, digested, and reconstituted. As a fact it exists only an sich, implicitly. The soul has to make it für sich, explicit. What is already psychologically real, in addition has to be made psychologically true (released into its truth). Facts are not enough. We are here not in physics, but in psychology. In physics, facts are all there is, and they are perfectly sufficient. For the soul it is obviously 201 With all these statements I am talking about modern man as such, the psychological Concept of man, the anthropos, as it were, not about all the countless individual people whose behavior and psychological makeup is both unpredictable and not a topic of psychology.

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not even sufficient to have a wholesale insight into the fact of the historical rupture that we talked about, into the loss of a previous mode of being-in-the-world and of its de facto already having been catapulted into a new mode of being-in-the-world. What it needs in addition is that this rupture, this loss, is painstakingly demonstrated in detail. Also, it is obviously not sufficient to have an insight about it only intellectually. The soul needs to expressly acquire this insight on an existential level in addition to any intellectual understanding. The insight must, as it were, incarnate; consciousness must be initiated into it. How can an insight be existentially acquired? How can consciousness be initiated into modernity, that modernity in which it already lives? There are two points to be noted. First, intellectually or content-wise it cannot suffice for consciousness to be simply presented with a new situation as that which it needs to absorb as a positive finished result. Consciousness cannot simply be asked to “swallow” the fact that it lives in modernity or adulthood. Rather it will have to go the negative way of learning, the way of the systematic refutation and destruction of each and every possible way in which the utopian premise of the absolute principle and its celebration might be defended. One by one all subterfuges must be cut off. It has to find out for itself that there is no feasible alternative to modernity, no way to get out of it and hold on to any utopian hopes or ideals. Consciousness202 will have to have seen with its own eyes that in practical reality none of them work. It is a way of disappointment and dis-illusionment. This last statement already leads over to the second point, which concerns the emotional aspect of initiation. The insight that not a single one of the utopian escape routes is tenable has to be painfully suffered through so as to become inscribed into the flesh, so to speak. Consciousness has to learn the hard way. On both counts, it is a working off of something untenable and not the presentation of a positive content, a new meaning. This is why the factual historical process in which the dissolution of the archaic mythical, or the later metaphysical, substance has already 202 Again: the consciousness of modern man at large, of the Concept of man, not each individual’s personal consciousness.

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happened has to be complemented, and repeated, by a psychological process to bring consciousness existentially down to the situation of modernity. But since historically any metaphysical substance is already gone, the soul has to posit a substitute for it, provide a simulation of it. It erects the utopia of an absolute principle as the closest modern, abstract analogy to the former mythical or metaphysical substance, equips it with highest suggestive power and fascination and inflates individual empirical persons with it, tempting, indeed forcing, them to try this out as a way out of modernity. But this, the soul’s luring itself onto the way of escape from modernity, is for the sole purpose of exposing the fascination of an absolute principle to the acid test and giving itself a real chance of step by step working it off. This whole roundabout procedure, as we have seen, is necessary because a correct intellectual insight into the fact of our having arrived in modernity does not yet in a psychologically real way and explicitly bring consciousness down from the implicit height of a traditional mythical or metaphysical standpoint, down to the modern standpoint of an earthly existence that is no longer grounded in nature and its divine ground, the absolute. 203 Because the metaphysical absolute and man’s embeddedness in nature had factually indeed dissolved with the transition to the industrial mode of production, but because man nevertheless kept to psychologically still being informed or haunted by some vague idea or feeling of an absolute, the locus of man’s existence, elevated or inflated by the idea of this absolute as it was, had suddenly turned into a cloudcuckoo-land,204 which it had precisely not been as long as myth and later metaphysics had provided man with a grounded knowledge of the absolute (both logically and practically, economically grounded: nature had quite literally been the ground of existence). 203 C.G. Jung may serve as a case in point. He clearly had understood and explicitly articulated the fact of the fundamental rupture in history, the “fall of the stars,” etc., but had not allowed this insight to initiate him into modernity. See also my “The Disenchantment Complex. C.G. Jung and the Modern World,” Chapter 3 in my The Flight Into the Unconscious, New Orleans (Spring Journal Books) 2013. 204 With this word I allude to a passage in a letter by Jung of 9 April 59 (cited in note 8 to a letter to Freud dated 11 Feb. 10, Letters I, p. 19) in which Jung called what he had written in his early letter to Freud “an unfortunately inexpungable reminder of the incredible folly that filled the days of my youth. The journey from cloud-cuckooland back to reality lasted a long time. In my case Pilgrim’s Progress consisted in my having to climb down a thousand ladders until I could reach out my hand to the little clod of earth that I am.”

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So rationally, intellectually, man had come down into modernity. He had lost all illusions. But deep down, unwittingly, implicitly, psychologically, he lived in cloud-cuckoo-land, which also empirically showed itself, e.g. in the utopian hopes, the sentimentalism, the nostalgia, the kitsch etc., that he entertained. In order to bring man really down from this cloud-cuckoo-land, the soul had to first catapult consciousness explicitly into cloud-cuckoo-land by creating the acute fascination in empirical persons by the absolute principle, for only what is explicit for consciousness can also be explicitly overcome. This is why neurosis exists. And, apart from personal circumstances and motivations that may influence the emergence of cases of neurosis, the individuals in whom it realizes itself are the unfortunate victims sacrificed on the slaughter-bench of the soul’s history. The soul’s purpose with the performance of the neurotic drama is to initiate itself, the soul, explicitly into modern subjectivity. The logic prevailing here is in a way similar to that of life. Life has been invented for the purpose of living it to the end, to death: ultimately for the purpose of dying. In other words, neurosis at large wants to demonstrate its own absurdity by gradually refuting its own initial thesis, its own legitimacy. This implies that neurosis, insofar as it is a cultural phenomenon, does not need the fairytale’s young man coming from outside to cut the demon’s head off. The young man as an external help to cure someone from a neurosis—that is to say, the therapist—is only needed for refuting the demon in the individual empirical case of a neurosis. But neurosis as a cultural phenomenon has its own course toward redemption within itself. It is aiming all by itself at disproving its own initial absolute principle and, thereby, at making itself unnecessary. In fact, an sich, the absolute principle is only a ghost. It is utopian. But it appears to the (night-side of the) person captivated by it as absolutely real, full of life, and of supramundane beauty and meaning; naturally so, because this is how the absolute principle had to be set up by the soul in order to make man’s unconscious clinging to cloudcuckoo-land explicit. This discrepancy between the initial absolutely real appearance and the actual ghostliness is what sets neurosis as cultural phenomenon on the course of a systematic development. It is the discrepancy between claim and reality. The discrepancy comes about because the idea inherent in the absolute principle is claimed

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to be empirically real, just like that, here and now. The friction between these two aspects brings about a dynamic movement, in which neurosis gradually passes through its stages. So the process of the passage of neurosis through its stages will have to be the step-by-step reduction of the discrepancy. The internal movement of neurosis (as a cultural phenomenon or real universal) is downwards. The majesty of the absolute principle will have to be worked off and the ghostliness, the emptiness, the blatant pathology, will have to come home to consciousness. Once neurosis has gone all the way to the logical end of its development, the untenableness of the absolute principle and thus of neurosis as such will have been spelled out and in this way made psychologically real. It will have been made publicly and once and for all clear to consciousness (consciousness at large, not necessarily individual consciousnesses) that the way of the absoluteness of principiality is not a possible option. The way of the soul is a negative way. It grounds consciousness in the flow of time, which means in our case, in the situation of modernity, only by letting it paradoxically indulge in all the possible escape routes from the flow of time, for the sole purpose of putting these escape routes to the test and disproving them, one at a time and in different ways in each of all the numerous individual persons who suffer from a neurosis. The negative way of learning the hard way means that neurosis as clinical phenomenon is only created by the soul in order to refute neurosis and concretely demonstrate to itself that the attempt to hold itself above modern subjectivity on the level of the absolute principle is not tenable. This is what happens in all the individual neuroses. They are the self-demonstration, self-presentation, of the absurdity and sickness of the neurotic way to get out of the flow of time. There is nothing redeeming in the clinical reality of neurosis. The individual patient as empirical person gets only the suffering from the neurotic symptoms due to the celebration of the grandiose principles and only the absurdity, whereas the reward of this learning the hard way is obtained only by the soul, by consciousness at large, on the cultural or societal level. The neurotics do not become aware of the meaningful, logically consistent evolution towards the self-negation of neurosis. The latter can only be seen

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if you do not restrict yourself to personal experience and clinical empiricism, but are also aware of THE neurosis as a historicalcultural phenomenon. With these reflections we have already prepared the ground for Part 6, which is devoted to the topic of The Absolute’s furtherdetermination in its striving for its incarnation as immediate present reality.

PART 6

The Absolute’s further-determination in its striving for its incarnation as immediate present reality. Or the semantics of neurosis

I

n psychoanalysis one distinguishes between a general and a special theory of neurosis. As the name suggests, a general theory of neurosis deals with all the factors involved in the genesis, perpetuation, and basic functioning of neurosis in general (whatever neurosis), whereas a special theory of neurosis deals with the manifold particular forms or types of neurosis, such as anxiety neurosis, phobia, obsessive-compulsive neurosis, neurotic depression, hysteria, etc. Seen in this light, all the previous parts of this book would obviously belong to the category of a general theory of neurosis, despite the fact that as starting point and paradigm I used particular fairytales that display rather special soul situations, those of young women before, and at the threshold of, getting married, whereas neurosis can of course just as well befall older and already married women, and young as well as old men, and can circle around numerous other issues besides marriage and relationships with the other sex. However, the logic that we were able to sift out of these particular fairytales as determining the

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particular neuroses they displayed205 showed itself to be one that is at work in neurosis as such, in what it is that makes neurosis neurotic. Now, in Part 6, we turn, as it were, to the “special theory” of neurosis. It will be our task to see how “The Absolute’s” attempt, in and through neurosis, at self-production, self-realization (its attempt to give itself an immediate present reality), leads to a diversification, to a number of completely different, distinct forms; how it leads to its (The appearing Absolute’s, or neurosis’s) unfolding itself into a number of forms of manifestation that ultimately make up the different types of neurosis that we know.

1. THE NEUROSIS The topic of types, not only of the types of neuroses, can be seen from two very different standpoints. The notion of definite types can be the result of a process of abstraction on the basis of empirical observation. This is how the dominant theories of neurosis that apperceive neurosis as a clinical syndrome arrive at the distinction of different types of neurosis. In looking at all the different individual cases of neurosis and comparing and contrasting them, one notices that despite the singularity of each individual neurosis many neuroses share certain similar basic characteristics that allow one to group them together, as being of the same type. Here one needs to abstract from what is peculiar to the individual cases in their eachness and only focus on the general features that certain ones have in common and that at the same time clearly differentiate them from certain other cases that have other features in common. It is the same classification process that allows us to distinguish between flowers and trees, oak trees and fir trees, etc. With the same inductive reasoning we could also arrive at a concept of types of mythic images—even though not of Urbilder, archetypes, in the strict sense—if we looked at the whole phenomenology of the mythic imagination all over the world and sifted out various groups characterized by distinctive features common to numerous individual occurrences. C.G. Jung’s “archetypes,” however, did precisely not mean 205 Only for what I called “the ‘neurotic’ reading” of them in contrast to an attempt to understand these tales in their own right and in terms of the archaic times that originally gave rise to them.

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types in this weak sense as convenient means of bringing some order into the infinite diversity of what shows itself and establishing peculiar groups within it by subsuming numerous different, but similar images under a general image-concept (Great Mother, Old Wise Man, virgin, sacred marriage, etc.). The theory of archetypes follows a different, indeed, directly opposite orientation. Archetypes are archetypes, Urbilder, precisely because they cannot in any sense be secondarily derived from all the many empirically observable mythical images and conceptions by means of our performing mental operations, our finding distinctive similarities. It is the other way around, the many individual images have to be derived or deduced from the archetypes as that which is truly primary (“primordial”) and generates all the individualized actual images. What makes Jung’s view a bit problematic is that he ultimately positivized the archetypes as “archetypes-in-themselves,” rather than allowing them to have the nature of concepts in the logical negativity of the mind or soul. But archetypes, I think, should not be considered “facts.” They do not have a positive existence, but receive a positive existence only in those actual “archetypal images” and symbols in their concrete cultural-historical settings in which the fundamentally negative archetypes exemplify themselves. 206 This relation is similar to what we find with respect to language. Language exists empirically only in individual factual speech acts. But there are also the many different languages (English, Latin, Japanese, etc.) in which these speech acts are spoken, and these specific languages are something in their own right. They are invisible, not subsistent, and yet undoubtedly a reality—however, a supra-empirical, logically negative reality preceding any speech act as well as any speaking individual and in some ways also independent of both speech act and speaking individual. They have their own laws, of which the speaking individual can only avail himself and must avail himself if he wants to express himself, and their own historical development, in which, as a given, the individual merely finds himself.

206 James Hillman criticized Jung’s concept of the archetypes in themselves for similar reasons.

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Despite being something different from speech acts and being invisible, the different languages nevertheless do not each exist as “languages-in-themselves.” They are not natural “facts,” but historical and cultural products in constant historic flux, live products of human intelligence. In a similar way, archetypes (as distinct from archetypal images, which in the realm of language would correspond to speech acts) should be seen as products of human intelligence and not as “archetypes-in-themselves.” Even if we do not want to follow Jung’s hypostatizing and positivizing concerning the archetypes, in discussing the types of neurosis, a true psychology has to follow the same general deductive direction that we also find in Jung’s conception of his theory of archetypes. Neurosis as a psychological illness is not merely the multitude of individual cases and factual neurotic reactions, behaviors, attitudes, symptoms. This is only one half of the reality of neurosis. And the types of neurosis are not merely a convenient classification that helps to structure the infinite diversity of actually occurring individual neurotic illnesses. Rather, much like language (language as such and the diversity of individual speech acts) neurosis exists twice, and with this I return to a topic already introduced in different contexts and with different emphases in the Introduction, ch. 2, and in Part 5, ch. 3. The full reality of neurosis is that it is the unity of the empirical clinical reality of itself and THE neurosis as a real Universal, a real general (in the sense of the medieval universals controversy). Neurosis is not only the concrete isolated instances of neurotic pathology in individual persons; it is also a supra-personal historical cultural reality. To understand neurosis, one has to be able to hold the tension between these opposites. One has to see the individual empirical facts as manifestations of THE neurosis, and THE neurosis as the truth of the individual facts. It is indispensable to comprehend that the clinical neurotic phenomenon does not have its substance and truth in itself, but in the universal, in the concept, in THE neurosis as a soul phenomenon and cultural phenomenon, while conversely THE neurosis has its only positive reality in the individual cases of neurosis with all their contingency and miscellaneous characteristics. THE neurosis is a living whole. It is a system that generates within itself all the possible forms that it can take. The clinical reality of all

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the many neuroses shows us the dispersed, isolated, unrelated fragments, the disiecta membra,207 of the living body of THE neurosis. But by operating with the terms “THE neurosis,” on the one hand, and the individual clinical cases of neuroses in the plural, on the other, it has also become obvious that our task is a fundamentally different one from the one that Jung was confronted with when discussing the relation between archetypes and archetypal images. Jung starts out with the types (“archetypes”) in the plural and his theory logically derives the concrete archetypal images from them. We have to start out with THE neurosis (in the singular) and derive its types from it as its evolutionary self-unfolding. The clinical reality of actual cases of neurosis is not our concern, cannot be the concern of a truly psychological investigation. The latter stays within the precinct of the soul and explores its inner logical life, here, the life of THE neurosis, the Concept of neurosis. Neurosis needs to be thought, thought through, from out of its innermost principle, The Absolute. If it is thought, then it comes alive, starts to move and, within itself, goes through a series of stages and moments. This means also that the types of neurosis are not separate concepts, separate realities. They are all moments within the one reality of THE neurosis; THE neurosis in one particular articulation of itself. Whereas THE neurosis, as a soul reality, a Concept, has an internal life and develops, the actual neuroses in clinical reality are generally fundamentally conservative, static, or even show a tendency to become more and more rigid, to narrow down ever more and become entrenched in the cul-de-sac that they represent. The very point (and, if you wish, “teleology”) of an individual neurosis in the clinical sense is, after all, to celebrate its absolute principle. It wants to keep this one celebration on the program forever, if at all possible. It does not have any true teleology (in the sense of a true conclusion and selftranscendence). To some extent we could compare this to the relation between biological life as such and the life of individual organisms. The latter are heading for their literal, hopeless end, their death, not their self-transcendence. Life as such, by contrast, has within itself a life of its own: it generates ever new forms of itself. We call this the 207 Horace, Satires I, 4, 62: Invenias etiam disiecti membra poetae (i.e., even the individual elements torn out of the rhythm of the poem still reveal the true poet).

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evolution of species. The theory of biological evolution is concerned with the origin of species that occurs as the unfolding of the logic of Life as such (species do not physically exist), whereas the origin and life of really existing individual members of whatever species is independent of biological evolution, which is why members of diverse species that in the evolution of species may be in an ancestordescendent relationship may in the present world condition nevertheless live simultaneously side by side. The subject of biological evolution is the species, not the individual organism. Similarly the subject of the development of neurosis is not the individual person, but the objective soul, which is not a positive fact, but absolute negativity. Just as a herring does not develop into a reptile and later into a mammal, but lives and completes life as herring, so also does any particular case of a neurosis stay within its own nature. A neurotic depression does not develop into a phobia and then into an obsessivecompulsive neurosis.208 Neuroses as clinical entities, i.e., as they appear in people, have their own history and course in those people, as distinct from the self-unfolding of the different forms of neuroses on the level of the concept. The genesis and development of an individual, really existing neurosis is (a) form-specific and (b) dependent on the contingencies of the actual historical and personal life conditions, but uninfluenced by other forms of neurosis. As far as neuroses are concerned, “ontogeny” is not a repetition of “phylogeny.”

2. SEMANTIC SPECIFICATION Jung had entertained the idea of “the content of neurosis.” Just as complexes have, according to Jung, an archetypal core, so he thought that in neurosis ultimately something numinous made itself felt, the “god in the disease,” and that it thus had an important function in the individuation process. We had occasion above to reject this view. Neurosis has no content, except for “The Absolute,” which, however, is only the empty form or zero-stage of content. Neurosis is fundamentally functional and not substantial. It is a mise en scène, an operation, but in substantial regards it is downright nihilistic. Neurosis 208 There is, of course, the clinical phenomenon of “symptom substitution.” But as the name suggests, this is a substitution, not an intrinsic development of the one symptom into to other.

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happens decisively on the level of syntax, of logical form, not on the level of semantics. The individual neuroses in clinical reality do, of course, display a certain semantic. A particular compulsion neurosis may thus focus on the gas stove and not on hand-washing. This phobia focuses on dogs, that one on spiders, and yet another one on open plazas. Neurotic depressions articulate themselves through quite particular ideas of hopelessness. But all these specific contents are merely due to the immersion of THE neurosis into the medium of practical reality. For THE neurosis itself and its different types, they are essentially contingent and external. But with the question of the types of neurosis some sort of semantic aspect does return to neurosis. By unfolding into different types THE neurosis specifies itself. And this involves semantic distinctions. However, even here we must always keep in mind that the specification which concerns us is the Concept’s selfspecification and occurs within itself. It does not (yet) leave the sphere of the soul’s logical life, as neurosis does the moment it enters empirical reality and becomes a clinical phenomenon in particular people. This means that the semantic specification that neurosis undergoes during its internal self-development is and remains the specification that the empty form or zero-stage of content gives itself within itself. The mere form of THE Absolute is never transcended, never left. The empty form is never concretely “filled” (such as with particular biographical or circumstantial details), as is the case in actual individual neuroses. The semanticization of the empty form consists in differentiations on the level of the concept, only in specific variations of this empty form. The self-specification into different types happens because THE Absolute needs to turn itself into an immediate present reality. But how can this notion—immediate present reality—be reconciled with our insistence that the specification happens only within the empty form of the Concept as variations of it and does precisely not materialize, not spill over into concrete empirical reality, into the individual neuroses with all their contingent specific contents that we see in our consulting rooms? The answer is simple. The phrase “immediate present reality” must not positivistically be confused with ordinary literal reality. It, too, is a psychological reality, a reality in the negativity of the soul. The Concept gives

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itself its present reality within itself, not outside itself. “Immediate present reality” therefore refers to logical forms of such reality and shows itself as types. Types do not subsist in empirical reality as positivities. Only individual cases occur in reality as positive facts. But in their structure or internal organization the materialized individual cases of neurosis follow this or that form of the Concept. In discussing the Sacred Festival Drama of neurosis I said that whenever a person shows a neurotic reaction we can know that NOW is festival time. But this NOW is also not the literal now of what is in fact happening and can be empirically observed. The literal and observable now of a neurotic reaction is nothing but the silliness, disgracefulness, and misery of neurotic behavior. That other NOW exists only for a psychological consciousness aware of the double bottom of the event, of the hinterland of the soul “behind the impressions of daily life—behind the scenes.” It is the awareness of the absolute negativity that can be sensed through what happens in positive reality. But is this idea of a hinterland “behind daily-life scenes” not an illegitimate transgression in the sense of a kind of metaphysical assumption, something projected on the empirical reality of neurosis? It is the phenomenology of neurosis itself that disproves this suspicion. Neurotic behaviors are of course part of ordinary empirical reality. However, by not being a natural self-evident result of empirical causes, not being an adequate and reasonable response to actual experience, not having a pragmatic purpose, but being artificially stage-managed, a free invention, and being thoroughly ludicrous and pathological, neurotic reactions within ordinary empirical reality “absolve” (free, emancipate) themselves from ordinary empirical reality. They gain freedom and independence from the nexus of the ordinary world (of which they are a part). They evade the categories adequate for an interpretation of ordinary human reality and a priori invalidate any attempt to see them in terms of those categories, thereby pointing beyond their factual positivity into the sphere of the absolute negativity of the soul, to The Absolute. In this sense they are comparable to ancient religious rituals (e.g., sacrificial killings) and symbols whose reality and essence is also not exhausted by the positive-factual impressions they give to an empirical observer. They also have no immediate

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practical purpose, do not make sense in terms of common-sense rationality and ipso facto are able to have a transcendent meaning, the meaning of veritable symbols. By the same token it is their total inappropriateness that gives neurotic symptoms the licence (and actual potency) to point beyond themselves. It is not we who transgress beyond the empirical standpoint and posit a metaphysical “hinterland.” We do not come to neurosis with a preconceived metaphysical ideology. No, the neurotic symptoms themselves, within themselves, negate themselves with respect to their clinical foreground reality, exposing it as a silly, irrational, and contemptible reality, as not to be taken at face value, and at the same time they push off from this their foreground and thereby establish their own “hinterland” within themselves. Just like rituals and symbols, so also neurotic symptoms209 are in themselves, as part of the ordinary empirical world, the opening up of the difference between their trivial empirical appearance and a truly intended deeper reality “behind the scenes” as well as the prioritizing of the latter at the cost of the former, while at the same time, conversely, being completely dependent on the former for the establishment of the latter (which in turn alone makes the disparagement of the former possible).

3. DEDUCING THE CONTENT OF NEUROSIS After all these preliminary clarifications we are now ready to turn to the discussion of the stages of the self-unfolding of THE Absolute and the form it takes in each. The psychological starting point for neurosis is the historically accomplished end of metaphysics. This end, this obsolescence, has been experienced and is definitive for it. The time of the absolute in the religious or metaphysical sense is over. “God is dead.” There is no “higher” substance or content anymore. Not only all the concrete metaphysical contents, but also the very dimension of metaphysics, 209 There is, however, a fundamental difference between the two sets of phenomena. Rituals and symbols are relative to an a priori metaphysical logical constitution of the world characterized by a vertical structuring. The establishment of a metaphysical meaning is under these conditions no more than the concrete actualization of what is already inherent in the logic of the world. Neurosis, by contrast, is situated in the irrevocably horizontal world of modernity characterized by the logic of the unbridgeable difference. For this reason its establishment of a metaphysical-like hinterland is counter-factual and illicit—neurotic.

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the vertical orientation and the place of transcendence and of the infinite within the system of the psyche, have become extinct. What is left is only the empty form of the metaphysical as such, the abstract concept or the memory of it, without any psychic reality. And it is left in the form of the historical relics of the metaphysical tradition, but relics without any living, animating spirit and without any authentication by a living tradition and an objective rootedness in real life and real feeling. There are also certain physical relics of the past, namely, temples, cathedrals, statues and paintings, the rituals of the Roman Catholic Church, etc., as witnesses to a past metaphysical world (much like in the sphere of biology, e.g., the fossilized relics of dinosaurs give witness of a past biological world). And in addition, and not to be underestimated in psychological regards, there may of course be a deep and painful feeling of loss and a resulting nostalgic longing. But there is no way back. The very goal and purpose of neurosis is, however, to give The Absolute, in spite of the experienced and understood end of metaphysics and the impossibility of a revival, a present reality and an immediate existence. The Absolute is the fundamentally empty form or vacant placeholder of metaphysics, merely its abstracted principle. This Absolute has to become factually real. Materialized, incarnated. Since all substantial content is already fundamentally discredited, neurosis has to fall back on empty form as what it can use for its project of getting an incarnated “The Absolute.” Up to this point we are already confronted with two contradictions. Neurosis has to begin with an immediate reality that nevertheless is the product of its own project, its own production, and as such not immediate. And it needs a semantic content that is only the empty form of content that, qua mere form, is nevertheless supposed to be materialized. Incarnation must not mean that all of a sudden a semantic content or an existing object is smuggled in as a kind of idolized, inflated substitute for the irrevocably empty form. The neurotic “The Absolute” appears in its first immediacy as “I.” To avoid misunderstandings: “I” is here the name of a logical form or status. It does not refer to people’s I, to the ego as psychic complex or function, to the ego-personality. It is not an entity, nothing empirically given. As a psychological concept

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(“psychological” in the strict sense, in contrast to a psychic or personalistic one) it belongs to the syntax of the soul. We now will have to see why “I” is eligible to be the first immediacy of the content of neurosis and why, furthermore, it is and has to be the sole, the exclusive, content of neurosis. There are several aspects that make the “I” eligible and necessary. (1) For each human subject, “I” is absolutely immediate, the first beginning. Logically, I am always already I. I cannot go back behind my being I to anything that would be prior or foundational to I. Whatever I say, think, feel, it is always my saying, thinking, feeling. Empirically speaking, we could, of course, say that my parents are factually and logically prior to me, as well as say that when I was a baby I was not yet able to say or think “I.” To be able to say “I” is an acquired characteristic. But with this argument I would already have left “I,” stepped out of it. I would be viewing myself from outside, as an object, an other, a being or entity, an empirical fact in the world. But by definition, as long as I know what I am saying when I say “I,” “I” means irrevocably subject and subjectivity. “I” is its own beginning. (2) “I” is a word of our language and as such semantic. It expresses a content. It means something. “I” means me. But at the same time it is only the empty form of content, because “I” is totally nondescript. It does not say anything about what or how I am (man or woman, old or young, thick or thin, good or bad, etc., etc.). After all, everybody is “I” in the exact same sense of “I.” “I” is not a name and does not describe. “I” does not really say anything, but merely points to myself. It is the abstract expression of this deictic act, this reflexive selfreference, an empty form into which every individual on earth can enter and which fits everyone alike without distinction. (3) It is an abstract concept. But whoever in fact comprehends this concept and can rightly say “I” has ipso facto proved its existence (the existence of “I”) in reality. I can comprehend what “griffin” or “unicorn” means and say “griffin” or “unicorn,” but this does not mean that a griffin, a unicorn exist. Not so in the case of “I.” The abstract concept “I” actually establishes its own existence. This is so because one’s truly meaning “I” is in itself the real performance of the act of selfreference. The act of saying and meaning “I” itself performs what it is about, namely the self-establishment and self-presentation of

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subjectivity, of a subject as subject. “I” incarnates itself. This is why as an abstract concept it is a concrete concept. The incarnation it performs is due to the fact that “I” moors itself, and is moored, in the really existing “me,” a flesh and blood person. It is tied to the human being who says (and thus constitutes himself ) as “I,” a being that has a material existence. (4) The fact that “I” refers to itself and gives to itself its own existence turns “I” into a figure of perfection. It is circular, and the circle is the perfect figure and the symbol of infinity and the absolute. “I” is the immediate logical identity of subject and object. I is me and me is I. By saying “I” I truly am I. There is no place for error or mistake. Also, nothing contingent can enter into the closed circle of the I’s self-relation. All this is true for the “I” in ordinary language and for normal life in general. It has nothing to do as yet with “I” as the first immediacy of the logical form of the neurotic “The Absolute.” Nevertheless, it already shows that the “I” suggests itself for the purposes of the soul’s Work that we call neurosis, as something that it can fall back on in order to establish itself. But more is needed for the normal I to turn into the logical form of the neurotic “I.” Neurosis is a Work, an artificial arrangement, a mise en scène. At least three more features have to be added to provide for us the essence of the neurotic “I.” (5) In a Winkelriedian fashion, the “I” has to apply the logic of I once more to itself. In contrast to the fundamental universality of I in normal life, the incarnation that is already inherent in “I” has itself to be incarnated, taken absolutely literally. It is the seizure of the person’s self. That is to say, its universal nature must be deleted and instead it must it be given exclusive singularity. It must be enormously intensified, pointed. It has to become the battleground, the one and only one. By virtue of its exclusive singularity, the “I” as the logical form of the content of neurosis can be the real immediate presence of “The Absolute.” It becomes the form of majesty, absolutely pleromatic, the reality of logical perfection, the logical form of “presence of the God-man.” (6) But the “I” of neurosis that is God-man cannot be I in the ordinary, everyday sense of I. It cannot and must not be confused with “me,” me as empirical person with my concrete biography, my lifestory and personal idiosyncracies. It is a logical figure, has a conceptual

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nature. It is absolute (“absolved,” freed of all empirical characteristics and contexts). And it has its incarnation within itself, within its concept nature. (I will come to this in the next point.) This thinking in terms of a hopelessly inflated or deluded empirical I is one possible misunderstanding. The other danger at the opposite extreme is the confusion of the “I” as majesty, God-man, and “The Absolute” with an idol. But in neurosis there is no idolization. Idolization would imply a regression to a metaphysical ideology. It would imply a duality between me and the idol to whom I would be in a relation of upward-looking and veneration. However, the “I” and “The Absolute” require strict logical identity. But if the neurotic “I” as the presence of “The Absolute” is neither the empirical me nor an idol, what else can it be? It can only be their negation: something logically negative, something that has its place in the absolute negativity of the soul. In other words, in normal-life contexts it is only possible as ghost in the night-world, invisible to and unsuspected by the empirical I and not a content of consciousness, nor anything that is idolized. (7) The “ghost,” that is, “The Absolute” in its ghostly negativity, incarnates itself in practical reality in the form of neurotic symptoms. But in this all-too-real incarnation it remains absolutely incognito. Owing to its pathological form, the God-man manifests in clinical (and everyday-life) reality exclusively as the opposite, as the negation of himself, namely in his slave shape. However, it is precisely this slave shape and disgraceful pathological form in which the God-man and the I’s majesty are honored and celebrated, in which they become a present reality.

4. METAMORPHOSIS OF THE CONTENT OF NEUROSIS a) “I” The first configuration in which the absolute principle appears in clinical reality is the I pure and simple, the abstract thought of I, the I in its first immediacy. In view of this immediacy, the word just used, “configuration,” expresses a bit too much, implying as it does a formation. But what we are talking about here is the I in its logical innocence and pristine primordiality, even more than that: the I as pre-existent, as dwelling in the pleroma, up in Heaven, unborn.

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What needs to be always remembered is that rather than to the ego or to “me,” “I” refers here to a logical form or stage within which experience and reactions take place and that provides the general structure for them. On the level of the I, the neurotic The Absolute is really present in the form of the inner unquestioned certainty and absolute conviction that the soul IS always already (a priori) complete, finished, perfect. In a state of wholeness. There is no a posteriori. The soul IS The Absolute. The Absolute has the form of simply being. It has the status of Son of God, the God-man. The soul feels, as it were, that “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30), that is to say, it represents an identity that obliterates the difference. As such it is a majesty, nay, the majesty. It is truly autonomous, absolutely sovereign. It is a priori entitled to respect and admiration. This soul is in a state of virginal purity. As such it is invulnerable, absolutely untouched and untouchable. The pleromatic or “I” form that the idea of a relationship takes can best be expressed with some other religious quotations and images. When Jesus was baptized, a voice came from heaven, “Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased” (Lk 3:22). This wording perfectly captures the feel and conviction of how the relationship is constituted under the dominance of the first configuration of the absolute principle. There is an unquestionable love surrounding, enveloping the I. But not only that. There is also an immediate, preverbal connectedness, an a priori existing understanding that does not need to be established; it is something like a logical umbilical cord that makes the relationship ontological rather than a relationship that requires the empirical act of communication, a mediation. There is a sympathetic unity. Another religious idea that captures the spirit of the concept of relationship prevailing in this phase of neurosis is that of Wisdom, Sophia, dancing before God, a motif known in the ancient Near East and in ancient Egypt, where Maat, the goddess of cosmic order, dances before the sun god Re. Sophia or Maat is imagined as the beautiful daughter, and it is an absolute delight for the father to see her dancing, and it is of course an absolute bliss for the daughter to bask in the joy she evokes in her father. The I knows itself here to

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be personally meant, to be wanted, to be important to the other, and all of this in an absolute sense. It is convinced that the love of others must, as a matter of course, flow towards it. For this soul, the soul in the stage of the I, ideal and reality, ought and is, office and office holder have not separated. They are still one. A strict identity rules. A teacher in empirical reality is, as a matter of course, the true teacher and thus is wise, learned and only wants to teach; a judge is of course the true judge and thus interested only in absolute justice. The world and others exist essentially for serving the I. In the world, everything is provided for the I and will be handed to it on a plate. I is basically a passive recipient. In other words, the I lives here with an umbilical cord through which it is automatically provided with everything it needs without an effort by the I. And when I is active, then it is only out of its own desire, its own “creative impulse,” and for its own entertainment. The spots of color in this brief listing, incomplete as it is, may nevertheless suffice to paint for us a general picture that characterizes the first or “I” form of the neurotic soul. Having spoken of “first immediacy” of the I, of “a priori ” and unbornness, of a separation that “has not yet” taken place, I have to remind the reader again not to lose sight of the fact that we are here moving in the sphere of the neurotic soul and that therefore a true first immediacy is completely out of the question. Psychological birth has long happened for the neurotic soul. It has experienced the loss of the soul’s pleromatic condition. 210 So what we get in this chapter under the title of “first immediacy” is a secondarily, artificially arranged, stage-managed first immediacy and unbornness, a spiteful, counterfactual production—a simulation. A generated preexistence is the opposite of itself. Furthermore, this pre-existence is psychologically not a substantial reality, but has the status of merely an inner certainty, and on top of it a certainty or conviction that is objectively (although not by the subjective soul) already known to be obsolete. This is why it is “a 210 I am talking about the soul’s pleromatic condition and not about the psyche’s or a baby’s possible pleromatic condition. The soul is fundamentally cultural. The psychological pleroma consists in the soul’s containment in a living myth, religion, or metaphysic.

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ghost,” a mystification. But the point of symptom production is precisely to give this mystification a real, empirical presence. In the symptom, the idea of pre-existence is intensely real and powerful. However, what is intensely real here is the idea or conviction, not preexistence itself. But again, it is the very point of a neurotic symptom to take the conviction for real. The neurotic has to live as the advocate of the thesis that this unquestioned certainty is absolutely justified, and the price he has to pay for this counterfactual conviction is his suffering from his symptoms. If after this descriptive part of the inner logic of the neurotic “I” we now turn to the question of how this first-level form of neurosis manifests in empirical, clinical reality, what immediately suggests itself is the idea of feelings of grandiosity. But we already know that this would be a mistake. A grandiose self-assessment, an unrealistic sense of superiority, conceitedness as well as pretentious, boastful behavior are not neurotic symptoms at all. They may be based on a lack of adaptation and insufficient social education, as the simple illusions of a spoiled-child stance continued into biological adulthood, or they may be expressive of serious delusions, or also the result of a deep psychic disorder. But this does not make them neurotic. Neurosis is not an illness of the psyche, but of the soul, and therefore neurotic symptoms are always the negation and opposite of that soul value that is thereby celebrated. Grandiosity, by contrast, is egosyntonic. What is celebrated in it is precisely openly displayed; it is the explicit attitude of the ego-personality. No ghost. No stagemanaging. Just innocent folly. For neurosis it is crucial that the soul values (the forms of The Absolute) celebrated in it, such as majesty or pre-existence, are not what the neurotic personality thinks. The day person is reasonable, he knows that it is all different: of course he is not pre-existent; of course he is not a majesty, he has to establish relationships if there are to be any. Of course you have to work hard on yourself to learn something and improve yourself. All those ideas that proceed from the conviction of one’s pre-existence are what the neurosis or the ghost in neurosis thinks (or what the neurotic personality thinks insofar as it is the soul or night person). And because this is so, this thinking can in empirical reality, “during the day,” only become manifest in the form of pathology, of symptoms.

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However, to be precise we should perhaps not say that it is in symptoms that this kind of thinking becomes manifest, because this might suggest a constant and existing thinking, a prevailing attitude, whereas in reality this thinking, i.e., the absolute principle, is only momentarily created in each instance of, and for the duration of, a symptomatic reaction or behavior. In other words, it is not so much that the principle as continuously present manifests in the symptoms. Rather, each time it comes into being “for the first time” in the symptom and exists only for as long as the symptomatic reaction lasts. The concrete symptomatic manifestation of the first-immediacy form of the neurotic celebration of The Absolute can avail itself of different aspects and areas of the human psyche and be concerned with different topics. In the area of forming a personal partner relationship we remember our Enchanted Princess fairytale. The princess showed the dogmatic conviction that the I was already complete, self-sufficient, self-enclosed (absolutely self-identical) and thus not in need of complementation through another person, a husband. A clinical example is the case of a woman at the end of her twenties who is engaged to a man and happy about it. On the very day of the wedding she suddenly cancels the wedding. A year later she has another relationship, again gets engaged, but soon after the engagement she has doubts and cancels it. The same thing happens at least one more time. She has no difficulty finding men who would marry her, but she cannot make the transition from the status of splendid isolation (in a psychological, not factual sense) to the logical status of being one half of a couple. By canceling her engagements, she celebrates the I’s a priori self-sufficiency. She is unconscious of this being the reason for her behavior. Some strange force in her simply compels her to break off those relationships. In the area of the will, and thus touching the topic of power, we find the outrage of neurotics at authority figures (parents, bosses) or other people who dare to give them orders or criticize them. A lowlevel employee was repeatedly fired by one company after another because he could not tolerate being told what to do by his superiors and therefore behaved unacceptably. In his demonstrated outrage, for which career-wise he had to pay dearly, he established and celebrated the I’s majesty. Consciously, as day-person, he dreamed of becoming Prime Minister, but psychologically (for the night person) this was

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not a wish, an ideal, but always already the I’s reality. He therefore was entitled to be treated with obsequiousness. The mere fact that there were superiors was already a lèse-majesté. In other cases of outrage at the behavior of others, the I openly demonstrates its majesty, its sovereignty, its claim to superiority, its right to have people behave in the way the I expects and wants them to. There is no duality, no otherness between me with my interests and the other person with his or her interests. There is only one subject, the I, around whom the others have to revolve. It is the I’s right to expect that what ought to be is also immediately what factually is the case. The ideal has to be immediately real. Narcissistic rage, oversensitivity to criticisms and alleged insults celebrate the I’s glory in the area of interrelations. In the same area, neurotic jealousy, possessiveness, spying on a spouse or partner (or analyst), etc., are the negative (counterfactual) demonstration of the psychological truth of the primordial absolute, pleromatic oneness of the I with the other. In the area of psychological self-relation, inferiority feelings and a negative self-worth (Cinderella!) are wonderful means for the soul to celebrate the I’s glorious status of being the lovely bride of the prince, the heavenly daughter dancing before God, the God-man and the Son in whom the Father is well pleased. 211 In the same area, but with the emphasis on morality, the soul’s capacity to use actual or imagined mistakes and wrong-doings for the purpose of feeling guilty are the way the soul establishes and celebrates the I’s primordial innocence and perfection. Neurotic depression, similarly, is the way to counterfactually establish the triumphant rule of the ideal (as such). Anorexia nervosa takes place in the area of material (bodily) existence. This illness celebrates the firm soul conviction that the I is an absolute principle or concept by consistently working off the I’s existence in and as a physical reality. Much like the enchanted princess 211 Since the soul is not concerned with people but only with its own reality, it does not make a difference between men and women. That is to say, it would be a mistake to think that the ideas of the “God-man” and the “Son in whom the Father is well pleased” is only applicable to male patients, “the heavenly daughter dancing before God” or “Sophia” idea only to female patients. Both can apply to either group. There is, of course, a psychological difference between “Son” and “Daughter.” But the psychological difference is not identical with the empirical son-daughter, man-woman difference.

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wanted all suitors killed, so the anorectic person wants the body to be eliminated, not by a sudden act (suicide), but by starvation. The day person does the starving, while the night person gets the bliss. Suicide would be a mere escape from the material world and ipso facto confirm its powerful reality. But neurosis wants to demonstrate the triumph of the spirit (principle) over matter and the contempt for the body from the point of view of the absolute principle. We see here especially clearly that the world of the “I” is determined by verticality. The absolute principle and the pre-existing “I” dwell up there in heaven. The soul is inventive, and it can utilize all sorts of empirical circumstance, psychic functions, areas of life, and topics to come up with a great diversity of neurotic pathologies. Numerous other possible ways the present form of neuroses displays itself in empirical reality could be described. The foregoing examples, however, are perhaps enough to illustrate the general principle of neuroses that fall under the category of the first immediacy of the presence of The Absolute, its “I” form. By way of conclusion of this first group of forms of neurosis I will mention only one more, rather subtle pathology. A patient is not capable of really listening to what the analyst says in the session. She mechanically takes in the sounds of the words or sentences, retains them mechanically, but does not open her mind to the meaning of what she hears. That is to say, she reduces herself to a kind of tape recorder and what she hears to precious but dead objects that she can carry away, to pearls that she collects from the speaker’s mouth. What he says is enshrined, but thereby also sealed, frozen. Or, if what the analyst says is a critical comment, his words are like a guillotine blade coming down on her. She never listens to an interpretation with the question in mind whether what the analyst says makes sense to her, whether to her mind it is right or wrong. This is why she cannot agree or disagree, or expand on what has been said, or ask for further explanation of what was meant but what she did not fully understand. Although she, too, talks enough in the sessions, she is never present in the session as the one partner in a dialogue, in a conversion or communication. Then, after the sessions, she writes down in detail what she remembered her analyst to have said—as the precious pearls mentioned. This last comment is already the clue for understanding what is happening here psychologically. To really open herself to the soul, or

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to the living meaning of what has been said, she would have to admit that there are two of us, two subjects, two thinking persons. And this is what must absolutely be prevented. By reducing the listening process to the mechanical storing of information in her memory and by absenting or annulling herself as a thinking and understanding subject, she celebrates the absolute unity of the I. There is no Other, no duality of subjects. Either she is speaking, and then (in her estimation) I have to be the mechanical recipient of her information, or I am speaking and she is the recipient. There can only be one soul, one thinking subject, at a time. What at all cost needs to be prevented is that the unity of the world falls apart into two. But this unity does not factually exist. Factually she is already in a dual relationship, in a situation of dialogue, and obviously so. But by negating the duality that factually exists (and only in this negative way), she succeeds neurotically in establishing and celebrating the principle of the One, of absolute unity. This unity only exists in the negation of the real duality. It has no other reality. And this is why the negation has to be absolute to give the principle an empirical reality. Interestingly enough, the patient also developed a severe tinnitus in the course of time. At home she reads her notes about what the analyst said and tries to talk herself into what he said, forcing his statements, as it were, down her throat much like pills that one swallows. In this way she again circumvents the inner insight into the meaning of the analyst’s interpretations. She does not expose herself to their message. In short, she refuses to think, where thinking means the dialectical simultaneity of passive reception and activity, of being-affected (or even “infected”) and (productive, constructive) judging, a dialectic that constitutes the subjectivity of a subject. She thus functions only as a kind of mailman who does not know (and does not need to know) what is in the letters he carries from one place to another. In this situation at home, the situation in analysis is repeated, but now under the conditions of a game of solitaire, as it were. Again, she does not enter into a dialogue. The difference is that now, when she is empirically alone, but of course psychologically alone with herself, she takes the role that the analyst had in the sessions, the role of the speaker, while she as the self that she is talking to is supposed to swallow the messages sight unseen. And

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then she wonders why this does not work, why it does not help. So here too, in the intimacy of her own person, she does not allow for a duality, for a conversation of herself with herself; here the mental recording that she practiced in the analytical situation is replaced by her attempt to dictatorially force something down her throat or rather into her mind. She treats herself in such situations like a goose to be force-fed and eliminates herself as thinking subject. All this in order to build up and celebrate an a priori and preverbal unity of the I in the sense of an abstract, eleatic, absolutely self-identical principle, a unity that needs these contrivances because it is obviously not true in itself, neither within nor around her, because in reality there are two from the outset, inside as well as outside. It is noteworthy that the I here manages to establish itself as an absolute principle only by extinguishing itself as an empirical living I: a real, self-responsibly thinking subjectivity, that is, an I as selfrelation in the sense of conversation with oneself. It will be this kind of self-contradiction that will lead to the destruction of the I-stage and lead to the next stage. A relationship is seen here as preceding the existence of the two persons involved, and as such something ontological, inviolable, eternal, infinite. And it is an abstract unity without otherness, not the dialectical unity of two. In analysis in similar cases one often comes across the patient’s idea that he or she does not have to say what he thinks, feels, experienced because the analyst of course already knows without being told. Very important things may never be expressed in the certainty that the other person knows. Expressing them, so the feeling goes, would not make any difference (or rather it would burst the bubble). Having thought something in one’s own mind means that it is immediately in the mind of the other person. Similarly, there is often the idea that the analyst is with his loving thoughts constantly with the patient, just as the patient is “constantly” connected with loving thoughts with the analyst. It cannot be imagined to be otherwise. As a reminder let me say that it is essential not to reduce neurotic symptoms to emotional problems or problems of desire and willing. No, the real problem is a philosophical, logical or ontological one. It is the absolute dogma that I am the prince, that I am too good for low jobs, that in the vertical structure of the world

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in this first stage I absolutely must hold myself above ordinary reality, on the higher level of principles. My actual emotions, desires, and my unwillingness are the result of this dogma and not the first cause of my pathological behavior. b) Here The purpose of neurosis is to give The Absolute the status of an immediate present reality or to incarnate it. In its first immediacy stage, the stage of “I,” it appeared in the form of simply being. The “I” form provided the bliss (of course, paid for dearly by neurotic suffering) of the absolute inner certainty or conviction of the soul’s dwelling in an a priori status of pleromatic pre-existence, we could use an expression taken from Schelling and say in “unprethinkable being,” in a preverbal oneness and innocence, in a priori completeness, in the majesty of the God-man or of Sophia dancing before God. For the individual soul in the neurotics suffering from this type of neurosis, the bliss of the Festival Drama it performs is perfect. But it cannot escape the awareness of the objective soul (as neurotic soul) that this first immediacy form remains flawed. This form does not fully achieve what was supposed to be achieved. Not only is the a priori a secondarily, i.e., a posteriori, produced one, produced through a neurotic arrangement or mise-en-scène (a feature which we can here generously ignore as being external to what the product of this production is). It is also the produced present reality of this “unprethinkable being,” and preverbal oneness in pre-existence is in itself intrinsically deficient because it excludes thought, critical reflection, those irrenunciable functions of psychological existence. The inner certainty had remained totally unquestioned and thus was in the status of a mere assertion or vain claim. This can now be seen through. That is to say, the neurotic soul as objective soul has now left the stage of absolute innocence and entered the stage of reflection. It realizes that the present reality that had been achieved so far is only the reality of a vain claim or inner conviction of this a priori state. The absolute inner certainty had been the certainty of a soul that still hovers “in Heaven,” is up in the clouds, and therefore the present reality it produced also had only an ideal existence, not a real one, and as such it had precisely not yet itself achieved that incarnation that it is all about. What good is the idea of incarnation if

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it remains a mere idea of incarnation (no matter whether this idea, qua idea, is given present reality or not)? With these questions and doubts the soul has come down to earth and is now here. It now lives with doubt, a suspicion, the suspicion that the certainty or conviction that the soul IS The Absolute might not be true. By having reached the stage of critical reflection and thus becoming subject to doubt and suspicion, the former “a priori” itself, too, has come down to earth a bit. It has been forced to give up the unquestioned glory of its immediacy. The “I” has had to divest and empty itself (kenôsis) of its form of pre-existence and being-equal-toGod, of its claim to untouched innocence and perfection. It has to step down from its throne as majesty. Suspicion has punctured its “innocence of being” (Nietzsche). This change leads to the metamorphosis of the very stage of “I” into the form of “Here” and thus to the second stage and type of neuroses. The “Here” is not a totally other and new configuration. It is the same “I” in a new form; the “I’s” own further determination and inwardization into itself. The “Here” is that “I” that has come down to earth from out of its former pre-existence, being “sicklied over with the pale cast of” reflection. Metamorphosis (i.e., the simultaneity of continuity, continued identity, AND radical change), not succession. In order to come home to itself, the “I” has precisely to leave itself and come out into the open; it has to leave its original immediacy and enter the real world, show itself in the outer world. Inasmuch as the “Here” still is “I,” namely the now incarnated “I,” we could also say that the Here is the I that has been reflected or interiorized into itself, has been released into its truth212 a little more. And we realize that the mode of self-inwardization can paradoxically only occur in the form of self-alienation and self-objectification. Accordingly, the “Here” is just as deictic, just as much only the empty form of semantic content as was the “I.” “Here” is everywhere. It has no semantic specification. It is not a particular describable place in geographic reality. Let me introduce this new stage with the insight that the boy Jung gained and that brought an end to what he considered to have been 212

Truth implies, among other things, coming out into the open, come to light.

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his childhood neurosis (although, as I pointed out earlier, I do not think that it was a genuine neurosis in the strict sense). Overhearing what his father said when he poured his heart out to a visitor about his worries about his son’s future under the conditions of his supposed incurable epilepsy, Jung felt thunderstruck. “This was the collision with reality. The thought, ‘Aha, here one has to work,’ shot through my head” (MDR p. 31, transl. modif.213). Jung’s aha experience means that he has suddenly awakened from an illusion. Now he sees how it really is! The scales have fallen from his eyes. Work, performance, achievement—instead of a priori given primordial bliss. The “here” in the phrase, “here one has to work” means: here in reality, down here on earth. And with this his insight Jung had in fact arrived here, in the real world. It was a breakthrough, on the personal level,214 from his childish cloud-cuckoo-land into reality, the reality of adult existence. Inasmuch as birth means coming into the world we could say that only now has the I been born in a psychological sense. Before, the “I” had psychologically still been up in “heaven.” To continue this imaginal parlance, we could also say that with the fall from the “I” stage to the “Here” the pre-existent Son of God (or, rather, the neurotic soul imagining itself in this mythical garment) has come into this empirical world, has incarnated. The Son of God has now been born as an ordinary human being, the son of a carpenter. But in contrast to the Biblical story, this also means that now “I and the Father” are no longer one. Now the Father and with Him the sphere of pre-existence has completely, irrevocably been left behind. So the appropriate quotation here would be: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mt. 27:46).215 I use this Jung passage about “having to work” not in order to describe the end of an actual neurosis of a particular individual. I rather use it as a symbolic expression in story form by means of which I can give a first indication of what that insight is about that induces the 213

Jung has: “Aha, da muß man arbeiten.” Not on the level of theory! Jung’s theory, as I have shown elsewhere, remained faithful to this childish cloud-cuckoo-land. 215 Biographically and on a literal level it is interesting in this light that in the same year of his “childhood neurosis,” namely after a second crucial experience, Jung began to dissociate himself inwardly both from his Church’s religion and from his own personal father, thinking disparagingly about him (precisely as a minister) and about all churchmen and church rituals. Disappointment became a hotbed of counter-ideas to the ending of the I stage. 214

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objective soul to leave the logical form of “I” behind and to move on to “Here” as a new logical form within which to celebrate “The Absolute” under new, completely different conditions, that is, to create new types of neurotic symptoms. “Here” is characterized by the fact that “One” has turned into “Two.” The “I” had been the world of the One, the bliss of total identity and primordial unity. Now there is a difference, a duality between I and Other, between subject and object. In temporal regards this means that the a posteriori rules. There is a difference and distance between today and tomorrow, beginning and end, between idea (or wish or plan) and realization, between inner self and outer appearance. Personal relationships must be established; they are not always already given. In order to know something, one has to laboriously learn and study. In order to be somebody, one has to have something to show for oneself, some achievement. Paradise is over for the soul. In the sweat of its face it will from now on have to eat its bread. This difference and otherness applies under the conditions of the “Here” even to the I itself. It starts out as a stranger to itself and therefore it needs an empirical and on principle incompletable process of self-experience to get to know itself to some extent (never absolutely). Its true nature is hidden and antecedes its own ideas about itself. The I exists twice now, as subject and its own object, as ego and (Jungian) self. As subject it thinks and may have ideas about itself; as object it finds itself as always already empirically given as an accomplished fact with a particular, already inescapably contingently conditioned nature (today we might say: with a genetic disposition and an imprinting through early childhood experiences), a hard fact that the I has to make do with, whether it likes it or not. The aware and thinking I is precisely not pre-existent I, not a priori, but on principle secondary, coming after the empirical fact that it is and as which and in which it finds itself in the world. And as all along conditioned, it is not fully absolute. Before, I said that with the stage of the Here, the I has been psychologically born for the first time. Now it becomes apparent that this is not really so. The I’s psychological birth has not really happened as long as its true nature stays hidden in the background and needs to be discovered a posteriori through an effort of self-exploration. So from the position now reached, what before had been called “psychological birth” would better be termed “psychological pregnancy.” To begin

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with the soul as an I is, in this stage, merely pregnant216 with itself— although that which it is pregnant with antecedes it factually and logically as conscious I. In normal life, for the not neurotic soul, the task at this stage would thus be for the I to give birth to itself, by letting what before had been only germinal,217 only enveloped, come out, and actively bringing it out into the open. It has to catch up with its true nature.218 The natural disposition, which as such is only a potential, has to become actualized, be made explicit, become real.219 The fact as which I finds itself to exist has to come out of the wrapping or cloud that its ideas, ideals, its wishful thinking about itself, represent. Once this birth is completed, I is a psychological adult. We see here the logical reversal that takes place in being “Here” and being born man. For my nature to be born, i.e., to truly come into the world, I have to suffer a sublation. Under the “I” I was in a position of majesty, now I am reduced to my caretaker, i.e., to a secondary position with respect to myself. I have to give up the position of the real subject and be under myself, a mere obedient servant of the facts of my nature, a nature that I find to be mine and am stuck with. With respect to the question of what the facts of my true nature are and whether I like them to become visible or not, I have no say in the matter. I have not made myself, not chosen my nature, but found myself endowed with these or those characteristics. The way I am has been given to me: for better or worse I have been “gifted” with my nature. My nature or truth has been entrusted to me like a ward, so that I have to act as its guardian. I have to lend it my voice, because it can only make itself heard through me. I have to carry the burden of being the way I am and pay the price for it, the price for my weaknesses, faults or 216

Pregnant in contrast to pre-existent. Outside the theory of neurosis, we can think here of Hillman’s “acorn theory” in his The Soul’s Code, New York (Random House) 1996. 218 One sees that Jung’s ideas of individuation and the individuation process, although not anything neurotic, have their logical place in the “Here,” as conceived here. Maybe this “Here” is the horizon and logical topos of his whole psychology, a possibility that would, of course, nicely correspond to the logical character of the initiating experience at the root of his adult consciousness, namely, his “childhood neurosis” together with its overcoming through the insight, “Aha, here one has to work!” 219 All theories of self-actualization (e.g., Maslow) have their logical place in the “Here.” 217

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not so likeable qualities just as well as the price for my gifts or my genius (if I have any). Life is not free of charge. Being what I am has a price, and to be fully here, to get really born, means wholeheartedly paying the price for my nature. In neurosis, the soul is not willing to pay this price, which means that it betrays the person’s true nature. Often the betrayal of oneself manifests as the terrible feeling of having no right to exist. This feeling is the expression of the false logic of neurosis. It is perfectly true that I do not have a right to exist. That I exist is simply an accomplished but utterly contingent fact (the existentialists said that we are “thrown into life”) and this fact imposes an obligation on me, the obligation to give my being a real presence here. The counterrevolutionary reversal from having to shoulder one’s obligation to exist as the guardian of the nature that one happens to have to insisting on a right to exist shows that neurosis tries after the fact to wriggle out of the aposteriority and contingency of existence into an a priori status, to an unquestionable axiomatic position in the sense of formal logic. Letting the true self, the inner seed, the potential come out would also mean exposing it to the outer world. At the same time, this would mean the self ’s need to adapt itself to external (social, cultural, and physical) reality. The topic of adaptation, e.g., to the norms and expectations of society, could not possibly have come up in the sphere of the “I” stage, because the need for adaptation is the result of otherness and duality which exist only since the I incarnated itself and as such turned into “Here.” The vertical distinction between the height of the pre-existent Absolute and the realm of contingency down below which determined the first stage has in the “Here” given way to a horizontal difference between foreground and background, potentiality and actuality, today and tomorrow, true self and empirical I, implicit inner and explicit outer, authenticity and alienation or superficiality. The absolute principle under the aegis of the “I” was, as it were, otherworldly, namely pre-existent. And thus the neurotic task had been to eliminate all signs of factually being in this world down here and to give immediate real presence in this empirical world to the absolute certainty of being out of this world. Now the neurotic soul once and for all admittedly and irrevocably exists in the world, the three-dimensional world. And with the essential distinction between foreground and

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background, myself and others, on the one hand, and between now and later, beginning and end, on the other hand, it has acquired for itself a sense of spatial and temporal existence (the category of being in space and time), whereas the existence in the pleroma was prior to the idea of any extendedness and linearity. It had been the point of strict identity. The neurotic soul is now here. Now we have to see how it can fulfill its task of establishing The Absolute as a present reality under the definitely earthly conditions of the “Here,” under the conditions prevailing after the “I’s” renouncement of the throne of majesty and of its existence in the pleroma. The Sacred Festival Drama now has to take place in a different theater. But how? We can express this in two ways. First, with respect to the change from pre-existence to “pregnancy” we can say that the soul can achieve this task by preserving the state of mere pregnancy, that is, preventing it from giving birth to itself. In other words, what it is pregnant with must not be allowed to come out into the open, has to remain only germinal, only enveloped. Secondly, starting from the idea that the soul has acquired a fundamental suspicion about its claim we can say that, under the conditions of the “Here,” the form that the neurotic soul must give to the desired present reality of The Absolute must be that of hiding, of keeping the claim deeply inside and thus protecting it from being exposed to the test of reality, any possible refutation, and the necessity of any compromising adaptation to the external world. It is clear that under the auspices of the “Here,” The Absolute can no longer have the same splendor and fullness that existed within the first stage of the “I.” The soul’s kenotic descent also affects the inner constitution of The Absolute itself. The “I” having incarnated and changed into “Here” must in itself be somewhat reduced over against the original “I.” The neurotic soul has already made concessions to its being in the world and thus is also ready to accept cutbacks to The Absolute’s absoluteness. Nevertheless, it still needs to celebrate it. It can celebrate The Absolute by cementing the difference between the inner and the outer, between I and true self, now and tomorrow, etc. Neurosis will make the person say: yes, truly, I am an ordinary human being, but still more truly I insist that I am the incarnated child of God. My form as empirical human being is merely a guise that hides what I authentically am as my true self. I do not want to document through

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my real life that I am truly the incarnated child of God, for I am my true self precisely and only if it has not been born into the ordinary world, but saved, reserved, kept pure. The divine seed is (a) too good for this ordinary world, it should not be defiled, and (b) it will not be understood and appreciated as the divine seed, so it should be preserved in the state of pregnancy. Such neurotics stay behind in hiding, do not really show themselves here, but merely send another version of themselves forward into the arena of life as a front man or strawman of the real self. In this way, disappointments, failures, etc., only hit the front man, not myself. I can always say: It was not really I who failed, because I did not really try. If I had really committed myself, the result would have been different. The trick here is the splitting and duplication of oneself. Both aspects are taken care of: I live my real life and I have a true self. But the I that lives my real life is not my true self, and my true self does not come out into this real life. This is not to be confused with having two identities. Rather, the point here is that the I that appears on the scene is deprived of being identical with me; it is only a façade. My identity does not come forward. The story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can serve us as prime paradigm. By being the dissociation of the one neurotic soul into two separate persons, the one personality, Dr. Jekyll, can enter the external world as the true self ’s (Mr. Hyde’s) front man or strawman. The true self or identity, by being absolutely hidden from the world and protected from the norms and demands the world imposes on the I, can stay in its primordial innocence, in its untamed, uncivilized form: unborn. And conversely, by being only Mr. Hyde’s front man, the adaptation to society that Dr. Jekyll perfectly performs is only a sham adaptation that does not count because the true self does not participate, or rather: the true identity is not the one that undergoes the adaption. The fact that Mr. Hyde is a murderer in Stevenson’s novel may seem to be an absolutely unusual case, the extraordinary extreme form of a “true self.” But it must not be taken at face value. What Stevenson presents is not to be read as a case history that gives us the facts of the case, but as a portrayal of the poet’s insight into the deep logic of the objective soul of his time, his seeing through to what the true nature

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of the idealized “true self ” is. The true self that preserves its absolute purity by artificially hiding in the inner—despite psychologically being long beyond the “I” stage and having its place here on earth and out in the open (as Dr. Jekyll)—is ipso facto a criminal. Its deliberately illicit, scheming reserving itself, against its better knowledge, its simulation of a state of unbornness, is the crime it commits: the murder of its own truth as already born. Also on the cultural level, the 18th century “beautiful soul”220 in its Pietist moral purity turned in modernity, during the 19th century, into the Biblical “robbers’ den,” out of which (the Bible says: “from within, out of the heart of men”) “proceed evil thoughts, adulteries, fornications, murders” (Matth. 21:13 and Mark 7:21). In the depth of the soul, modern man knows that he is a murderer, not a literal murderer on the level of behavior (that too, of course, just think of Hitler and Stalin as exemplary modern men), but a logical one. When Nietzsche diagnosed that God is dead, he added, “and we have killed him.” The soul’s fateful fall out of religion and metaphysics is experienced by the soul as its own murderous deed. This is also the psychological background for why in mid-19th century the genre of the criminal or detective novel all of a sudden emerged and immediately captivated people’s imagination, and why a bit later psychoanalysis developed a hermeneutic of suspicion.221 Kafka wrote in his “Penal Colony,” “Guilt is never to be doubted.” The true self in Stevenson’s great novel simply had to be a murderer. Turning from this poetic paradigm again to actual neurotic pathologies, we find, for example, patients whose fundamental stance towards life is that this is not the true life. It is an inauthentic life, and they have somehow ended up here in this world, but living here is like an exile for them. Real life would only begin if they were freed from all everyday duties and could do what they think they were really meant for, maybe to just paint or think or read or listen to music. The place of true life is here thought to be one’s interiority. By setting up the real world as a kind of prison into which 220

E.g., Rousseau, Shaftesbury, Goethe, Schiller. This hermeneutic of suspicion was attacked and criticized by Jung as an attempt “to explain everything downwards” and “to discover by what obscene joke the material can be related to some oral, anal, urethral, or other sexual abnormality” (CW § 355 and 366, italics from Jung’s German text). 221

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they “actually” do not belong, they themselves conversely imprison their own alleged “creativity” in their interiority, preventing it from having to take the test of reality. Jung (CW 16 § 336) and H. G. Baynes spoke about the “provisional life.” This is similar to the foregoing example, but not the same. “Provisional life” means that this real life, the only one that a person has, is construed and lived as if it were not the real life, but just a temporary, provisional one. So one only goes through the motions of living, but one is not really serious about it. One performs actions, but what one does, does not really count. One only puts on an act, only pretends as if one were living. One’s true self, one’s real identity, does not enter the fray. Both aspects are taken care of: I live my real life and I have a true self. But the I that lives my real life is not my true self, and my true self does not come out into this real life. And in this way, by dwelling in the no-man’s-land between straw man and true self, being neither the one nor the other, one celebrates The Absolute, the soul’s absolute freedom. Before, I discussed the reversal that happens for the I through the transition from being merely pregnant with its own nature to its own nature as already born, namely that the I is reduced to no more than a caretaker and guardian of its true nature and of its having to pay the price for the faults or shortcomings of this its true nature. But neurosis as the defender of formal logic insists on my staying the main person, in control of the I’s inner truth, in the top position as the true subject. According to it, it has to be my decision how I am and how I appear. And thus, as long as I think my nature to be such that it does indeed serve my self-aggrandizement, it is allowed to come out, but whenever I have the suspicion that people might not appreciate it because my self-doubt tells me that I have nothing to offer, I am not good enough, I am a nobody or what I think or feel is embarrassing, then I betray my nature by keeping it locked away. We understand, of course, that the feeling of being not good enough is the neurotic way in which the soul precisely erects and celebrates the secret claim of being the highest: the hidden incarnated child of God under the aegis of the “Here.” A third variation is what might be called “vicarious living.” A student who is actually very interested in the field that he is studying nevertheless cannot make himself study, and especially not write papers in time. Every morning he tells himself, “Tomorrow I will start,” but

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then he always does something else instead. However, when a colleague from another course that is also interesting to him asks him for help with his (the colleague’s) paper, he can passionately do the research for and even write his friend’s paper. His true identity can come forward when and only when it is not his own task, but his friend’s. His identity does not stay altogether in hiding, but in this case it hides behind the back of his friend. And our student does not divide himself into his true identity and a front man, but stays true to his own true identity and thus rather allows himself to get into trouble because of his own papers. Whereas the provisional life person would have himself as his own straw man write the papers, the vicarious-life person is forced to simply refuse to write them, if he cannot put his true identity into the work. But both are forced to refuse to come forward with their identity under their own name. In the area of relationship problems in the stage of the Here, a way to celebrate The Absolute is by constantly finding fault with one’s spouse, which ultimately means blaming him or her for not being perfect. Through this never ceasing to criticize, the idea of the ideal relationship is celebrated under the conditions of existence in the real Here, i.e., the idea of a meeting of souls on the level of the ideal. The best brief illustration for this fantasy of an encounter with an other on the ideal level is the following early passage from Jung. “Once when Ludwig the Saint visited the holy Aegidius incognito, and as the two, who did not know each other, came face to face, they both fell to their knees before each other, embraced and kissed—and spoke no word together. Their gods recognized each other, and their human parts followed.” 222 This is clearly not symbiotic, no fusion into a unity (in the sense of the “I” stage). Each is within himself the difference between the god in them and their human parts. The One has fallen apart into Two. And in their humbling themselves before each other, there is respect for their difference and otherness, and there is true encounter. But what an encounter! It does not need speech, no introduction to each other, no slowly getting to know each other, in other words, no mediation and no temporal process. It is the unmediated instantaneous recognition, a recognition to be sure in 222

Letters I, p. 32, to Hans Schmid-Guisan, 6 Nov. 1915.

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the real world, however, not on the level of the real world, the “Here,” i.e., a recognition by the empirical personalities through their empirical senses and feelings, but by their inner gods. In this kind of encounter, empirical time, in which both live to begin with, is suddenly disrupted and eternity takes over. A miracle has taken place. They are saints, after all. A neurotic way of erecting and celebrating, under the conditions of the “Here,” one’s absolute invulnerability and unwoundedness is by blaming others for one’s wounds or, even better, by construing as traumas ordinary disappointments and mishaps that life presents to oneself.223 I mentioned a while ago the necessity of one’s having to pay a price for one’s existence and nature. Now I add that we do not only have to pay the price for our own nature, but also for the injustice, violence, insults, emotional wounds and other wrongs inflicted upon us by others or by fate. This is what neurosis refuses to understand. It is true, in practical reality I may sometimes be able to sue the perpetrator and he may have to pay damages or be punished. But psychologically this is irrelevant. I, all alone, have to pay myself the price for my wound. The other person, if at all, only has to pay the price for his action, not for my wound. And whether he has to pay or not has nothing to do with my wound. Psychologically, these are two entirely separate stories. It is I who have to suffer from my wounds, I who have to mourn, to go into therapy, etc. Neurosis would like to turn this around and make the other person have to suffer instead, naively believing in a kind of psychological “polluter [or here: perpetrator] pays” principle. But of course there is no “instead.” If the other person is made to suffer, that again is all alone his or her suffering and an entirely different story. My wound is not healed by it. This is what is the logical error in revenge. A true psychology is governed, one might say, by the “victim pays” principle (if the word “victim” would not be ruled out in a true psychology from the outset since it still ties the wounds we received back to some other who caused it). Psychologically, wounds are exclusively mine, absolutely contained and self-sufficient within myself. Psychologically they are not caused, there is no cause. Any cause is outside the range of my psychological sphere. 223 Many psychologies fraternize with this neurotic tendency by explaining neurosis in terms of a trauma theory.

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But this is precisely why neurosis wants to get at the person who caused the wounds. By going outside and blaming some other, it establishes the dogma of the absolute invulnerability of the pre-existent I. The wound is in this way psychologically shoved out of my psychological sphere into the empirical factualness of the physical world that psychologically does not count for me to the extent that I refuse to be serious about my being “Here.” Many people yearn for a relationship and lament that nobody shows a serious interest in them. But in many such cases this kind of yearning is set up as self-sufficient, self-contained. Such a person sits and waits for another person, whoever it might be, to come and show interest in her or him. Here the I reserves itself with respect to its desiring, while it burdens the other person with the task of coming openly forward with his or her desire. The I wants to be invited into a relationship, not to conquer, seduce, win someone, and through its self-betrayal celebrates its own innocence. Let us take a somewhat closer look at this situation. An I may encounter somebody who is interesting and attractive, but shows a bashful reaction because it fears to let its secret innermost desire become visible. The I wants to hide its desire behind a wall of shyness. But really wanting a relationship and really being serious about the “Here” would require that the I step back behind its desires, allowing them (= its true nature) to come out and make themselves felt, to let them take the lead, in other words, releasing them into their status as objective facts, while allowing itself to be reduced to merely having to back them up and to affirm them, stand up for them with the whole strength of its character (no bashful hiding and disowning them, no trying to stay innocent). Then and only then would the I be out of the mode of merely longing for and dreaming about a relationship and would have entered the mode of really (in fact) desiring one—which, of course, would not in itself be a guarantee for a relationship, but is certainly a precondition. And in contrast to the encounter between Ludwig the Saint and the holy Aegidius we can say that a real relationship can only come about if precisely “the human parts” (one’s own senses and feelings) find attractive “the human parts” of the other person (all those things that can be perceived and sensed “Here”: face, figure, personal charm, erotic presence, character, feeling, intelligence, style, etc.) and if the self really shows itself.

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A variation of this is when a person celebrates the ideal in relationship matters by deeply longing for a partner, while having the idea in the back of his or her mind of “the right woman,” “the right husband.” We know this type of attitude from a detail in the Cinderella story. It shows in the prince’s search for his missing and unknown beloved, of whom he possesses one golden or glass shoe as the only possibility to identify her. The shoe is already given, and now the prince merely has to go through the world and test it on every real woman to see whether she is the one who fits this shoe. The prince does not empirically recognize her when he sees her; he needs the shoe as magical object. It is what has to do the recognizing of her for him. The mold comes first; the real person is not seen as herself at all, but only as to her fitting the mold. A different topic comes up with people’s incapability to decide. The neurotic problem of choosing and deciding is due to two desires. (a) The I wants to stay in a position where it still has all options before it. It does not want to step out of the state of still having possibilities and having them before itself, and enter the state of accomplished fact, of having left all options behind, because it has committed itself and thereby transformed one of the former options into a reality that it will be stuck with. Thereby neurosis celebrates the feeling of being on the level of an a priori and its getting out of the I’s being inevitably placed into an a posteriori situation. But this is not the a priori of the “I” stage. Here, the soul has accepted the existence of otherness (several options) and thus shows itself to be in the “Here,” but it spitefully refuses to decide. (b) It wants potentially all advantages, the advantages of all options. It does not want to limit itself to a determinate form of existence. In other words, this one little situation of having to choose is used by the neurosis to psychologically produce and celebrate, pars pro toto, the feeling of a kind of infinity and totality (wholeness). In deciding among several options it is first of all most important to realize that it is less a question of which advantage I prefer than which disadvantage I am willing to live with. Secondly, one has to understand that the main point of deciding is not the decision for an option, but the relentless cutting away of all the other options (“decide” from Lat. de- + caedere: to cut off ). A favorite neurotic game is, after a decision has been made, to go back behind the decision and say, “it would have been better to have taken the other

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possibility after all.” Or one is merely full of doubts (“Would it not have been better ...?”) This is the attempt to psychologically undo the decision (“Penelope”!) and get back to the status quo ante, the status of having options. It shows that one is unwilling to use the sword that is indispensable for deciding. Even before the decision has been made there are often these neurotic doubts as to what would be “the right decision.” But the very point of a decision is that there is no right or wrong. Because if there were, I would not have to decide. The situation of a choice means that I have to come forward with nothing else but my subjective arbitration, i.e., without being able to fall back on substantial reasons that would relieve me of having to decide all by myself. Oportet me adesse: I have to enter the fray with my subjectivity as the ultimate deciding factor. So the neurotic question of what would be the right decision is the method for establishing the feeling of having or needing an objective backing for oneself. It is reminiscent of the case of the prince who has the glass shoe of “the right bride.” Other pathologies that obviously belong to the stage of the Here are stage fright, erythrophobia, and voyeurism. c) Now The problem of the “I” stage had been that its “The Absolute” had only been an absolute inner certainty that had not been critically questioned and thereby verified or justified, which is why on the “Here” stage the neurotic soul, having become a reflecting soul and thus doubtful about the validity of this certainty, needed to protect a claim that had already become doubtful from being exposed to the test of reality. Because it entertained a fundamental suspicion, the soul that had already been born and entered the “Here” needed to resort to the means of hiding, keeping secret, and insulation, by radically splitting and holding apart the inner from the outer, the true self from its appearance in reality. But here again it cannot escape the awareness of the objective soul that a present reality of The Absolute that is dependent on staying totally hidden and immunized is not the present reality that is actually intended. What good is a present reality that does not show itself (really present itself ), that needs at all cost to avoid being put to the test and having to prove itself? And the “I” that is not really, committedly, here and not really born is not even a really

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present “I,” nor a real I in the first place (since being the existing concept, “I” by definition has to be here, in the physical world, embodied). Only the “Here” is the real “I.” By the same token, “The Absolute” is not really absolute if it needs, in order to be at all, to screen itself from contact with the real world and remain an inner secret. The transition from the “I” to the “Here” was made by the entrance into it of critical reflection. Absolute certainty gave way to doubt and suspicion about the original certainty as a vain claim. Now, the transition from the “Here” to the new stage happens because the soul becomes suspicious about the suspicion itself. This very doubt is seen through as being merely a smokescreen that is supposed to conceal the fact that the emperor is naked. Not only the original certainty was an illusion. The doubt, the suspicion, is still illusionary, because there is simply nothing behind the doubt, nothing to be suspicious about. The doubt glosses over this nothing. So now the soul has entered the phase of the reflection of the reflection. The “I” had been the stage of the One, but with the “Here” this One came apart and turned into Two. Two: this means the distinction between inner and outer, true self and born I, acorn and oak tree, “not yet” and accomplished fact, beginning and end. Inasmuch as “Here” implies the necessity or task to come forward out of one’s shell, we can say that the “Here” paradoxically finds its fulfillment only in a “There.” Only if I have truly moved from in here to out there am I really here, in the world. Now one could think that with this move and with this here, the demands of the “Here” would be completely fulfilled. But this is not so. Important as the move from “in here” to “out there” would be, it would nevertheless still only be a semantic arrival in the “Here,” a fulfillment on the level of literal behavior. A structural, logical, syntactical problem of the “Here” would remain: the structure of duality as such, the fact that the structural place of the inner in its distinction from the outer would be left behind intact. The logic of the distinction between “in here” and “out there” would remain unaffected. But the move would only be complete if also the very category of the inner would be brought along in the movement from in here to out there. As it is, however, it is, pictorially speaking, only the body that made this move, whereas the mind, the logical constitution of consciousness, still upholds the duality as before. The

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movement is, we could also say, acted out, but not erinnert, interiorized into itself. So we get a new level on which something reserves itself, a new duality of hiding place and straw man. It is the level of a mental reservation in the literal sense: the psychic, behavioral, and semantic aspect is sent forward out of its shell and makes itself present in outer reality, whereas (or: so that) the psychological, logical, and syntactical aspect can get away undetected and unscathed. For the “Here” to come home to itself it needs to go beyond itself, just as the “I” could only come home to itself by turning into the “Here.” The “Here” that goes all the way to its logical conclusion turns into a new form, the “Now.” (This Now, as the soul’s Now, is of course not the abstract now as a point or a short stretch on the time line.) The “Now” is the incarnated “Here,” the “Here” come home to itself. “Now” means going under into the moment as movement, flux, performative act. “Now” is a temporal term, and time is motion. And because the “Here” was the realized or incarnated “I,” it is only in the “Now” that the “I,” too, finally achieves its full realization, its true present reality. Both “Here” and “Now” are further determinations and inwardizations of the “I” into itself. Neurosis in all its forms has only one content, “I,” which, however, is a self-unfolding, selfinteriorizing content. And just as “I” and “Here,” so is also the “Now” merely deictic, an empty form without descriptive attribute and semantic or substantial content. The “I,” having revealed itself as actually being “Now,” at the same time reveals that its innermost core is time itself, life.224 Whereas the “I” needed to come out in order to come home to itself and be reflected into itself in the “Here,” the “Here” comes home to itself and is released into its truth when the apartness of its internal opposites, inner/outer, today/tomorrow, true self/ego, etc., collapses and the two extremes, à corps perdu, go under into each other, so that each is already inextricably the other and is only in and as this other, not separate from it. Each side is in itself the whole opposition, i.e., is both sides at once. That is to say, the opposition as such is by no means dissolved into homogeneous uniformity. No fusion, amalgamation. The opposites are merely entwined, within each 224 Not natural, biological life, but the life of the spirit. The “I” is, after all, a concept, a thought, and as such contra naturam, which is also the only reason why it needs to incarnate in the first place. Biological life is incarnate from the outset.

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other. There is mutual permeation (with an old theological term, we could say a perichôrêsis, circumincession). Mutual penetration and interlacement. After the Two of the “Here” stage, we have again advanced to a One, however, a One in which the difference between the Two is not blurred or canceled, but is the One’s internal logical contradiction. The existing dialectic. The going under of the opposites into each other and their disappearance as separate extremes and their perichôrêsis is the sign that logical interiority has been reached. Our way so far has been downwards. We have accompanied the subject on its way down from the pre-existence of the first stage to the real world or this earth in the second stage and we are now getting even deeper, namely, getting submerged into the stream of life. But this topological downwards movement of the subject coincided with an alchemical ascent in the style of thinking from the cement-like hardness of the absolute principle to the concrete substantiality of the real world and from there to the subtlety and fluidity of the logical nature that prevails in the present stage, its dialectic. The high ideal of the true self or true inner nature of the “Here” stage has been boiled down to its syntactical form. It has been a process of sublimation, distillation and evaporation.225 It has also been a process of the integration and interiorization of otherness or the form of opposition. In its immediate form (in the stage of the “I”), the opposition had been absolute, which expressed itself in the verticality of this stage. The “I” had been the Absolute, and the opposite to this totality had been totally rejected or excluded. In the stage of the “Here” the opposition had already been reflected into the “subject” itself, as its internal tension between the inner true self and its external appearance. Thus there was a clear horizontal vis-à-vis. In the sphere of the Now, the opposition has been reflected into itself: into its notion. The “I” maintained the form of self-identical substance. The “Here” took the form of a sort of existentialist program of selfactualization. The “Now” displays the self-contradictory, uroboric logic 225 Biological evolution is life’s self-unfolding in the sense of diversification, expansion, the invention of ever new and often ever more complex forms. The “I’s” further-determination moves in the opposite direction: home-coming, selfinteriorization, and refinement.

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of surrender and love. The self-identical substance (“I”) has the quality of an extensionless point. Self-actualization is spatial and temporal extension (spatial: coming out from one’s shell; temporal: individuation process, developing “from acorn into oak tree”). The inner nature of “Now,” by contrast, is movement as such, sheer presence as the ongoing performance or enactment of life, as “passion” (the contradictory unity of “passion” as in “Christ’s Passion” and “passion” as passionate involvement or desire, of active and passive, of Dionysian dismemberment and intoxication). If we avail ourselves for a moment of a personalistic perspective for the sake of illustration, we can say that we are the objects of our passions—and yet in our passions we do not lose our subjectivity (our nature as veritable subjects). Rather, we are fully there, with keenest attention and intention. In our passions we are total “willing” and total “suffering,” both at once. It is not for nothing that the experience of the sexual act has been called “le petit mort.” This death does not abstractly undo or kill life altogether; on the contrary, it is the very form of life. The more you die, the more intensely you live. And to live means to expose yourself, for all you are worth, to this dying, this self-surrender. In this dying you have your life. This dying is not the enemy of life, but the gateway to being fully alive. If you want to prevent this dying, you are dead.226 Life is self-contradictory. It is not the opposite of dying. It is the invention of death; of death not merely at the end and as the end of life, but rather as the beginning, the prerequisite, as the base from which life plunges into itself. Life needs the (implicit) knowledge of death as a springboard to push off from and in this way to bring itself into being in the first place.227 As such it is the existing hysteron proteron. Life is an impertinent uprising of the inanimate stuff, its “booting” itself (pulling itself up by its own bootstraps). And this uprising succeeds because life does not simply walk out of inanimate nature, leaving it totally behind (which would be a utopian endeavor), but by sublating lifelessness, integrating it, appropriating the reality of 226 Even biologically it is so that to live is a constant dying; the physical “substance” that makes up the human organism is constantly being replaced, so that after some years we consist of all new material. 227 I discussed this in my What Is Soul? New Orleans, LA (Spring Journal Books) 2012, chapter “1.2 The corpse and life.”

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death as its own active dying. This is life’s impertinence. The lifelessness that used to be the ultimate horizon for inanimate matter, its absolute nature that was all around it and beyond it, the outermost edge of being, has been incorporated and thereby reduced to a moment of and within life, that life that only came into being by that very reduction. Ipso facto life had transcended death as the former horizon and had conquered for itself the new dimension of life with a new horizon. It had managed to come out from its total submersion in lifelessness. But the price for this conquest was the invention of death both as the termination of life and as an integral, ongoing moment of life. Life is something “crazy” because it has death always behind itself and before itself. Behind itself: since it is only because it never minds death; it always has already disregarded, superseded, the fear of death, and only this impertinent disregard for death, this “Anyway!” or “Nevertheless!,” this “never-mind-death” exuberance, is what makes it life (in contrast to inanimate matter, say a stone). Before itself: because it is mortal; it has the capacity to die (in the end-of-life sense). This capacity is life’s distinction. A living being, in order to be living, has logically embraced death, embraced its own mortality. If it had not, it would be inanimate. Life is “crazy” because it does not follow the laws of formal logic. If the formal-logical demands for unidirectional consistency were followed, there would not be any life: since life means to embrace its own mortality and to be heading for death, it would not start. It would consider the effort a waste. That life has to embrace its own mortality in order to be life is already true on the most primitive physiological level, and it is also true on the higher level of human life. With humanization, the invention of biological life was repeated on the higher level of the life of “the soul” and the mind. And again it was repeated by means of the invention of death in a higher sense. This is why we find in ancient societies rituals that celebrate death and rebirth, which is nothing else but the logic of the life of the mind. Hegel said, But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when

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What happened on the biological level and was repeated with humanization on a cultural level can, in the context of our discussion concerning the transition from the “Here” to the “Now,” be seen to be repeated once more on an intrapersonal level, as the psychologizing of life. Inasmuch as the result of the stage of the “Here” has been that the true nature has come forward from its protective hiding and exposed itself to the world, we can now see that this was not only the completion of birth or the attaining of adulthood, but already the first immediacy form of the death of the I as substance and entity and its going under into the fluidity of life as movement, and the going under of its self-identity into desire, relation, relationship. From now on the I will have to be as movement, process, that is to say, it will have to die into life, not once, as a single act, but as the general form of its existence. It will have to abandon, spend, consume, even squander itself and maintain and fulfill itself in this squandering. It will be able to do so because it lives Now, and the “Now” means: “This is it!” “This moment counts!” Life will not be seen as the extended time line at the end of which is death. This time line has been sublated and reflected into itself, the result of which is the “Now.” No future. No utopia. No projecting death into the distance. Life is the movement of the Now, the Now which has everything it needs within itself. And even if the present Now is the special moment of death as the literal end of life, then this is nevertheless still Now and still life, even its teletê. Whereas the result of the “I” stage of the development of subjectivity had been the first immediacy of the incarnation (i.e., “pregnancy”) and the result of the “Here” stage “birth,” the “Now” stage brings the culmination of the whole process: dying death as the intricate unity of crucifixion-and-resurrection together with the concomitant loss of The Absolute and thus the fulfilled incarnation. After this general portrayal of the internal character of the “Now” stage we return to neurosis. The neurotic soul has reached, and is now 228

G. W. F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit, Miller translation, p. 19.

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on, this new, logically very subtle, highly sophisticated level. Because it cannot, on the one hand, revert to the situation and forms of the previous stages, and on the other hand, as neurotic soul nevertheless needs to celebrate The Absolute and give it an immediate present reality, it must produce entirely new forms of neurosis, new forms of neurotic pathology. In these forms the logic of the new stage and the neurotic purpose will both enter into a kind of compromise formation. The neurotic mise-en-scène cannot escape the necessities of the logic of surrender, of going under into life, but it must artificially produce, by means of some pathology, something that preserves a trace of the former pre-existent Son of God in the first, and the true Self in the second stage. During the “I” stage, The Absolute had the form of an inner unquestionable certainty that, as a neurotic certainty (the certainty of the neurotic soul) had to be given its present reality (or incarnation) in a negative, pathological way, through emotions like anger, outrage, or emotional states like inferiority and guilt feelings, or depressions. The production of The Absolute as present reality happened in the psychic sphere of feeling. During the “Here” stage, The Absolute had the form of doubt and could therefore achieve its present reality through the logical act of splitting, holding the opposites apart, and keeping secret. The psychic sphere was that of thought. In the “Now” stage, The Absolute has the form of absence, loss. And its neurotic production therefore has to be a fabrication, mise-en-scène. What is not a given has to be generated through one’s own performance. The psychic sphere of the generation of the neurotic The Absolute is therefore that of deed, action. Inasmuch as the production of the present reality of The Absolute has itself to occur here in the mode of fabrication, we see that the neurotic arrangement or mise-en-scène that is required in all stages has in the “Now” stage been reflected into itself, come home to itself. The very mode of the generation has now the explicit form of a literal doing, enactment, fabrication (in contrast to the seemingly natural events of emotional states in the “I” or the negative [preventive] logical acts in the “Here”). A first form of neurotic pathology under the aegis of the “Now” is exhibitionism. It is an artificial self-staging. It is, so to speak, the exact opposite of hiding in the “Here.” In the case of exhibitionism there is nothing to which a present reality would or could be given. Rather,

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The Absolute is the very act of showing itself. The Present of the staging is itself The Absolute. So The Absolute has been interiorized into its enactment and thereby desubstantiated. Logically, the performance does not merely attest to an Absolute that exists outside its momentary presentation. The presentation is The Absolute, which outside of it is nothing. Similarly, but on a larger scale, hysteria produces a show that is its own end. There is surrender, self-abandon. However, the subject that would have to completely give itself over is not in the surrender. The hysterical performance is the display of nothing. It is only a front, façade, formality, a play of surrender without substance. That is to say, the surrender has the logical form of a mere acting out. Whereas the exhibitionist at least pretends to show himself, his innermost secret, the content of the show in hysteria goes under in the formality of the show itself as act and performance. Again, The Absolute is only in the act, mere logical form, liquefied, dissolved into a kind of l’art pour l’art, a demonstration per se. All kinds of sexual disorders, each in its own way, such as frigidity, impotence, sadism and masochism, take place on the level of the “Now” with its issue of surrender and passion in its twofold sense. Quite frequent is also the incapability of making a start, be it making a start with particular tasks or with life in general. Jung wrote in more general terms, “Many young people have at bottom a panic fear of life (though at the same time they intensely desire it), and an even greater number of the ageing have the same fear of death. Indeed, I have known those people who most feared life when they were young to suffer later just as much from the fear of death” (CW 8 § 797). This is naturally so: because it is one and the same fear. To plunge into life means relentlessly heading for death, and to really make a start with whatever means to plunge into life (at least at the one point of the matter at which one makes a start). In order to live you have to die into life, that is all there is to it. Death is the beginning of life, not the end. But the point of some neuroses (if not of all of them) is to shirk from life. Whereas hysterical neuroses one-sidedly act out and display the surrender, but without there being a self that gives itself over, the manifold obsessive-compulsive forms try, conversely, to protect the self from having to die into the performance and passion of life, and thereby

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they emphasize the I or self—however, not its majesty, the glory and majesty of the Son of God (as in the “I” stage), but now precisely the God-man’s slave-shape and utter misery. The show element so dominant in hysteria is present only negatively, i.e., as absent: it is present in the absent, only fantastically conjured-up danger that the fending off is directed against. And the moment of surrender, life, and enactment, so essential for the “Now” stage, has receded into a quality of this defense (and thus precisely into the opposite of surrender and life), namely, the total abstractness and mechanical rigidity of the ritual and repetitive character of the defense against the event of life (repetition compulsion), the prevention of motion, flux, happening, fate, commitment, entanglement. With the dissolution of “The Absolute” in logical form and its liquifaction into sheer ongoing performance, the original “I” has exhausted its possibilities of manifestation. Precisely by coming home to itself, The Absolute has itself gone under. But inasmuch as going under and surrender are precisely the essence of the “Now,” at this point one more possibility of neurosis opens up at the logical point now reached, and this form of neurosis expresses itself as Angst, anxiety, either abstract anxiety (“anxiety neurosis”) or concrete anxiety (“phobia”). With this form we have reached the highest logical point and the greatest logical sophistication of the unfolding of The Absolute, its culmination. With the phenomenon of (pathological) anxiety the “Now” ceases to be the last form of the “I” in its comprehensive sense (including all three stages) and transcends itself by opening itself to “other,” to the other as real, a reality in its own right outside the I. All previously discussed forms of neurosis circled around the subject. Even neurotic jealousy, which cannot do without an other, merely uses the other as a means to build up the I in some way. Anxiety (be it phobic or general), however, is no longer I-centered. It is centrally concerned with a content outside of itself. Likewise, the form of present reality is no longer subjective: it has no longer the form of “inner certainty,” nor of “doubt, suspicion,” nor of “a feeling of absence, loss.” No, now present reality has the form of simple fact, real occurrence. Qua anxiety, it in fact happens and overwhelmingly brings its own truth with it and to the I. The subject does not have to do anything, no hysterical show, no compulsive ritual behavior, no holding the self

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back in hiding, no outrage at not being respected, etc. Angst has everything it needs within itself. It is self-sufficient. In other words, The Absolute has emancipated itself from the I. Precisely by having gone absolutely under into movement, into logical form or syntax, The Absolute is now no longer dependent on the subject’s fabrications, machinations, and performances that were so essential in the other forms of neurosis on the level of the “Now.” The surrender has objectified itself. Anxiety is in itself surrender, that is, it is objective surrender, not a subject’s surrender. It is objective passion in the word’s twofold sense, the unity of suffering, terror (“apocalypse now”) and celebration, delight, bliss. This makes it in formal regards similar to an experience of God. For in the Christian tradition, God is certainly Love, and the mystic experience of God is sublime bliss, but, as Jung never tired to insist, God is also abysmal fear, i.e., terror (“the almighty shadow of the Godhead, which is the fear that fills heaven and earth.”229 This fear is not a person’s fear. It has for Jung become ontological, if not cosmological). And yet, the Angst in anxiety neurosis and in phobia is clearly neurotic, rather than a “numinous experience.” For two reasons, first, because it is precisely not the presence or epiphanic appearance of some substantial content, of a god or some metaphysical abysmal depth, some wisdom, but rather the presence of nothing serious, just a trivial, silly fear and thus disgraceful. It is fundamentally empty (merely syntactical, without any authentic semantic content: just Angst). And secondly, as this Angst, anxiety is logically in itself dissociated from itself. It blocks itself. It screens itself within itself from itself. It does not release itself into its truth, abandon itself to itself. And this is why it has an inhibiting, even paralyzing and occluding effect on the neurotic (whereas a numinous experience has a revelatory and illumining character) and this is also why it cannot have a substantial content, cannot discover such a content within itself. Whereas in all previous forms of neurosis there was a spiteful counterfactual move on the part of the subjective soul, in anxiety this spite has become entirely interiorized into the symptom, anxiety, itself. It has become logical. The Sacred Festival Drama has likewise become interiorized into the logic of anxiety itself and thus become fully 229

Letters 2, p. 333, to Künzli, 16 March 1943. Transl. modif.

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objective, independent of any actual performance on the part of the neurotic, as, for example, in hysteria. But despite this logical interiorization and objectification, and despite the fact that anxiety has the form of an experience and occurrence, anxiety neurosis and phobia would not be neuroses if they were not nonetheless a mise-en-scène, something that is produced by the objective soul, an arrangement and a Work. It is not truly the event of the self-presentation of an Other. Rather, the appearance of being such a self-presentation of an Other is neurotically staged. d) Not-I Neurosis is over. The contentless content of neurosis has step by step passed through all its stages, from “I” (in the narrower sense) via “Here” to “Now” and thereby interiorized itself and gone under into itself. All its three possible logical forms, not to be confused with its empirical or clinical forms, have displayed themselves and thus exhausted themselves. The more immediately present “the I” in the comprehensive sense became in the course of its further development, the more it dissolved into fluidity and lost its absoluteness and “metaphysical” quality. With the last form discussed, anxiety neurosis, the “Now” (and this also means that “I” that has ultimately come truly home to itself ) has within itself transcended itself by opening itself—with an inversion from “the I” into the opposite—to “other,” to “Not-I.” Thereby the way beyond neurosis is paved, the way to new psychological illnesses that no longer circle around the task of producing the incarnation (immediate present reality) of The Absolute, “the I.” Two forms are especially noteworthy. First, what is called “borderline personality disorder,” which consists mainly in the systematic negation, cancellation of the I as a stable, consistent subject with a fixed identity capable of entering a relationship as a substantial, reliable subject. And secondly, the many forms of modern addiction, a kind of merging of the hysterical total surrender (and indulging) of the I and obsessive-compulsiveness. Drug addition and compulsive buying both focus on some “stuff,” an “It,” but only in order to prove it to be nothing. By senselessly buying an endless number of all sorts of commodities, the compulsive buyer caricatures consumerism as the general form of the culture and shows that each individual item is

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intrinsically worthless, superfluous. Here we are at the exact opposite of the situation of the Biblical “merchant man, seeking goodly pearls who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it” (Matth. 13:43f.). The drug addict, similarly, although in a very different way, demonstrates to the soul that the consumption of his drug only creates a new craving for it, endlessly, senselessly. The compulsive player of computer games displays an obsessive devotion to purely formal, functional operations absolutely devoid of substance or meaning. These major forms of illness are the celebration of nihilism. The logic of neurosis and the “I” concept have been left far behind by these new cultural forms of illnesses. Neurosis had still been concerned with substance, content, even if only the zero form of it. Now, however, even the empty form of content has become dissolved. The phenomenon of “borderline personality disorder” shows that the objective soul has gone beyond the first, Industrial, phase of Modernity (which was the historical background of neurosis proper) and entered the second phase, Medial Modernity, or at least its first immediacy. Medial Modernity is no longer concerned with substance and identity, but has dissolved into formality, functionality, and has the status of just playing, or of an eternal deferral (Derrida), or a sliding of the signifier, and in the fundamental openness of the newly discovered medial “field” as the successor to the former substances, things, persons; substances, things, persons that under the new conditions might merely appear in the “field” as its sublated moments.230 Therapy, of course, would have to try to help the patient, on the personal level (opus parvum), to emancipate himself from this identification with the logic of medial modernity and to establish himself as I, as a stable personality, a real subject—in contrast to the general necessities of the culture (opus magnum).231 The various forms of addictions and addictive behavior in our time display a Winkelriedian identification of individuals with the root principle and deepest core of Industrial Modernity as such, Schopenhauer’s blind Will, naked willing per se, 232 which is the 230 The technical symbol of this “field” is the World Wide Web. And the human activity corresponding to the WWW is appropriately called surfing. 231 The person who surfs should not himself or herself subsist as mere surfing. 232 Just think here of Darwinian struggle for life, Freudian libido, Lacanian desire as later examples.

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correlate of the Naught (which in turn is the positivized first, or simple, negation of the metaphysical “the absolute” and as such itself still pseudo-metaphysical). They exemplify Nietzsche’s insight (and foresight) that man prefers to will (want) the naught [“das Nichts wollen”] to not willing [“nicht wollen”].233 They thereby go back before the utopian (and thus compensatory) versions of Industrial Modernity (e.g., Feuerbach, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche ...) to its starting point, the absolutely disillusioned, “pessimistic” Schopenhauerian first principle which underlies all its later forms. And by, one and a half centuries later, acting out this root principle, they reduce it, and along with it the stance behind Industrial Modernity as such, to absurdity, in this way indirectly pointing ahead to the new logic of Medial Modernity, which neither circles around substances, things, nor around the naught, “nothing,” not even “nothing” in the sense of “no-thing.” The pathological forms mentioned arise because of a hangover of the old absolute importance that now, however, is attached to the opposite of substance or content, which are the only thing that could have absolute importance (“the pearl of great price”!), namely to sheer technical functionality and relationality, sheer “surfing,” sheer “field.” The need for absolute importance as a hangover of the obsolete metaphysics is still felt in some quarters, but since the logic of substance has, with the change from Industrial to Medial Modernity, been pulled out from under it, it can only show itself as abstract greed and consumption: the interiorized and literally enacted blind Will. But all this lies already outside the scope of a book devoted to neurosis as the logic of a metaphysical illness. Neurosis had precisely been the soul’s countermove to nihilism.234

233 234

See the last sentence of his Genealogy of Morals. However, this we need to add, an in itself nihilistic countermove to nihilism.

APPENDIX

Neurotic traps. A miscellany

I

n the course of more than a century, depth psychology has produced and made publicly available an incredible host of case histories that can be assumed to cover more or less the whole range of possible neuroses, although, since the soul is inventive, it can, of course, still surprise us with new forms, or adjust neurosis to altered societal conditions of life and altered needs. The motivation for adding this appendix is not a wish to add a number of new case reports to the sum total of those already published. In keeping with the spirit of this book, which is devoted to the concept of neurosis, under the title “neurotic traps” I offer a number of individual observations and reflections, little vignettes, that might help to sharpen our understanding of what makes the thinking inherent in concrete neurotic feelings and behaviors neurotic. The general concept of neurosis has to prove itself in view of actual reactions that might be encountered in the consulting room or in life at large. Of course, a real comprehension of what is neurotic can only be acquired by one’s own prolonged practice. Nevertheless, a few more practical examples to complement the ones presented in the previous chapters may prove helpful. The focus in this section is not on particular neurotic patients (the persons themselves) and their neurosis as a clinical syndrome, but on particular instances of neurotic thinking, feeling, and acting—regardless

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of whether they occur in thoroughly neurotic persons, in more or less healthy ones, or, for that matter, in therapists. As such instances of neurotic thinking and feeling, they are to a large extent part of the psychopathology of everyday life. The examples given will be presented out of context. For our purposes we can abstract from personal biography and special life circumstances that provide the background, the contingent building material, and the specific coloring for any real neurosis. Despite the fact that I stand up for the notion of THE neurosis, we must remember that when it is a case of neurotic arrangements in actual life and in actual people we never get to see THE neurosis, which is logically prior to people’s lives, but only individual instantiations of it, individual neurotic behaviors, thought structures, and outbursts of complex reactions. THE neurosis shows itself in reality only indirectly as particular events, momentary occurrences or actions. THE neurosis enters into people’s lives through what I called loopholes for the ghost—for the ghostly form of truths that are no longer true. The difference between “person” and what is predicated of the person. This last point about the difference between THE neurosis and decidedly temporal complex reactions takes me already to my first example. A frequent form of neurotic reaction is to take any reproach, criticism, or condemnation personally, as relating to the person as such rather than to the person’s deed, opinion, or behavior (“Winkelried”). The person (as “substance”) is then subsumed under the predicate, the “substance” is subsumed to one of its own “attributes.” The person is pocketed by the condemnation and disappears in it as a self. What the criticism criticizes is in such cases neurotically experienced as an attack on the human dignity of the person, and this untouchable human dignity of the person is what is neurotically celebrated in the feeling of its having been violated. The whole idea of “human dignity” in modernity, where it is literalized and declared to be sacrosanct, is structurally neurotic. Just as a therapist or a judge is morally not allowed, when expressing a criticism or condemnation, to reproach or condemn the very person of somebody, but only what this person did or said or thinks (i.e., the views), so I am also, in the converse case, obligated to refuse to relate any criticism or condemnation to me as “person,” even if, as is

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sometimes the case, it should in a particular situation in fact be intended to mean me personally (in the sense of a literal “argumentum ad personam”)! This refusal is my obligation to myself. My human dignity must not at all be declared to be sacrosanct: it is untouchable, inviolable, because it is logically negative and thus on principle out of reach. 235 Wanting to assign to it the status of sacrosanctity would construe it as a positivity while at the same time giving it a metaphysical quality, that is to say: mystifying it. But this mystification is, of course, what neurosis is all about. The positivization comes out most blatantly in the modern fundamental condemnation of the death penalty as incompatible with human dignity. In former times, during the whole Christian eon, the death penalty was not seen as being in conflict with “human dignity” (which in those times was called “the immortal soul”)—because it was appreciated as something logically negative. And as such it could not possibly be encroached upon by any empirical action or event.

*** Communication: unity based on distance. In relationships and communication with others, particularly with friends, there can be the neurotic idea that one’s own opinions should immediately be convincing to the other person, that one’s own feelings and tastes should be totally shared by him or her. If a present to the other person was not enthusiastically received, but evoked only a polite “thank you” (because the present did not meet the person’s taste), this may then be experienced as devastating or as an insult and even as a cancellation of the relationship. In addition to being a neurotic misconception, this is also a moral fault. In moral regards, it has the character of a transgression, a lack of respect for the integrity and freedom of the other. Psychologically it amounts to the pocketing and appropriation of the other, a claiming him for oneself. The neurotic problem is the insistence on an undialectical unity without separation, on a situation 235 There is one noteworthy exception: when the physical basis (or the rootedness of the sense of person in its physical basis) gets damaged by the attack, such as through systematic torture (in the literal sense), be it through physical or psychological violence. Our personhood is neither free-floating above our bodily existence nor identical with it. Its logical negativity is dependent on the essentially embodied soul’s rising above the body. It needs its firm rootedness in the body to be able to push off from it.

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in which the personal, maybe intimate connection between two people is construed as if it were a physical one (in analogy to the mother-embryo unity through an umbilical cord) and not viewed as a human, civilized relationship, that is a fundamentally mediated, linguistic one. Expressing one’s opinion must not be meant as a kind of injection of it into the other person. Contact with others, even between close friends, is only civilized if, figuratively speaking, a table is imagined as standing between them, at once separating and connecting them. Speaking to the other can then be one’s placing one’s opinion onto this table and granting the other person the freedom to ignore it and leave it on the table or to pick it up and, in the second case, to understand it correctly or to misunderstand it, to like it and agree with it or to disagree and reject it. As paradoxical as it may sound, true communication consists of two discrete (independent) acts rather than a continuous migration of a content from the one person to the other.

The two vertical lines represent “the table” and mark the nonidentity or fundamental gap between “what is said” and “what is heard,” even in cases where there is no misunderstanding but a congruence and “communication.” The act of hearing/understanding is creative (reproductive), not merely receptive.

*** The intrusiveness of love. The opposite problem appears in the area of erotic desire. Some people are incapable of saying “I love you” and ostensibly showing their desire; they are inhibited from performing the (in the area of love indispensable) transgression into the very heart of the person they “love.” They cannot muster the courage of feeling, “you MUST love me!” But without this feeling, the desire is no desire. Even in the area of love those people stay, as it were, “polite.” They always place a table between themselves and the person loved, and their “desire” is merely a pious hope or wishful thinking (“it would be nice if you reciprocated my love”) that they place on this table, leaving it to the other whether he or she wants to respond favorably

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or not. Real desire is Amor’s arrow aimed from the heart of the one person directly into the heart of the person loved. Note: My desire is Amor’s arrow, not mine! The transgression into the very personhood of the person loved that is inherent in desire is not the person’s transgression, not his or her behavior, like an act of violent force. It is a desire-internal transgression, a violence immanent to, but also enclosed within, the logic of desire. Therefore, while the desire, within itself, says, “you MUST love me!,” the person who feels this desire will nevertheless respect the freedom of the person loved to react as he or she sees fit. This can be so because a real erotic desire is not the ego-personality’s emotion, but a feeling coming over the egopersonality from out of the objective soul, which is why mythologically it has been seen as the workings of a god or goddess. Seen in this light, those people whose wooing stays in the status of a harmless wish can be seen as defending the I’s sovereignty against a possible experience of the objective, autonomous force of desire from within themselves. They construe desire as their own ego wishes.

*** Intrusiveness in the relation to small children. Transgression into the territory of another personality is also an issue in the education of small children. Many parents want to be “nice guys,” great chums with their children, and thus they fear, for example, to strictly forbid something or to demand immediate obedience. Instead, they try to appeal to the children’s goodwill or insight, or they want to coax them into doing what they as the parents want, so that the illusion is created that the children happen to wish to do, of their own free will, the same thing that their parents want. In other words, such parents have a “table” between themselves and their children and split their interaction with them into two acts, their expressing a wish, on the one hand, and the child’s “voluntary” fulfilling the wish, on the other hand. What they avoid is a direct, “naked” contact from I to I, will to will. But with this avoidance they betray their children, first, by not doing their own job as parents (parents are office-bearers, not buddies!), and secondly, by putting the burden of moral or rational behavior prematurely on the shoulders of their little ones, thereby overtaxing

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them. The smaller children are, the more they should have their morality and rational insight and the associated responsibility in their parents and not in themselves. They themselves should be logically free, just children. But practically they need to experience moral principles and rational necessities as external boundaries coming as factual dictates from their parents. They need the direct contact, need to feel the impact of the parent’s will as a limitation, because only through the emotional experience of the limiting direct encounter can they experience themselves. This painful limitation must be personalized, that is, come precisely from the most important and most loved persons, father and mother, rather than from some abstract universal source (rationality, moral principles). Only when they emotionally experience themselves through such clashes of wills can they in the course of time develop a solid sense of I and turn into firm, well-contoured personalities—who then can also gradually be granted responsibility for the morality and rationality of their behavior and concomitantly more and more deserve to be respected as free human beings. Parents have the obligation, and owe it precisely to their children, to educate them instead of having a soft spot for them. Very often such a soft spot is actually sheer selfishness, namely the parents’ fear of their children’s anger at them that would be evoked if they showed the courage to face them with demands and prohibitions.

*** Parental impotence. There are, of course, parents who do attempt to fulfill their office as parents by setting limits to their children— however, it does not work. They tell their children to stop playing, to put their toys in order and to come to dinner, but the children simply ignore this command. The same phenomenon occurs in other spheres in different ways. There are schoolteachers whose words are immediately respected without question by their students and there are other teachers who feel forced to get louder and louder because they are not listened to. The same also applies to other authority figures like supervisors, bosses, military officers. What is the neurotic trap here? In such cases of disregard, the command is vain because it is a command only according to its external form, that is, on the behavioral level, according to its semantic content, and subjective

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intention. But its objective inner logical form lacks that which alone would turn it into a real command, namely, that it has within itself the inexorable finality of a sort of guillotine that logically, psychologically—of course not empirical-factually—cuts off any possibility of disobedience. Children do not so much react to what is said and to the subjective intention as to the logical form of what is said. Children, pupils, and subordinates immediately sense whether an order is meant seriously, whether it is a real order, or only the impotent mock-up of one, a mere personal wish. Just as the violence of Amor’s arrow has to be internal to one’s erotic desire itself (to its logical form) if it is to be real desire, so also must the “guillotine-like finality” be a finality that is inherent in the logic of command itself, its internal characteristic. This indispensable ruthlessness, if you wish: cruelty, is one of that “genre” that we call “command.” It is not a sign of the personal cruelty or ruthlessness of the person uttering the command. On the contrary, persons who are capable of truly giving commands may personally be quite kind and well-meaning. But the point is that their subjective nature, one way or another, is neither here nor there. Those persons whose commands are not taken seriously and not obeyed are usually within themselves, intrapsychically, themselves not obedient to the inexorable demands of the objective logic of the genre “command,” and this is why their “commands” are necessarily phony, merely semantic imitations of “commands” and thus do not deserve to be taken seriously. It is just as in the case of those people who cannot truly desire in the erotic sphere. The ego-personality high-handedly wants to be the sole and supreme ruler and thus pronounces its orders and prohibitions solely on its own authority as subjective person, refusing to bow to the demands of the objective situation or objective necessities. Such persons want in their inner psychic structure to retain, or rather revive, the freedom and unharmed subjectivity of innocent children. They do not want their own innocence to be wounded by the ruthless finality of demands made on them by objective situations, by necessity. Because they continue to refuse to be obedient to necessity in favor of their own wishful thinking, they transport their own prevailing disobedience to their children or subordinates even and precisely in those very utterances to which they try to give the appearance of orders or prohibitions.

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Another possible reason for such “impotence” on the part of parents, teachers, or other authority figures is if in their consciousness the logic of the situation of giving orders or expressing prohibitions is construed in purely technical terms in analogy to operating a machine, as if demanding something from the child were comparable to pressing a particular button on an apparatus and being allowed to expect the corresponding mechanical reaction to happen. Such parents, to talk only about them, have left and severed the human bond connecting them with their children (or never established it) and thus stand as isolated, solitary individuals vis-à-vis their children as wholly others. But the event of giving orders (and thus causing displeasure) has to happen within a genuine human relationship that unites both parties, and within a feeling of solidarity with those who are the recipients of the command.

*** Condescending to do the chores. A patient and his wife expect visitors tonight who will stay overnight. His wife asks him to make the guest beds. He says, “Yes, I will do it.” But before doing it, he compulsively has to do something else, like playing the piano for a while. It is not that he had all the time intended to practice piano at this very time and that his wife’s request had unexpectedly come in his way. No, if this request had not happened, he might have continued to read the newspaper or done something else. What was it then that made him first play the piano instead of right away making the beds? Making beds was an unpleasant job, menial work, and being asked to do this menial work offered a wonderful opportunity to build up and celebrate the absolute freedom of the I, which is too good to have to do such low jobs. So, by playing the piano the soul demonstrated to itself that although eigentlich, yes, truly, he knew and agreed that it was necessary for him to make the beds, eigentlicher, still more truly, he had something better, higher, more noble to do. Such menial jobs, even though empirically doubtlessly necessary (from the day person perspective), are logically or psychologically (from the night person perspective) beneath his dignity and a waste of the precious time of his life. “In truth” he is not just a normal person living in empirical reality and expecting

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overnight guests today; he is the prince who can expect that others do these jobs for him, so that he is free to do what he pleases, in other words, free to play. By refusing to immediately do what needed to be done and interposing his first having to play the piano, this person celebrates the principle of his being the prince, a majesty, all-important, even if in practice he would later graciously condescend to do what was necessary. If he had been asked to practice the piano (because maybe he was supposed to play something that night for the guests), he might first have had to do something other than practice the piano, like polishing his motorcycle. So the issue is not the kind of activity itself, it is whether it comes from his own spontaneous impulse and agrees with his own wishes, or whether it is a tiresome necessity intruding from outside.

*** “Division of labor.” A mother spoils her child by always letting it do what it wants to do rather than demanding of it that it do certain jobs. This mother does all the menial jobs herself because she thinks that it would be an imposition for the child to have to do such things. So she builds up the prince or princess, but not in herself—because she herself takes on the Cinderella position, relieving her child of all duties—but in the person of her literal child who, of course, simultaneously represents for her THE child as such, the principle of childhood majesty, and thus also her own inner childishness.

*** Deserving a reward. Sometimes people who have forced themselves to do an ordinary menial job feel they have to treat themselves to a piece of chocolate or a drink of whisky or whatever as a consolation and reward. Or they expect praise from their parents or from their partners. The idea behind the feeling of deserving a consolation, reward, or praise is that they think by having done this job they have humbled themselves far beneath their actual princely position and need a compensation for their act. In this way they still hold on to and celebrate the majesty of the prince. By feeling that they have humbled themselves, they show precisely that they have not really humbled themselves, but are still living high up in the sphere

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of the principle and therefore think that they did something that actually was far beneath their dignity only as a favor and out of great kindness. They have not come down. If they had, they would know that the job they did was nothing special at all, no great favor, no sacrifice, but just a normal household chore as everyone has to do them, simply a practical necessity, like brushing one’s teeth. But they make of such a banal and ordinary thing a great feat for which they ought to be decorated with a medal.

*** Falling. A patient is on a hike with others in a mountainous area. At one point they get to a place where the path has become narrow, with a rock face on the one side and a somewhat steep drop on the other side. Realistically seen, there is no danger. The path was wide enough for one person to get comfortably by. But the patient sees this place and is suddenly as if paralyzed. She can neither move ahead nor back. This lasts only for a few seconds, then she succeeds in pulling herself together. So this is a very small, relatively insignificant neurotic reaction, but one in which the functioning of neurosis is fully present. What creates the panic fear is here not a real danger, not the real situation. Nobody else in the hiking party felt anything like this. Rather, the situation afforded a close enough analogy to an abyss; it was suggestive enough of the danger of falling to allow the soul to conjure up the vivid image of absolutely losing her ground under her feet and endlessly falling into the void. (There was no idea in her fear of being smashed at the bottom of the abyss, only the idea of falling.) The real situation is thus, so to speak, just what the soul had been waiting for as an opportunity to project its own concern, a soul concern, upon it and to indulge in this image and emotion, even if only for a moment. This imagined falling is an unthinkable threat. It means: no ground to stand on, no ground that reliably supports me; it meant bottomlessness of existence and it means being thrust into a movement and process that is absolutely beyond my influence, let alone control. In falling, a dynamic takes hold of me and does with me what it wants, and I have to experience and suffer this condition of being the object of an autonomous larger force.

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Since nothing of this is in fact happening, but it is all, as it were, “voluntarily” conjured up, it must be wanted by the soul. The soul must have an interest in it. The artificially created fear is the neurotic soul’s negative way of celebrating the true self that should stay protected, not come forward, not be exposed to life where it could lose its own subjective autonomy. It is not a case of a general fear of height. By producing the terrible fear of being helplessly exposed to a process of falling if she went on, the soul celebrates its demand to be provided with a firm ground, a safety net if it (the soul) is to proceed forward into life. The existence of a stable ground is set up as the precondition for coming forward with her true self. Fear of height could in other cases (e.g., when standing on a high tower or skyscraper) be a symptom in which the soul in a negative way celebrates the I (rather than the Here), the I as an absolute and abstract, eleatic principle; the I as absolutely grounded, reliably supported; the I as the subject that is in charge of any movement, not as the object of a movement absolutely beyond its control. In the general fear of heights the soul makes its absolute insistence on an eleatic definition of existence and on subjective control existentially and intensely felt. The insistence on the eleatic principle means existence not as life, movement, being in (exposed to) a process, not as the dialectic of coming to be and passing away, but as pre-existence. This insistence and this principle are, as it were, inscribed into consciousness through the described small incident, the emotion of fear serving as a kind of laser beam. Falling is the extreme image of being in life. In fact, we are all falling, we are all in the unstoppable process of heading for our death. The image of falling does not in itself cause fear. Small children, for example, do not have a fear of falling and often experience being thrown high up into to air and falling down as pleasurable. This is because the small child does not yet know a need to establish itself as I, and so it is totally given over to the experience itself and its movement. The moment that the soul sets up the idea of falling as a terrible threat, it establishes and celebrates the I as absolute principle, the I as firmly grounded and in absolute control. The soul works here through the opposite. The fear of falling creates or confirms the idea of the absolute stability and control of the I. The fear is neurotic when it occurs (not before a sense of I has been established, but) after it has already objectively been

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understood that the dogma of absolute stability and control is untenable and if the fear is used to subjectively restore what is, deep down, already known to be obsolete.

*** Conforming vs. imposing. Very frequently one encounters the need of patients to behave the way they think that others wish or expect them to behave. There is in them the fear to come forward with their true being and to impose themselves with this their own nature on their surroundings. To be really here, however, would mean just that. There are two main ways to see the reason behind a refusal to impose oneself. First, it is the fear that one might be a nuisance for the other person, and this is why one holds back. Secondly, one tries to escape the judgment or verdict of others; one does not want to risk oneself, not expose one’s inner nature to the acid test. In the one case it is a behavior out of consideration for others, in the other it is motivated by a kind of cowardice, the wish to remain a clean slate, an unknown quantity. Now it is true that empirically-practically, in one’s social behavior, it is a normal and appropriate attitude to show consideration for the feelings and interests of others. But here we are dealing with something completely different: with a psychological self-reservation out of consideration for the interests of others. The psychological selfreservation does not make one refrain from bad behavior, which would indeed be a demand of politeness or ethics, but much rather suppresses one’s own nature, that is one’s own truth. One does not allow oneself to be what one is. But the only reason why I am in the world is to be what I am, to bring my nature into reality, myself in my individuality and particularity. And this is why it is my psychological obligation to impose my nature, my being, my truth (again: not my behavior) upon others if a situation calls for it. The psychological mistake behind the neurotic self-reservation out of fear of becoming a nuisance for others is that I treat my nature as if it were in the same status as my behavior. I am certainly morally responsible for my behavior. I can to a large extent learn to keep it in check and control it. But I am not responsible for my nature, my true being, my real desires, feelings and opinions. I have not made myself,

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not chosen my nature, but I found myself with these or those characteristics as contingent, irrational facts.236 The way I am has been given to me: for better or worse I have been “gifted” with my nature. From this it follows that the question of responsibility has to be seen exactly the other way around: Rather than that it would be my responsibility to feel guilty for my true nature and to keep it hidden and under control, I have precisely the responsibility to be the advocate of my being. My nature or truth has been entrusted to me like a ward, so I have to act as its guardian. I have to stand by it and behind it, support it as its caretaker. I have to lend it my voice, because it can only make itself heard through me.

*** Involuntary aggression. A woman finds to her dismay that time and again she is subject to a compulsion to make malicious, venomous comments to persons that she loves, indeed adores. These remarks are particularly invidious because they aim with total precision at real sore spots and weaknesses of the others. The patient is shocked by her own behavior and full of guilt feelings, and hurting those people’s feelings is the last thing she wants to do. She loves them and is very grateful to them. This is why her behavior deeply pains her. But all this does not prevent her from letting herself be seduced into being malicious again at the next opportunity. Her love is an absolutely symbiotic one, that is to say, her relationship to those others is construed as an undialectical a priori unity that logically excludes the second moment of a real relationship, the moment of separation, distance, “divorce.” Because this moment is absolutely excluded and denied, it asserts itself from behind with compulsive power as a symptom against the subjective attitude and will of the I. If the separation is not logically inherent in the form of relating, it makes itself forcefully empirically present in the semantics of neurotic behavior (or sometimes, another possibility, as external fateful events). Thomas 236 This is why Jung says about ordinary man in the status of “childlike naïveté”: “He has no objectivity toward himself and cannot yet regard himself as a phenomenon which he finds in existence and with which, for better or worse, he is identical” (MDR p. 341).

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Mann wrote in one of his novels: If you can do it, you will do it. If not, it will be done to you.237 We should not relate the “doing” that the first part of this important insight refers to to literal behavior, actual doing, but to the performance of the soul’s acts in its logical life and thus to the inherent moments of its stances, attitudes, and institutions. There is a second aspect to the symptom described. Precisely because it is a symbiotic love, the neurotic soul cannot forgive the people loved that they are human, all-too-human, and have weaknesses or faults. They ought to be absolutely perfect. From the point of view of the neurotic soul, their faults need to be ruthlessly exterminated, expurgated. The compulsive viciousness of this patient has therefore the character of a kind of inquisition.

*** Coniunctio: union of unity and separation. As far as matrimony is concerned, the usual sequence in our time is: first marriage, then divorce. But psychologically a true relationship should from the outset be the logical unity of both. A marriage should be based on a (logical) divorce.

*** From wound to scar. Patients often do not shoulder their neurotic symptoms and behavior, do not actively accept and bear their disorder as their own present being. Instead, they keep viewing it as something imposed on them, indeed, almost as a kind of injustice done to them by life. They are the “victims” of their neuroses. This is a form of denial and an attempt to hold themselves in the status of wishful thinking. In this way they keep their neurosis, as it were, in the status of an open wound instead of seeing it as and letting it be a scar. In the sphere of the body, it is nature that has to perform the transition from wound to scar, and we are dependent on nature concerning this change. But in the soul the transition from wound to scar is the subject’s own logical, psychological task, a task to be performed by it. This can be so because “wound” and “scar” are in psychology not physical realities, 237 Thomas Mann, Joseph und seine Brüder, no place (S. Fischer), 1976, p. 512 (Chapter “Nachtgespräch” in the volume “Joseph in Ägypten”), my translation.

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but modes of seeing and construing one and the same situation. “Wound” in this psychological context means constantly pushing away the symptoms one suffers from, holding them at bay as something impending and not already real. It is in some way similar to how a businessman who is actually already bankrupt keeps clinging to the hope that his next transaction will be his rescue, instead of admitting his disastrous financial situation and turning it into a solid base from which to proceed. This admission would require his strength of drawing a line under his business life up to now. It is finished, concluded. This strength to draw a line under his neurosis, the strength of considering it an accomplished fact, is what the neurotic, too, needs, if his neurosis is to be overcome. He must make his neurosis his own. He must submit to it, allow it to be, to be his (present) truth, and precisely by placing himself under it in this way turn it dialectically into the ground on which he stands and from which he takes his next steps. Interestingly enough, drawing a line under his neurosis as an accomplished fact is in itself the first step out of his neurosis. Making it his own present reality turns it into an object, a fact that he as subject can relate to. Conversely, if the neurosis is kept in the “open wound” status, the neurotic settles (more or less comfortably) in it, makes it his home, which means that it is construed as an eternal present instead of a perfect tense and that his view will inevitably have to be a neurosisinternal one. But from the therapeutic standpoint he should take a position vis-à-vis to his neurosis. Self-pity, being ashamed, feeling inferior, feeling unfairly victimized, complaining about one’s symptoms: these are different modes of secretly staying in love with one’s neurosis and avoiding drawing a line under it.

*** The courage to be nothing. A woman says she cannot let go and fall into herself because she is nothing, a void. But this void is the first immediacy of her own being. Her psychological task is to stand up for and back up this nothingness as which she experiences herself. She does not need a Tillichean “courage to be,” but the very opposite, the courage to be nothing, to face the risk of perdition. Only through

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abandoning herself to the risk of being empty, weak, “wrong,” stupid, can she find out who she really is and thus find her own solid ground. This is also why Jung could warn the therapist against using “suggestion, insinuation, or any other method of persuasion” (we could add to this list: consolation) because it “ultimately proves to be nothing but an obstacle to the highest and decisive experience of all, which is to be alone with his [the patient’s] own self or whatever else one chooses to call the objectivity of the soul. The patient simply must be alone if he is to find out what it is that supports him when he can no longer support himself. Only this experience can give him an indestructible foundation” (CW 12 § 32, transl. modif., my emphasis). That she is nothing is, of course, a fantasy, not a reality. Therefore her fear of letting go does not have the character of an avoidance. Rather, by conjuring up this seemingly “devastating” fantasy the neurotic soul celebrates her insistence on being something, a solid substance.

*** Self-identity and self-estrangement. A patient had all her life been in vehement fights with her mother, fights less about differing concrete essential interests, but more for principle’s sake, in order to demonstrate her independence and absolute sovereignty. This patient now suffers from a strange condition. She feels as if in an alien world and even estranged from herself. Her energies seep away. “An inversion of reality: not I look at the world, but the world looks at me. I stand beside me. I cannot say, ‘I am,’ but have to say, ‘that is me.’” The first person has turned into a third person, like a thing, an object. With these feelings or states that the neurotic soul produced it celebrates and solidifies—in a negative way: in the form of suffering from what absolutely ought not to be—her habitual selfdefinition as absolutely identified with her sovereign ego and totally subjective. Neurosis refuses to allow self-estrangement into the I’s self-definition. It rejects the actually prevailing dialectic that “I am” and “That is me” are equally and simultaneously true. The not neurotic I is at one and the same time completely identical with itself and sees itself from outside, has a distance to, and a more objective perspective upon, itself. It knows itself as subject and as

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object, as the contingent fact this it is 238 (“I am only that!”). Neurosis dissociates this dialectic and insists on the total otherness of I and world. The world as an alien other is looking at me when and because I as subject do not make my self-estrangement also my very own perspective and project it away from me upon the otherness of the world.

*** No justification. A man complains that he can only stand up for his position when it is a matter of a rational argumentation based on facts or other objective reasons. Thus he is quite able to defend his opinion in business matters in his professional life. But in person-to-person confrontations, when it is his subjective will against the other person’s subjective will, he becomes utterly helpless. He himself, as naked I, must not show himself. He needs to keep himself hidden behind a third, some justifying fact, rule, objective reason, or principle. But this means that he is not really “I.” Because the I is groundless. It has no justification. I is sheer insurgent self-assertion, unfounded, without a “right” or “permission.” Indeed, if there were a right or permission, there would not be an I. And there is not first an I as a subsistent psychological entity which may or may not risk to assert itself. No, I only comes into being as and in the act of an essentially “impertinent” uprising, its daring to establish itself as a center and its own origin. I is, as Fichte put it, a Tathandlung (fact-act: autoproductive activity). Not, however, the neurotic I.

*** Non-committal self-knowledge. A woman in analysis characterizes herself or her actions quite adequately. She can be quite open about her faults and criticize them ruthlessly. But when her therapist says more or less the same thing to her she gets furious. As long as she admits to herself the truth about herself, it is only a non-committal, ineffectual game. The correct critical assessment of her faults and actions does not come home to her. It does not make a 238 See the vignette entitled “Conforming vs. imposing” above and especially the footnote with the quote from Jung.

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difference. But when the therapist tells her something to her face, she cannot escape any longer. Then it cuts into her, she is faced with it and has to face it herself. This is why the therapist’s behavior is for her a “criminal offence.” His saying the same thing she herself had said pierces her armor.

*** Dependence on others. When alone, a patient has no drive, no motivation. He is as if paralyzed. But the moment he is with some other person, he has ideas about what they could do. Then life returns to him. Erich Fromm wrote a book entitled Man for himself. This patient lives the exact opposite. One could say that he avoids being himself. But it is psychologically more correct to say that in this symptom of his listlessness, his being bored, his having no idea of what to do with himself when alone, the neurotic soul refuses to accept the fundamental loneliness of itself as born soul and conversely celebrates its insistence on being on principle connected with the primordial soul at large, here represented, sort of pars pro toto, by other empirical human beings. It would not make sense to think about this listlessness in terms of a problem with the anima. This would merely glorify and mystify his neurosis and distract from the real issue: his unconsciously wanting, needing his listlessness for the celebration of The Absolute.

*** Playing the babe in the woods. A woman complains about little annoyances that come up in her contact with other people: the doctor she went to was not interested enough in her symptom; a bank teller was a bit aggressive in tone to her; others are egotistical and try, she thinks, to take advantage of her ignorance in certain matters or of her personal weakness. Sometimes she also complains about the allegedly “impossible,” outrageous behavior of other people that she merely witnesses without being personally involved. Now the special thing about her complaints is the feelingtone that betrays the underlying fantasy and emotion. She talks about these incidents as completely incredible, unheard-of. That

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people behave in this way is stylized as something that is totally unthinkable, shocking, and therefore absolutely outrageous! However, the fact is that all her life long, already in childhood, she had apparently time and again had occasion to get angry and upset about similar incidents. So why is today’s annoying experience “unheard-of”? Why is it “unthinkable”? Over the years she had experienced this type of behavior a million times. Today’s new event is perfectly in keeping with her own life-experience. She should be used to this kind of thing and be familiar with it as the way of the world. Nevertheless, the way she presents each new incident it is as if such a thing had happened to her for the very first time and left her speechless. In other words, a neurotic refusal to learn from experience. We can say: those occurrences, ever more of them, are needed, selectively highlighted, and utilized by the soul to create, constantly reconfirm, and celebrate the idea of her as a babe in the woods, or an unborn soul up in the clouds, who is absolutely untouched by and stays immune to the real human world. By creating the feeling of being absolutely shocked at the behavior of people in real life, the neurotic soul shows that it has already arrived in the real world, but regressively restores, or simulates, a kind of prenatal innocence. In addition to this innocence, the shock and indignation at the ways of the world betrays a claim to moral superiority. Inherent in the indignation is a radical condemnation. Its momentum is needed to propel the soul, which in reality is already down here, psychologically up to a place in the clouds.

*** Abstraction. A patient feels under constant pressure and stress out of the fear that she might die before she has accomplished all that she should have accomplished in life. Nothing must be missed by her. She cannot let go and live life one day at a time. This woman is haunted by the idea of totality and of her being responsible for achieving this totality. We have the saying: someone “cannot see the forest for the trees.” The reverse is the case with this lady. She cannot see and appreciate the moments of life, the particular task that each new Now in its eachness represents, because she is obsessed with “all,” “everything.” She is in the grip of a faulty logic.

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She wants to seize, and take possession of, the “Whole” directly, she as I. Her concept of wholeness is that of an abstract universal that she nevertheless literalizes, treating it as if it were a concrete object (even if one of enormous scope), in other words, a positivity. This shows that she views life from a position above life, the supreme position of a sovereign I as a kind of imperialistic ruler striving for world domination, which necessarily overtaxes her as finite human being. The logic of life is exactly the other way around. You have to immerse yourself in, to go under into the stream of life, devoting yourself to particular moments, and if this is done conscientiously, life produces its own wholeness, wholeness as a concrete universal and as absolutely negative.

*** The avoided verdict. A patient is deeply hurt and terribly disappointed about the heartlessness and egotism with which his mother behaved to a certain other person. This feeling is gnawing at him. It rankles him. But what is crucial for neurosis is that this feeling of pain and disappointment and this newly gained knowledge about a dark shadow aspect of his mother is not harbored in his heart. Rather, he has only a personal feeling in the privacy of his inner and suffers from it. It does not become a judgment, an outright condemnation of this egotistical behavior that he saw his mother perform. As long as he refrains from passing such a verdict, his feeling remains a means of stowing away the experienced truth in order to thereby psychologically rescue the sanctity of his mother. To have a subjective feeling is not enough. The painful feeling shields him from the truth. The subjective pain is the coin with which he pays for his staying exempt from having to admit the objective truth. The content of the experience must be released into its truth. He has to, as it were, open Pandora’s box, let the “evil” news get out and thus have a life of its own (to which he then would be exposed, rather than keeping it under his ego control in his private inner). He has to let the emperor be naked. As long as the experience stays in the form of his own feeling, he stays in control of it and is protected from what this feeling is actually about. The feeling serves as a protective screen between himself and the insight inherent in his disappointment. Only if its content came out into the open and took on the form of an

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objective judgment, a condemnation of his mother, 239 would he relentlessly be himself exposed to its truth. Now I hasten to dispel a possible misunderstanding that by “condemning his mother’s behavior” I had his actual confrontation with her (on the behavioral level) in mind. I am not talking about any interaction at all. I am only concerned with the patient’s own internal relation to the substance of his experience. Whether on the behavioral level his internal “pronouncing sentence” on his mother may or may not make it also necessary for him to confront his mother explicitly is a completely different question that is of no interest within a psychology of neurosis. What is psychologically needed is merely the form change from subjective feeling to objective statement, from emotion to logos and truth. At the same time such a change would subjectively amount to a move from an “amateurish” to a “professional” way of living life. The emotional disappointment is “amateurish” because it stays stuck in and bound to one’s wishful thinking. In this case this man wants to rescue the untarnished beautiful image of his mother. But releasing the content of the feeling into its truth is only one necessity. A second, but connected psychological necessity is: obedience, obedience to his own experience, to its truth. He has to bow to the insight inherent in his experience, the insight that causes this disappointment, rather than holding this truth beneath himself, and himself above it, by merely personally suffering from pain. The latter is cheating: subjective pain instead of admission of the truth and releasing it into its objectivity.

*** Going through the motions of living. I once heard of a lady of over 90 who had become blind, whose two legs had been amputated, and whose children had turned against her and deserted her so that she more vegetated rather than lived in a nursing home waiting to die. If this woman should ever have said, “Life is a burden; I don’t like it any more; it is enough,” we would immediately understand and sympathize with her view. Yes, her life is a burden. But it is an 239 Of course not a wholesale condemnation, but the condemnation of this one experienced trait of hers.

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altogether different matter if this very statement is heard from a middleaged woman whose life situation was not really bad at all. The middleaged woman complains of having no zest. Life is for her like an obligation imposed upon her from outside. She also toys with the idea of throwing herself before a train or, in winter, laying down in snow to freeze to death. As we see, for example, from the difference between this woman and the 90 years old one in the nursing home, in such cases the actual life situation and background make a difference for the psychological assessment of the feeling of life as a burden. In the case of the middleaged woman, the burden was not factual, but a neurotic construct. Due to some disappointments she resentfully pulled herself out of life and set the latter up as an other, an alien element, over against herself, as an unfair imposition. She reserves herself. She merely goes through the motions of living, but does not really live, let herself be lived. At the same time she sets herself up as an abstract isolated ego over against life. This I is one that is absolutely emaciated, reduced to an extensionless point, whereas normally an I is dispersed, invested in and given over to numerous activities, interests, objects, and relationships. And under ordinary conditions, life is not an other. There is no difference between “me” and “life” (my life) because I am only as the ongoing life as which I exist. Furthermore, the I is not a subsisting entity, a positivity, in contradistinction to life. The I is a logical form of life itself. So the patient’s incapability to enjoy life (or at least feel alive) and her experiencing life as a burden imposed on “her” are due to a dissociation that entails a logical error, wrong thinking, and is motivated and fired by a certain spitefulness.

*** The semantic price for the syntactical neglect. A woman feels constantly slighted. By this I do not merely mean that time and again there are particular incidents that evoke this feeling. No, hers is above all a generalized attitude, a mode of her being-in-the-world, that does not need specific events. Among other things, this narcissistic insult shows also in her transference relationship. Her deep conviction is that she should be immediately involved and participate in the analyst’s private life, know all about it. This is her right. And

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because she is not part of the analyst’s personal life, she constantly suffers from the feeling of being unfairly excluded, which is experienced as an insult, we could also say: this fact confirms her generally pervading feeling of being insulted. Because she indulges on the level of the logic of her consciousness in the idée fixe of a primordial, a priori union, she as empirical person in the reality of life has to constantly deeply suffer from the experience of dis-union, of separation. And this, we have to admit, is only fair. It is the soul’s justice. When we refuse to let a soul aspect come into the very logic or structure of consciousness, refuse to acknowledge it as part of the soul’s syntax, then that aspect of life will inevitably keep painfully “rubbing itself in” innumerable times in the form of fundamentally unbearable insults. Admitting “separation,” “negation” into one’s logic and thus into one’s self-relation is a single act that takes care of the issue once and for all. All empirical, semantic experiences of separation or distance that may occur in life will then only cause ordinary, not psychological (fundamental) pain. Such experiences will be felt only as particular, empirical life events. But the experiences of separation of the person whose syntax of consciousness on principle excludes separation will be loaded with a terrible neurotic surplus value, namely with being of syntactical, fundamental significance. Here, too, Thomas Mann’s dictum applies, “If you can do it, you will do it. If not, it will be done to you,” where again the first doing refers to a logical, psychological act, whereas the “being done” refers to an endless series of positive-factual painful events.

*** Yearning for the unreachable. A proverbial saying states that a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. The corresponding German proverb says: a sparrow in the hand is better than a pigeon on the roof. But neurosis reverts this idea into the opposite. The pigeon on the roof is better than a sparrow in the hand. For example, a particular single woman always ignores men with whom it might be possible to enter into a relationship (since they showed some interest in her), but she yearns for a particular man who is on principle out of reach. Her yearning secretly does not really want to get anything into the hand, because whatever is in one’s hand,

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would no longer be the dream, the ideal. The mere fact that a possibility is a realistic one disqualifies it as uninteresting. Only the impossible and inaccessible is able to fascinate her. The ideal, in order to be an ideal, has to be and stay “in the bush.” And the yearning is the mode of keeping it in the bush. So we could also say that here the ideal other is preferred over the real other. Such a person does not have a real wish to be in a relationship; he or she only has a dream of a relationship and wishes the dream to be true.240

*** Peace AND war. “I would rather put up with it,” a female patient states after something annoying was done to her. But it still rankles with her, and internally and in therapy she makes a fuss about it. In other words, she gives free rein to both opposite emotions or tendencies within herself, without herself entering the scene and choosing between them. Each one is allowed to follow its own course, but they never are allowed to come together, never allowed to clash and in this way to demand a resolution. If she really preferred to put up with it, there would be no need to make a fuss about it. If, however, it truly rankles with her, she cannot simply accept it. But she affords the luxury of wanting both at once.

*** Being superior to oneself. Patients fairly often disparage their own wishful fantasies and feelings “as rubbish” (childish, naive, irrational, unrealistic). This is the rationalistic standpoint, the standpoint, as it were, of the fantasies’ “market value,” in contrast to the value that the heart (the patients’ own heart) ascribes to them. However, with this disparagement the fantasies are not gotten rid of. They are merely pushed underneath, cut off from conscious life, and the persons cheat themselves about the value they have for them and their own enthusiasm for them, because those very fantasies, despite their possibly indeed being childish, are nevertheless what de facto, even if secretly, makes their heart leap for joy. They are what the soul in them thinks would in truth make life worth living. 240 In contrast to “coming true,” which would imply the radical transition from dream to reality. What this woman wants, however, is the truth of the dream qua dream.

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As I indicated, those fantasies may in fact be immature and irrational. But the paradoxical thing is that denouncing them, and thus the patient’s refusal to own up to them with his whole heart, is the method for protecting (and thus cherishing) the very childishness that is allegedly the reason for their rejection, rather than being the result of a wish to uphold the demands of adult rationality. Far from truly leaving those fantasies behind, these patients fraternize with their childish fantasies and freeze them in their original naive, immature form. By excluding them from participation in conscious life, the fantasies are prevented from becoming manifest in their childishness. Thus their childish character is protected from having to collide at eye level with consciousness’s more mature, rational judgment. And this, in turn, precisely screens the fantasies from the necessity and possibility of “growing up,” becoming transformed into more mature versions of the “same” fantasies. The explicit disparagement turns out to be in the service of the implicit rescue of what we call in psychology “the child.”

*** The call of the depth. A man in his best years is afraid of swimming from one to the other side of a lake, by no means because he believes himself unable to do this as far as his muscle power and skill are concerned, but because of the idea of getting, at one point, to the middle of the lake and then being equally far from both sides. As long as he is closer to one edge, this edge, the solid ground that it presents remains his point of orientation and thus his anchor. But the middle of the lake is, for him, neti, neti, neither-nor, and thereby imaginally opens up for him the experience of the third, the wholly other, namely vertical dimension of the depth underneath him—the loss of ground, the exposure to an abyss. In our earlier case of the woman who felt momentarily paralyzed when during a hike she had to enter a narrow mountain path with a rock face on one side and a rather steep drop on the other, the visible sight of the real situation itself had offered the experience of the vertical dimension. By contrast, in the present case the situation is actually one of overcoming the strictly horizontal distance between one edge of the lake and the other. Nevertheless, totally unnecessarily the neurotic

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soul comes up with the fantasy of the vertical dimension and pushes it forward as the dominating idea, thereby successfully preventing the actually intended movement across the lake. It thereby gives to this merely pragmatic task the surplus value of absolute importance, of psychological significance. In this fear and shirking from an already experienced and accepted task to which he would unquestionably be equal, the neurotic soul celebrates its refusal to leave its status as preexistent soul and to expose itself to reality as the process of life. But no, this is not quite right. There is not a refusal to leave this status because the latter has already been left all along; it is irrevocably gone. No, what we have here is conversely the simulation of the soul’s still being in this status, the regressive restoration of that which is already known to have once and for all been overcome. In therapy a psychology with soul could, however, turn this symptom around. Instead of following faithfully the direction of neurosis and thus, for example, trying in therapy to increase the man’s ego strength, it could utilize this anxiety for its therapeutic, truly psychological purposes and assign to it the opposite meaning by interpreting this anxiety as the (now not neurotic) soul’s call to this man to go under, to give himself over to the bottomlessness of existence, to expose himself (not to the literal, physical element of water, but) to the fluidity and absolute negativity of the soul’s life as his new ground. It could say that this anxiety points to his psychological task. As Jung repeatedly stated, our fears indicate where we have to go. Theoretically, my collection of examples of neurotic traps, neurotic ways of thinking and behaving, could go on endlessly. But this book has to come to an end, and just as the foregoing compilation of this miscellany of examples of or observations about neurotic traps has been an arbitrary one, so this collection also has to end at some arbitrary point. I think, however, that the last example offers itself as a rather good point to stop and to exit from a book devoted to neurosis as the logic of a metaphysical illness, since thanks to the therapeutic twist we gave to the described anxiety to experience one’s swimming in the middle between the two banks of a lake, it already points, for us at least, beyond neurosis and to the needs of

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the healthy soul, in fact to initiation. After having devoted ourselves to the inner life of neurosis and immersed ourselves in its “stinking waters,” it is now time for us to emerge again from these waters and to bring back to mind Jung’s insight that it is only “the smallest part of the psyche, and in particular of the unconscious, that presents itself in the medical consulting room”241 and that the authentic sphere of the soul is the whole wide world of culture.

241 Letters 2, p. 307, 17 June 1956, to Nelson. When Jung speaks of “the unconscious” we can frequently substitute our term “the soul.”

Index

archetypal psychology 162, 274 archetypes 132, 356-359 Aarne, Antti 158 argumentum ad personam 320, 323, “about” (or sentence) structure (cf. 332, 407 neurosis, loss of sentence form) in reverse 320 52, 53, 55 Aristotle 94, 103, 106, 107, 220 absolute negativity 12, 67, 82, 128, Artemis 162, 198, 200 132, 133, 168, 188, 193, 304-306, Athena 25, 162, 198, 236, 284 320, 325, 327, 333-335, 337, Atlas 337 339, 344, 360, 362, 367, 430 Augustine, St. 259, 346 absolute principle, the: is due to inAusgelassenheit (see also: releasement) tratemporal fabrication and yet ab116, 127 solute (see also: The Absolute) 291 authentic self, idea of 85 adaptation 187, 222, 381 B Adler, Alfred 26, 177 aggression: due to exclusion of babe in the woods 422 “separation” 417 Bachofen, Johann Jakob 269 alchemy 45, 47, 73, 115, 121, Barthes, Roland 179 175, 268 “battleground” (for the essential Andersen, Hans Christian 158, 162 decisions) 39, 78, 79, 94, 101, Angst (see also: anxiety) 99, 399, 400 112, 121, 133, 134, 144, 146, animal(s) 145 147, 150, 152-154, 317, 322, “depressed to the earth” 103, 105 325, 328, 335, 338, 366 law-abiding citizen 13 Baynes, H. G. 385 animatedness of nature 81, 121, 126, beautiful soul 384 149, 291 Being, concept of 133 anorexia nervosa 33, 39, 253, 272, 372 bird in the hand, a 427 Anselm of Canterbury 172 birth of man (see also: born man; anthropology 107, 123 soul, born out of itself; anxiety (see also: Angst) 31, 61, 99, unbornness) 96, 99, 208 399-401, 430 Book of Job 280

A

434 borderline 401, 402 borderline syndrome 63 born man 93, 97, 131, 218, 345, 380 Brecht, Berthold 40 Brecht, Martin 259 bride kidnaping 194, 231 Brynhildr 197 Buder, Hildegard 315 Bühnenweih-Festspiel (see also: Sacred Festival Drama) 247 Burns, Robert 283, 287

C Caesar, render to him the things that ... 148 Cassirer, Ernst 31 Chaucer, Geoffrey 149 chiasmus 216, 221, 255 child begins with concepts (e.g., of mother) 301, 303 begins with unio naturalis 302 logic of 183, 184 needs experience of clash of wills 410 of God, of Mother Nature 346, 347, 383 reacts to logical form of what is said 411 relation to mother is self-relation 290 child archetype 183 childhood paradise 264, 297, 346 Christ 58, 70-74, 96, 97, 185, 239, 326-328, 336-339, 342 Christ’s Passion 71, 394 “even his humanity is divine” 336 “You should all become Christs” 337 Christian community, congregation (see also Gemeinde) 96 Christianity: released into its truth, made independent of people’s faith 327

INDEX clearing (Lichtung) 65 cloud-cuckoo-land 348, 350, 351, 378 collapse of subject and predicate into the copula (see also: copula) 58, 66-68 collective unconscious 101, 128, 132, 150, 260 commands: the logic or “genre” of 411 communication: two discrete acts 408 complex(es) 226, 259, 277, 301, 304, 306, 307, 315, 344, 360 an “algorithm” 309 manufactured 278 negativity of; as if non-existent 306, 309 not archetypal or imaginal 48 complicity with neurosis (see also: fraternizing) 178, 254, 256, 286 compulsive buying 401 concept, the abstract vs. concrete 51 as in itself real 171 “as which (she) exists” 167 existing concept 101, 112, 165, 168, 171, 329, 334, 391 it s (not people’s) self-development 209 the concept incarnates itself 330 consciousness’s becoming unconscious 219 consensus omnium 101 consulting room xiii, 1, 19, 79, 80, 158, 161, 253, 361, 405, 431 content of neurosis? 31, 47, 137, 226, 360, 363, 365-367, 401 “this cannot, must not be true” 289, 294 “conversation of one human with another” (Feuerbach) 108 copula 53, 54, 58, 59, 66-69, 95, 96, 98, 99, 115, 123, 136, 139,

INDEX 151, 220, 239, 270, 273, 337, 338, 347 absolute/absolutized 67-69 as the linguistic representation of sacrificial killing 65 Corbin, Henri 128 cosmos (see also: reflection of cosmos in man) 101 courage to be nothing 419 Courbet, Gustave 71 cut-off head, having/showing 173175, 179, 180, 192, 193, 218, 249, 250, 315 cutting the demon’s head off 173, 178, 249, 251, 263, 311, 351

D Dante Alighieri 81, 106, 118-120 darkness, praise of or fight for 121, 134, 219 day-world and night-world 164-167, 169, 180, 193, 201, 210-214, 216, 217, 219-225, 227, 229, 231, 241-243, 250-252, 255259, 261, 264, 305, 307, 310312, 316, 324, 326, 332, 333, 370, 371, 373, 412 De nihilo nihil fit 189, 220 death as beginning of life (see also: life) 398 deciding, difficulty with 389, 390 decision, nature of 326, 389, 390 demon, translated into his real-life version 193 demon: image of an abstract principle 168 demon’s sublated successor, the 197 Derrida, Jacques 140, 347, 402 Descartes, René 94 descensus ad inferos 102, 201 désir infini 140, 143

435 desire 137-140, 142, 143, 154, 189, 388, 411 Amor’s arrow, not mine 409 emergence of erotic desire 184, 186 nihilistic concept of desire 138 nothing natural, biological 143 versus truth 142 developmental personality disorder 63 Dickens, Charles 283 Dionysian dismemberment 394 dis-ownment 213, 260 disappointments purpose: be taught better 318 normal, natural, response to 279 not the origin of neurosis 279 vs. dis-appointment, disillusionment 318 dissociation 209, 237, 246, 255, 258, 261, 270, 296, 316, 334, 337, and ch. 3 of Part 3 dissociative disorders 209 Donne, John 97 doubt 172, 377, 385, 391 Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 213, 224, 256, 332, 333, 337, 383, 384 dream(s) 14, 208 drug addition 401 Dumas, Alexandre 27, 71 dying into life 396, 398

E Echo 345 Eleatic philosophy 286 Eliade, Mircea 106, 281 emancipation from the soul 115, 344 emotions, cult of (see also: subjective pain) 321 emotionalization of experience 321-325 vs. simple knowing of the truth 321

436 empty form 134, 135, 226, 269, 270, 300, 360, 361, 364, 365, 377, 392, 402 empty slot 139, 140, 142, 143 end of metaphysics/religion 363, 364 Engels, Friedrich 106, 107 Enzensberger, Hans Magnus 39 Epictetus 40 epiphany 46, 58, 218, 219, 225, 299, 400 external perspective 227, 229, 241, 243, 247, 250, 277 externality 8, 13, 19, 26, 67, 68, 182 Ey, Carl-August Eduard 158, 162

F facticity 61, 98, 101, 115, 132, 304, 322, 329, 332-334, 338 fairytale types 158, 160 falling: extreme image of being in life 414, 415 falling for ... (cf. fraternizing) 20, 51, 59, 154, 176, 177, 185, 232, 307, 322, 333 fantasies “as rubbish” 428 fear of death 398 fear of life 398 fetishism 38, 128, 143 Feuerbach, Ludwig 95, 106-108, 111, 123, 124, 403 fiat absolutum et peream homo 252, 300, 341 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb 421 fixation 6, 24, 25, 128, 178, 195, 203, 205, 263, 264, 287, 288 Flagg, Montgomery 325 Frederic the Great 146 Frege, Gottlob 95, 139, 343, 347 Freud, Sigmund 26, 31, 38, 48, 49, 51, 83, 109-111, 123, 130-132, 134, 137, 184 from imaginal to logical form 45

INDEX from mythos to logos 45, 133 Fromm, Erich 422 front man, strawman 383, 386 function – argument (Frege) 139, 140 future: a priori closed 288

G Gebser, Jean 281 Gehrts, Heino 160, 201 Gemeinde (see also: Christian community) 96, 97, 99, 100, 108 George, Stefan 71 ghostly character 168, 169, 176, 180, 185, 187, 190, 304-306, 367 Gnostics 113 God (see also: Sophia dancing before God) as abysmal fear 400 as Love 400 loss of 339, 342, 343 presence of absent God 342 “God is dead” 363, 384

God-man, see: suffering God-man “gods have become diseases” 79, 121, 128, 260 gods, turned into concepts 44, 150 Goethe, Joh. Wolfgang von 37, 81, 104, 105, 109, 110, 117-119, 236, 242, 325, 384 Gregory of Nyssa 102 Gryphius, Andreas 114-117, 122, 141 guillotine 373, 411 guilt feelings 322

H Havisham, Miss 283, 284, 288, 296 head and heaven correspondence 104 skull: the vault in which heaven is supposed to reflect itself 104, 109, 117 healing: via transference to general theory 51

INDEX Hegel 94, 96, 106, 107, 122, 133, 135, 176, 259, 270, 314, 335, 345, 395, 396 Heidegger, Martin 65, 68, 70, 116, 347 helping dead man 176, 178 Hera parthenos 185, 189 Here, the as the I’s having come down to earth 377 description of the Here position 377-382 manifestation of the Here position 383-390 hiddenness of the adyton 218 Hillman, James 2, 10, 46, 83, 128, 259-261, 263, 357, 380 hinterland of the soul (see also: impressions of the daily life, behind the) 284, 333, 362, 363 historical rupture 80, 122, 135, 203, 298, 349 historical shift from verticality to horizontality 124, 125 Hobbes, Thomas 95 Hölderlin, Friedrich 323, 339 Homer 81, 311 horizontality 41, 43, 52, 123, 125, 128, 138, 142, 246, 292, 333, 334, 347 horizontalized style 123 hortus conclusus 182 Hösle, Vittorio 94 human dignity 72, 88, 91-93, 406, 407 humanness: is made through cultural act 92 Husserl, Edmund 138, 140, 141, 147, 343

437

I “I am only that!” 343, 345, 421 I, the as first configuration of The Absolute 367 discussion of the nature of I 365-367 finds itself as hard contingent fact 379-381, 417, 421 first immediacy of The Absolute 364 has no justification, no “right” 421 knows itself as subject and as object 420 logic of the neurotic form of I 368-370 manifestion in empirical, clinical reality 370-375 opening itself to “other” 399 pre-existent, in the pleroma 367, 369, 370, 373, 376-379, 381, 382, 388, 393, 397, 415 identification statements (Bible) 327 identity and difference, see: mysterium coniunctionis illusory appearance 134, 142, 148, 286 images: inadequate for speculative insights 8 immediate present reality 73, 132, 133, 152, 209, 333, 353, 356, 361, 376, 397, 401 at the cost of truth 325 immunization 210, 213, 264, 321, 333, 390 implicit (an sich) and explicit (für sich) 65, 67, 71, 120, 141, 144, 331, 348, 350, 351, 381, 429 impressions of the daily life, behind the (see also: hinterland of the soul) 176, 177, 362

438 in Mercurio 167 incarnation 192, 201, 326, 332, 336-339, 341, 342, 344, 349, 353, 1, 364, 366, 367, 376378, 381- 383, 385, 392, 396, 397, 401 applied to itself 336 identity, not an epiphany 327 interment, burial in earthly reality 336 the concept incarnates itself 330 veri-fied 336, 338 individual and religion 89 as measure of all things 100 embedded in customs, roles 86, 88 “essential is only the life of the individual” 330 established as focal point 328 role of the 49 inferiority feeling 233-235, 237, 241244, 247, 251, 321, 372, 397 absolute inferiority = absolute superiority 237 result of defamation 234 initiation 310 inner, the 144, 146, 154 historical creation of 39, 83, 120 offered as asylum to the gods 132 product of history 144 insights: are like radioactive material 313, 314 intentional logic (cf. logic of judgement/of function) 139, 343 intentional world-relation 138, 270 interiority: not introspection 17 interiorization into (it)self 12, 62, 66, 68, 79, 111, 119, 120, 180, 183, 184, 186, 270, 275, 293, 325,342, 348, 377, 392, 400, 401 internal view (from within) (see also: phenomenon, getting into; “put yourself inside”) 227, 229, 231

INDEX intersubjectivity 95, 127 introspective, introspection 17, 101, 117, 118, 154 invariant structures 82 inversion of speculative philosophy 107

J judgment, logical form of 53 Jung, C.G. 2, 4, 9, 15, 16, 41, 44, 45, 47-49, 51, 55, 63, 64, 72-75, 77-80, 82, 83, 94, 99-101, 109111, 117-122, 126-132, 134, 137-139, 144, 145, 147, 149, 150, 152, 154, 161, 163, 167, 171, 176, 177, 187, 200, 205209, 212, 217-220, 226, 231234, 243, 247, 248, 254, 255, 257, 259-265, 267, 273, 278, 279, 284, 285, 291, 302, 307, 309-311, 323, 326, 328, 330, 331, 334-339, 343-345, 350, 356-360, 377-380, 384-386, 398, 400, 420, 430, 431 childhood neurosis xi, 254, 284, 307, 378, 380 eternalized one form of soul 81, 82 hails the defeat of the ego 260 his epistemological about-turn 118 his father as suffering Christian 73, 74 invites simulation of nightly flight to demon lover 217, 218 logical blunder 131 personalistic bias 16 too much of a soft spot towards immediacy 264

K Kafka, Franz xiii, xiv, 73, 222-225, 272, 289, 384 Kalff, Dora 151

INDEX Kant, Immanuel 7, 116-120, 129, 134, 171, 172, 262 kenôsis 70, 75, 336, 339, 340, 377 Kepler, Johannes 113 Kierkegaard, Søren 70, 71, 96-98, 100, 101, 108, 111, 115, 213, 342, 343, 403 kitsch 37, 44, 274, 351 Kleutgen, Joseph 298 Kore-Persephone 195

L Lacan, Jacques 140, 189, 402 lack, unfulfillable 189 Lactantius 102, 105, 109, 110, 113, 114 Lange, Friedrich Albert 2 Laplanche, Jean 26 Lar Familiaris 145 Lavater, Johann Caspar 104 Lay of Hildebrand 323 leap leap into faith 71, 98, 99, 342, 343 out of sphere of concept into facticity 330 out of the imaginal into outer reality 326 learning the hard way, from experience, painfully suffering through 215, 302, 349, 352 Lévinas, Emmanuel 123, 128 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 182 life amateurish vs. professional way of 425 biological life embraces its own mortality 359, 395 going through the motions of living 425, 426 holding oneself above it 424 is the invention of death 394 life-world, Lebenswelt 147

439 light of reason 110, 112, 113 Locke, John 95 logic of judgement/of function (cf. intentional logic) 347 logical form 53, 132, 133, 135, 147, 174, 176, 203, 204, 250, 270, 361, 364, 366, 368, 379, 398400, 411 fluidity of 133 form of logical form 203 semanticized 203, 204 loneliness, fundamental 422 love (see also s.v. God) 18, 19 transgression into the heart of the other person 408 Ludwig II of Bavaria 43, 71 Luhmann, Niklas 124, 125, 281, 347 Luther, Martin 96, 211, 215, 259

M Maat 368 magic, need for 166 maiden, virgin(ity) 182, 184, 187, 193 as “married” 185 loss of concept of virginity 198, 203 transition from girl to maiden 183, 186 transition from maiden to woman 190, 191, 194 Man (see also: medieval man; modern man; psychological man) a Mängelwesen 112 above self-preservation 38, 39 already on the level of logical form 348 animal rationale 38, 111, 127 as animal already human 93 as arbor inversa 105, 107 as single, atomic, solitary individual 83, 92, 94-101, 108, 112, 122, 128, 144, 329, 339

440 ball-like shape of head corresponds to cosmos 104 born out of the soul 243 derives personhood from gods 38 embeddedness in the metaphysical cosmos 108, 113 exemplary man 71, 72, 335, 339, 340 expectation of immortality 103, 105, 113 has ordinarily no objectivity towards himself 417 identified with idea of animal 143 imago dei 104 “not-fixated animal” (Nietzsche) 38 upright posture 102, 105, 108-110 upward looking 85, 102, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 116, 122, 123 Mann, Thomas 418, 427 marriage and divorce 418 as collective concern 90 marriage with a demon 164 martyr, figure of 275 Marx, Karl 38, 70-72, 106, 107, 127, 143, 340, 341 Maslow, Abraham 99, 380 mass or crowd 95, 100 Mass, the Roman-Catholic 142 medieval man’s containment in soul (see also: soul, containment within) 120 memory 282, 283, 287 Mercurius 18, 45, 151, 167 metábasis eis állo génos 131 metaphysical assertion as deadly sin 217 metaphysical difference 53, 56, 57, 63 metaphysics and religion 52, 53, 57 longing always already fulfilled 141 metapsychology 9

INDEX methodological principle 176 methodological stance only 14, 15, 17, 107, 171, 172, 293 Miller, David 168, 175, 239 models, insight-produced 206, 207 modern man (see also: Man): fallen out of the soul 115 modernity 44, 52, 84, 95, 98, 100, 107, 108, 133, 137, 142, 204, 243, 346, 351 contradiction soul – modernity 44 industrial modernity 70, 140, 402, 403 initiation into 349 medial modernity 63, 70, 402, 403 Mogenson, Greg 151, 179, 213, 239 Molière, Jean Baptiste 48, 244 molk sacrifice 38 Mullah Nasrudin 8, 9 mysterium coniunctionis (cf. unbridgeable difference) 220 identity of the identity and the difference of the opposites 249 opposites going under into each other 392, 393 separation and union of opposites 220 unity of the unity and difference of the opposites 337 mystification 6, 38, 370, 407 myth vs. fairytale 199-201 myth, sublation of myth into concept 135

N names names vs. Sache 205-207 significance of the names we assign 80, 331 the names we use for soul 205, 206 narcissism 12, 128

INDEX Naught, the (see also: nihilistic character) 403 negation positivized 132 reflected into itself 132 Nestle, Wilhelm 45 neurosis a creative Work 26, 157, 234, 253 a modern illness 210 a psychological illness, not a psychic disorder 29, 278, 293 a thought as real 21 about psychological, not clinical diseases 5 absolutized copula 68 Aktualkonflikt theory of 24, 25 and complexes 47, 226, 301 and The Absolute 33-37, 40, 42, 43, 45, 50, 52, 58-63, 65-67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 112, 129-131, 133-135, 143, 144, 147, 148, 150, 152, 155, 163, 178, 202, 204, 232, 236, 237, 248, 252, 261, 268, 273, 286, 289, 290, 295, 298-301, 304, 325, 329, 331-333, 335, 338, 353, 356, 359, 360, 362, 364, 366-368, 370, 371, 373, 376, 377, 379, 382, 385, 386, 390, 391, 396401, 422 as baseless, not a positivity 5 as existing concept 21, 336, 359 as metaphysical illness xiv, 19, 34, 39, 52, 129, 240, 403, 430 as riddle 179 as self-contradiction 28, 30, 50, 51, 69, 72, 77, 147, 148, 152, 210, 212, 213, 298, 307 as “stinking water” xii, 25, 268, 298, 300, 301, 431 based on solitary individual (see also: Man, as single individual) 101

441 beyond the imaginal 163 can only show what it is not about (cf. n., follows via negativa; n., manifests in negative way) 273 causa sui 25, 30, 236, 253, 284, 285, 300 celebration of a Sacred Festival Drama (see also: Sacred Festival Drama) 248 closed to reason 310, 311 collapse of (cf. n., dissolves; n., will just die) 245 concept of (see also: n., psychological concept of ) 2, 19, 405 constantly generated anew 24, 27, 233, 234, 255, 284, 288, 292, 309 cultural function and telos 345 cunning, sly 28, 50, 77, 152, 210, 268, 290, 297, 305 dependent on something real to push off from 292, 306 different from being deluded or from stupid choice 29, 41, 284, 296 dissolves into thin air 250, 314, 315 does not claim or preach 338 due to defiance and spitefulness 203, 205, 284, 292, 294, 296, 298, 369, 389, 400, 426 end of apartness of Heaven and Earth, subject and predicate 66 enfleshed theology 341, 343 fabricated (see also: trauma, as fabricated) 280 falling for the neurotic complication (see also: falling for ...) 51 follows the via negativa (see also: n., manifests in negative way) 270, 273, 274, 298, 299, 399 fundamentally positivistic 58

442

INDEX

has its course to redemption within itself 351 has logical structure 50, 51, 147, 218, 406 inner core is premodern 266 invented by soul in 19th century 128 logical, intellectual illness 20, 47, 169, 170, 196, 226, 270 loss of sentence form (cf. “about” structure) 58, 59 manifests in negative way (see also: n., follows via negativa) 43, 293, 374, 415, 420 mise-en-scène 26, 28, 50, 278, 341, 366, 376, 397, 401 morbus sacer 30, 63, 64, 69, 75, 131, 260, 261 must insulate itself 313 “nature’s attempt to heal” 30, 64, 154 need to think it 19-21, 50, 51, 269, 359 needs ghost instead of Geist 304 neurotic interpretation of neurosis 26, 80, 154, 181 no archetypes or gods 44, 47, 50, 246, 247 no bliss, no triumph 265 no redeeming value 64, 155, 267, 268, 352 not about the individual 49, 324 not an illness of consciousness 59 not due to a conflict 25 not hangover from the past 24 not manifestation of meaning 331 not the result of traumas 26, 157, 286 not through loss of meaning 64, 80 nothing semantic 61 originates through intrusion of a thought 284 polarity, like positive and negative electricity 237, 244

preserved by kicking it upstairs 261, 263, 264 presupposes a reliable I 57 product of freedom 27, 28, 234 product of history 77 psychological concept of (see also: n., concept of ) 1, 2 rupture into two realities 35, 36 self-demonstration of its absurdity 352 self-generated, auto-poietic 278, 285 self-specification into different types 361 sinks “mind” into mindless status of positive fact 305 “substitute for legitimate suffering” 243, 323 the empirical I wants it 253, 255, 256 the I must assume responsibility for it 254, 262, 315 The Neurosis in the singular (as cultural phenomenon) 20, 31, 73, 148, 335, 351, 353, 358, 359, 361, 406 the neurotic misery is the neurotic bliss 271 the ordinary, but inflated with metaphysical significance 31, 33 the soul’s, not the person’s work 43 the whole construed as internal part (cf. time, involution of the whole into one of its parts) 334 totalitarian regime 285, 287 triumphant presence of The Absolute 62, 70, 73 unity of clinical reality and THE neurosis 358, 359 utilizes the instinctual needs and wounds 129 wants self-debasement 232

INDEX will just die (see also: n., collapse of; n., dissolves) 257 “boots up” 293, 306 neurotic symptom 363 contrasted with rituals, symbols 363 independent of our believing in The Absolute 331 realized zero-grade of the soul’s truth (cf. zero-stage) 273 within themselves negate themselves 363 neurotic traps 252, 311, 312, 1, 405, 410, 430 neurotic(s), the “beings of a ‘higher’ type” 64 exemplary man 335 exiled from ordinary life 335 God-man not as view, but as fact 340, 341 merely the place of appearance 21, 286, 299 only the tormented creature in its creatureliness 70 they sacrifice ordinary happiness 72 níðingr 91-93 Nietzsche, Friedrich 38, 48, 70, 71, 81, 100, 135, 137, 272, 322, 377, 384, 403 nihilistic character 138, 204, 360, 402, 403 noêsis – noêma 141 Not-I, the: proven to be nothing 401 Now, the description of 392-396 is the incarnated “Here” 392 manifestation in neurosis 396-401 numinosity xi, 58, 59, 62, 63, 131, 132, 149, 150, 217-219, 221, 231, 250, 251, 260, 263, 291, 312, 360, 400

443

O obedience 411 object relations 19, 26, 43, 196, 198 object, sublated 12 Occam’s razor 14 occludedness, occlusion (cf. space, closure of ) 37, 61, 66, 67, 69, 73, 74, 219, 225, 265, 303, 304, 337, 341, 343, 400 Okeanos 17, 141 One turns into Two 379, 386, 391 oportet me adesse 259, 286, 314, 390 opposites, see mysterium coniunctionis opposites going under into each other 392, 393 opposition of consciousness 52, 5558, 60, 63 opus parvum – magnum 148, 402 other, the external 18, 19, 25, 26, 51, 127, 184 Other, first immediacy of the 181, 185, 190, 204 Ovid 102

P Pale Criminal 322 Pan 345 Pandora’s box 424 parents: office-bearers, not buddies 409 Parmenides 286 past, invention of the historical 281, 282 paying the price 44, 63, 179, 274, 299, 300, 345, 370, 380, 381, 385, 387, 424 semantic price for the syntactical neglect 426 “pearl of great price” 402, 403 Penates 145 Penelope 311-313, 390

444 undoing one’s insight 312 perichôrêsis 393 person, the: subsumed under a predicate 406 personalistic fallacy 148 pharmakon, scapegoat 262 phenomenon, phenomena are in themselves interpretations 9, 18 as a self, an individual 16, 18, 19 getting into it 5, 13-15, 19, 66, 158, 247, 268 has everything it needs 14, 18, 25, 170, 189, 232, 268, 293, 369, 396, 400 Plato 103, 104, 107, 118, 119, 122, 220 Timaios 103, 105 Pontalis, J.-B. 26 positivization is itself positivized 329 prayer: God speaking to God 141 present reality 49, 52, 60, 62, 68, 70, 72, 133, 143, 147, 362, 364, 367, 376, 377, 382, 390, 392, 397, 399, 419 Present, the 281 Presocratics 122, 133 principle deadly serious 170 nature of 211, 285 insists on being a reality 221 private religion 145, 146 psyche (see also: soul) black box idea 6, 7 does not merely react 279 not the carrier/locus of neurosis 5, 7 vs. soul 4 psychological difference 4, 38, 148, 167 psychological jungle 87 psychological man 116, 151, 154

INDEX psychological phenomena: in themselves interpretations 9, 18 psychology discipline of interiority 13, 16, 171 externalized 8 faulty directness 2 fraternizing with the neurosis (see also: complicity; cf. falling for) 59, 177, 387 has to sublate itself 13 is about psychological, not clinical diseases 3, 4 neurosis of 59 no Archimedean point 10, 11 no substrate 7 not a science 13 not a specialty of medicine 4, 5 portrays itself in itself 10 requires change of consciousness 3 speculative nature of 7-9, 11 subjective confession 9 the problem of the object of 4, 7, 9, 11-13, 16, 17 uroboric, self-reflective (see also: uroboros) 12 with/without soul 2, 12, 16 zeros in on the individual (see also: individual) 322 psychosis 45-47, 50, 52-54, 56-59, 61, 63, 163 a psychic, not a psychological illness 50, 54 absolute identity 54, 55 loss of subjectivity 54 not a problem of the unconscious 57 psychotherapy: thinks neurotically itself 26, 28, 161 “put yourself inside the pig” (see also: internal view; phenomenon, getting into) 13, 247

INDEX

R reduction from opinion to (kind of ) natural fact (cf. neurosis, sinks “mind” into fact) 215 reflection of cosmos in man 104, 107, 108, 110, 111, 142 reflection of the reflection 391 reflection, stage of 250, 330, 376, 377, 391 regressive restoration 207, 209, 423, 430 of “metaphysics” 133, 134 releasement (see also: Ausgelassenheit) 116, 122, 129, 134, 151, 186 repetition compulsion 26, 27, 294, 399 retort, alchemical 17 reversal of the direction of vision 116, 117 in Faust 119 Jung’s epistemological aboutturn 118 Rieff, Philip 151 rituals 363 performed without thinking 209 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 95, 96, 384

S Sacred Festival Drama 247, 248, 251, 252, 256-259, 261, 263, 265, 267, 270, 271, 273, 283, 286, 298, 299, 301, 307, 309, 337, 341, 344, 362, 382, 400 sacred, the: made through a sacrilegious act 65 sacrificial killing 65-67, 69, 219, 362 Saintyves, Pierre 160 Sallustios 199, 200, 281 Sathya Sai Baba 331 Scheier, Claus-Artur 70, 71, 95

445 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm 94, 122, 376 Schiller, Friedrich 39, 384 Schlegel, Friedrich 281 Schopenhauer, Arthur 95, 123, 127, 135-137, 139, 154, 155, 270, 402, 403 Schultz-Hencke, Harald 35 second daily-life world 177 second supersensible world 177 secret 29, 42, 43, 165, 185, 186, 192197, 219, 243, 258, 265, 267, 316, 333, 385, 388, 391, 398 Self, the 16 self-contradiction: the splitting of truth itself 212 self-debasement as production of splendor 233 self-knowledge, impotent 421 semantic content: reduced to zerostage (see also: zero-stage) 63, 134, 144, 204, 226, 332, 360, 361 semantic vs. syntactical 3, 6, 12, 19, 41, 42, 45-47, 54, 59, 77, 132, 133, 135, 140, 163, 175, 201, 204, 206, 220, 250, 264, 265, 270, 275, 334, 348, 361, 392, 400, 410, 411, 417, 426 semantics sublated into syntax 133 separation of the world parents 65, 66, 132, 220, 245, 303, 305, 337, 338, 344 Shaftesbury, Antony Ashley Cooper 384 shaman(ism) 64, 107, 122, 128, 150, 160, 207 journey to heaven 38, 113 shoe, motif of (Cinderella) as symbolon 238, 239, 389 Simmel, Georg 135, 138, 154

446 simulation 43, 63, 125, 205, 245, 274, 298, 305, 350, 369, 384, 430 Skinner, B. F. 1 sleep (of Sleeping Beauty) 182, 186, 204, 205 Sleeping Beauty 182, 208 “so much more impressive” (see also: suggestive power) 177 Sophia, dancing before God 368, 372, 376 Sophocles 81 soul and thought 20 as Ausgelassenheit 116 as subjective consciousness 125 as the act of upward-looking 129131, 133-135, 138, 144, 316, 341, 367 born out of itself (see also: birth of man; born man) 204, 208, 240, 266, 271, 378-381, 383, 385, 390, 391, 422 containment within (see also: medieval man) 141, 142, 208, 369 crosses human will 163 disgust of physical body 231 disruption of the soul’s self-relation 214, 215 embodied soul’s rising above the body 407 has always already arrived 189 has deserted the sphere of people’s experiences 140, 203 is self-relation 288 is transcendence, a reaching out 141 its way is a negative way (see also: neurosis), follows via negativa 352 locked into itself 126, 129 makes no difference between men and women 372

INDEX not emotional but intellectual 266 not immune to history 82 simulation of sleep 209 soul’s sleep is over 204, 207 speaks about itself, not us 15 waking soul 209 soul history: from imaginal to logical form 45 soul truths celebrate themselves 266 soul truths: displayed vs. concealed 267 space, closure of (cf. occludedness) 126, 127 sphere of the private and subjective 144-146, 150 successor to the sphere of myth and metaphysics 153 stars, starry heaven 114-117, 125 “stars have fallen from heaven” 117-122, 126, 128, 130-132, 138, 139, 149, 350 stepmother – true mother 244, 245 Sterne, Laurence 40 Stevenson, Robert Louis 213, 224, 383, 384 structure of duality 391 Suárez, Franciscus 95 subject and object (see also: opposition of consciousness; I, the, knows itself as) 8-12, 14, 16, 18, 53, 67, 118, 123, 260, 334, 366, 379, 419 subject, esoteric – exoteric 257-259 subjective pain – instead of admission of truth (see also: cult of emotion) 425 subjects exchange their predicates 216 subreption (Erschleichung) 7 suffering God-man in the shape of a servant 70-75, 340-344, 366368, 372, 376, 399

INDEX suggestive power (e.g. of images, see also: “so much more impressive”) 178, 257, 258, 262, 264, 265, 326, 331, 350 sunken gods 80 sunt duo toti homines 211, 214, 215, 305 surfing 402, 403 surplus value 52, 70, 112, 113, 129, 144, 427, 430 surrender 188, 394, 397-401 has objectified itself 400 “swallowing of primordial animatedness” 78, 94, 121, 122, 126, 127, 132, 149, 291 swallowing of the gods 79 symbolon 238 symbols 363 symptom vs. symbol 37, 38

T The Absolute (see also: neurosis, and The Absolute) absoluteness per se, in abstracto 61 emancipated from the I 400 senseless, mindless occurrence 62 the right bride, recognition of 240, 390 the right man, spouse 191, 289, 389 The unconscious 7, 123, 138 as phantasm 123 due to renunciation of light as such 121 theôsis 219 therapeutic position, the truly 162, 176, 179 therapy of neurosis 249, 268, 344 and ch. 7 of Part 3 Tillich, Paul 135, 255, 289 time arresting of the flow of 288 different senses of 125

447 freezing the moment 283, 342 involution of the whole into one of its parts (cf. neurosis, the whole construed ...) 289 total dependence (Hörigkeit) 224, 231 partial total dependence 225 transference analysis 19 trauma 278 as fabricated 26, 278, 284, 295, 300, 317, 387 as permanent construction principle 300 triangulation 290 truly human being 250, 252 truth (cf. soul truths) 328 abstractly noetic 167 assault of truth 318, 323 itself is split into two truths 212, 220 positivized as event of emotion 339 positivized, contracted into individual 328 types of neurosis 356, 358, 362 only moments within THE neurosis 359 types, topic of 356

U unbornness (see also: birth of man; born man) 234, 367, 369, 383, 384, 423 unbridgeable difference (cf. mysterium coniunctionis) 98, 139, 221, 270, 337, 342, 347, 363 Uncle Sam 326, 329, 330, 333 undialectical unity without separation 407 unio naturalis 302-304 Universal, priority of the 84, 89 unthinkable, the 34, 294-296, 298300, 303, 317, 342, 414, 423 upward-looking locked into itself 130

448 uroboros, uroboric 10-12, 14, 16-18, 25, 65, 115, 121, 141, 142, 214, 268, 300, 393

V Valéry, Paul 345 verdict, refraining from passing a 424 verticality 42, 43, 52, 95, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 133, 140, 246, 334, 347, 373, 393, 429, 430 horizontalized 123, 138 vicarious living 385 Virgil 123 Virgines Vestales, punishment of 187 von Hofmannsthal, Hugo 313

W Wagner, Richard 248, 299 Wahnfried 248, 299 watershed age of metaphysics – modernity 107 Will, the 136-140, 143, 154, 155, 402, 403 Winkelried, Arnold, and Winkelried principle 317, 318, 320-325, 327, 329, 330, 332, 333, 336, 338-340, 343, 344, 366, 402, 406 as argumentum ad personam (see also: argumentum ad personam) 320 redirection of a criticism’s point to one’s own self 321 World Wide Web 402 Worringer, Wilhelm 99 wound and scar 418 wound: to me – or to my dogma? 40, 299, 300 writing, invention of 280, 282 “yes, truly – still more truly” 222224, 243, 245, 252, 255, 305, 382, 412

INDEX

Z Zenon of Elea 286 zero-stage (cf. semantic content: reduced to zero-stage; s.v. neurotic symptom; cf. empty form; empty slot) 269, 271 of metaphysical orientation 140 Zeus and Hera: eternal embrace 189 “Zeus no longer rules Olympus” 79-81