We wish to make our lives simple, certain and smooth, and for that reason problems are tabu. We choose to have certainties and no doubts, results and no experiments, without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt, and results through experiment. The artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction; on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is called for to give us the certainty and clarity we need. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results: and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness.
We are all thoroughly familiar with the sources of the problems which arise in the period of youth. For most people it is the demands of life which harshly put an end to the dream of childhood. If the individual is sufficiently well prepared, the transition to a professional career may take place smoothly. But if he clings to illusions that contradict reality, then problems will surely arise. No one takes the step into life without making certain presuppositions, and occasionally they are false. That is, they may not fit the conditions into which one is thrown. It is often a question of exaggerated expectations, of underestimation of difficulties, of unjustified optimism or of a negative attitude. One could compile quite a list of the false presuppositions which give rise to the earliest, conscious problems.
But it is not always the contrast of subjective presuppositions with external facts that gives rise to problems; it may as often be inner, psychic disturbances. They may exist even when things run smoothly enough in the outer world. Very often it is the disturbance of the psychic equilibrium by the sexual impulse; and perhaps just as often it is the feeling of inferiority which springs from an unbearable sensitivity. These inner difficulties may exist even when adaptation to the outer world has been achieved without apparent effort. It even seems as if young people who have had to struggle hard for their existence are spared inner problems, while those for whom adaptation for some reason or other is made easy, run into problems of sex or convicts growing from the sense of inferiority.
People whose own temperaments offer problems are often neurotic, but it would be a serious misunderstanding to confuse the existence of problems with neurosis. There is a marked distinction between the two in that the neurotic is ill because he is unconscious of his problems; while the man with a difficult temperament suffers from his conscious problems without being ill.
If we try to extract the common and essential factors from the almost inexhaustible variety of individual problems found in the period of youth, we meet in nearly all cases with a particular feature: a more or less patent clinging to the childhood level of consciousness — a rebellion against the fateful forces in and around us which tend to involve us in the world. Something in us wishes to remain a child; to be unconscious, or, at most, conscious only of the ego; to reject everything foreign, or at least subject it to our will; to do nothing, or in any case indulge our own craving for pleasure or power. In this leaning we observe something like the inertia of matter; it is persistence in a hitherto existing state whose level of consciousness is smaller, narrower and more egoistic than that of the dualistic stage. For in the latter the individual finds himself compelled to recognize and to accept what is different and strange as a part of his own life — as a kind of “also-I.”
Psychology teaches us that, in a certain sense, there is nothing in the psyche that is old; nothing that can really, definitively die away. Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and thereby regresses to the past, falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past. The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past, and the other from the future. In principle both are doing the same thing; they are salvaging a narrow state of consciousness. The alternative is to shatter it with the tension inherent in the play of opposites — in the dualistic stage — and thereby to build up a state of wider and higher consciousness.
This outcome would be ideal if it could be brought about in the second stage of life — but here is the rub. For one thing, nature cares nothing whatsoever about a higher level of consciousness; quite the contrary. And then society does not value these feats of the psyche very highly; its prizes are always given for achievement and not for personality — the latter being rewarded, for the most part, posthumously. This being so, a particular solution of the difficulty becomes compulsive: we are forced to limit ourselves to the attainable and to differentiate particular aptitudes, for in this way the capable individual discovers his social being.
Achievement, usefulness and so forth are the ideals which appear to guide us out of the confusion of crowding problems. They may be our lode-stars in the adventure of extending and solidifying our psychic existences. They may help us in striking our roots in the world; but they cannot guide us in the development of that wider consciousness. In the period of youth, at any rate, this course is the normal one and in all circumstances preferable to merely tossing about in the welter of problems.
The dilemma is often solved, therefore, in this way: whatever is given to us by the past is adapted to the possibilities and the demands of the future. We limit ourselves to the attainable, and this means the renunciation of all other potentialities. One person loses a valuable piece of his past, another a valuable piece of his future. Everyone can call to mind their friends or schoolmates who were promising and idealistic youngsters, but who, when met with years later, seemed to have grown dry and cramped in a narrow mould.
The serious problems of life, however, are never fully solved. If it should for once appear that they are, this is the sign that something has been lost. The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly. This alone preserves us from stultification and petrifaction. So also with that solution of the problems of the period of youth which consists in restricting ourselves to the attainable: it is only temporarily valid and not lasting in a deeper sense. Of course, to win for oneself a place in society and so to transform one’s nature that it is more or less fitted to this existence, is in every instance an important achievement. It is a fight waged within oneself as well as outside, comparable to the struggle of the child to defend his ego. This struggle, we must grant, is for the most part unobserved because it happens in the dark; but when we see how stubbornly childish illusions, presuppositions and egoistic habits are still clung to in later years we are able to realize the energy it took to form them. And so it is also with the ideals, convictions, guiding ideas and attitudes which in the period of youth lead us out into life for which we struggle, suffer and win victories: they grow together with our own beings, we apparently change into them, and we therefore perpetuate them at pleasure and as a matter of course, just as the child asserts its ego in the face of the world.
The nearer we approach to the middle of life, and the better we have succeeded in entrenching ourselves in our personal standpoints and social positions, the more it appears as if we had discovered the right course and the right ideals and principles of behaviour. For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many — far too many — aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories. Sometimes, even, they are glowing coals under grey ashes.
Complexes. They are unresolved problems of the individual, the points where he has suffered a defeat, his weak spots, something he cannot evade or overcome. They are emotionally toned contents of the unconscious having some autonomous behavior, meaning that they resist conscious intentions, are outside the control of the conscious mind, and come and go as they please, are split off from consciousness and lead a separate existence in the unconscious, ready at all times to interfere with conscious intentions. They are the cause or effect of some conflict — shock, inner strife, etc. They are the 'vulnerable points' we neither want to remember, nor want it to be reminded by others, but they frequently come back to mind in the most unwelcome fashion — as memories, wishes, duties, views — with which we have never really come to terms. They are a conflicting obstacle, but can also be stimulus for opening new possibilities of achievement. They are the focus or nodal points of our psyche. Lacking complexes would mean that our psychic activity has come to a fatal standstill.
The events of our psychic life are immediately close to us, we ourselves are the psyche, hence we are almost forced to assume that we know all of our psyche better than anyone else, and are encouraged into believing that we are the best authority in psychological matters. But what is closest to us is the very thing we know least about, although it seems to be what we know best of all.
September 28, 2023
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