The intellect of man is forced to choose
Perfection of the life or of the work
And if it take the second must refuse
A heavenly mansion, raging in the dark.
(The Choice, W.B. Yeats)
Thomas Hardy’s novel “Jude the Obscure” is the story of a young workingman who aspires to improve his lot by learning, but in the end fails to rise beyond his working-class origins and established familial patterns. He dies young, broken in body and spirit, lonely, unrecognized, and utterly miserable. Youthful aspirations, put on hold, though never forgotten, were abandoned as the rigors of earning a living and raising a family took precedence over all else. The course Jude followed was ancestral, a life that fell into a pattern established by countless generations before him, and ever since, to this very day.
Jude’s history is more the rule than the exception. The 20th century psychologist C.G. Jung wrote of the overwhelming power of ancestral influences in the establishment of powerful behavioral patterns. These can be altered and overcome, but only when there is serious commitment to change and a willingness to undergo a systematic process leading to transformation.
Jung wrote:
Freud has pointed out that the emotional relationship of the child to the parents, and particularly to the father, is of a decisive significance in regard to the content of any later neurosis. This relationship is indeed the infantile channel along which the libido flows back when it encounters any obstacles in later years, thus reactivating the long-forgotten psychic contents of childhood. It is ever so in life when we draw back before too great an obstacle, say the threat of some severe disappointment or the risk of some too far- reaching decision. The energy stored up for the solution of the task flows back and the old riverbeds, the obsolete systems of the past, are filled up again. (Jung 1961 p. 303).
To overcome the powerful indoctrination that results from early parental and societal influences requires investigation of dominant elements in the unconscious psyche. Conditioning produces an overlay, powerful in its manifest effects, but primarily a surface phenomenon. The totality of the self is greater than what we know consciously; hidden forces in the unconscious are the essence of much of the psyche’s true nature. Unrevealed, their existence is readily ignored, or even denied, but their repressed forces cannot be restrained by merely looking away; sooner or later, these energies work their will, often with very negative consequences.
The example of Hardy’s “Jude,” who cannot find his place in his19th century world where traditional values clash with those of the industrial revolution, is about the desire to achieve completeness . . . and the despair, which comes when it is not attained. Aspiring to join the realm of academia, the existence of which he would not have known of a generation earlier, Jude is held back by the culture and upbringing he received in a remote English hamlet. His tale tells of a life wasted because he can neither stay in the role to which he was born, nor evolve past his conditioning and early influences.
For one who aspires to learning, Jude is peculiarly non-introspective. His role models are professors and clergymen, but he seems to have acquired his limited knowledge of those vocations through his reading alone. He does not seek the company of others who are like-minded but chooses for company other working men. Abruptly and without love he marries the daughter of a pork butcher. Later in the story, his ideal lover and mistress, a country schoolteacher, likewise has little sympathy for his goals and dreams and is herself a self-destructive misfit, unable to commit to marriage. Ultimately, she martyrs herself by returning to her first husband, a man she doesn’t love.
The namesake for Hardy’s Jude is the author of the “Epistle of Jude,” one of the shortest books in the New Testament. It is entitled “The Danger of False Belief.” We may consider “false belief” as another term for “unconsciousness.” (One tradition has it that Jude was the brother of Christ; another makes him the patron saint of lost causes.)
The Jude Epistle carries a warning against those who are slaves to the unconscious and who live by instinct rather than through conscious enlightenment. “. . . the things they do understand, by instinct like brute beasts, prove their undoing.” (10-11). (New English Bible.)
Jung likened the archetypes of the collective unconscious to these instincts:
I have called this congenital and pre-existent instinctual mode, or pattern of behavior, the archetype. This is the imago that is charged with the dynamism we cannot attribute to an individual human being. (Jung 1961, P. 315).
Jung compares this dynamic to the nest-building instincts of birds and refers to it as “the ground plan of humanity’s nature. It is fundamental, which is why it is called archetypal, but it is unconscious.
The Epistle says that those who survive by instinct alone are “clouds carried away by the wind without giving rain, trees that in season bear no fruit, dead twice over and pulled up by the roots. They are fierce waves of the sea, forming shameful deeds; they are starts that have wandered from their course, and the place forever reserved for them is blackest darkness.” (12-13). For modern human beings the meaning of these words can be interpreted as the “blackest darkness” of unconscious despair and depression.
The “Jude” story is a tragedy that is played out every day by men and women in the 21st century. Because of cultural pressures, the high cost of psychoanalysis, and the time and effort required to achieve transformation through its gradual methodology, most people who are willing to admit they need help choose to avail themselves of superficial or ineffectual therapies. The explosive growth of the quick fix of psychopharmacology is a symptom of the magnitude of the problem. Popular psychologies, in the form of books, tapes, infomercials, and seminars are others. None of these methods gets at the heart of the problem, the archetypal forms that precede consciousness. The rhythms, resonances and harmonies dictated by the archetypes are the key to the work/life dilemma. How can this knowledge best be applied?
The darkness of unconscious carries within it the seeds of hope, because when the bleakness is acknowledged, only then can one begin the process of finding a way into the light. The job of enlightened counselors, charged with the task of tapping the latent productivity of their patients, is to facilitate the process of emergence from the despair that so many feel. Depression and anxiety may be viewed as positive calls for the enlightenment of greater consciousness.
It is common for the person who is at odds with the unconscious to attribute the resulting phobias, anxieties and neurotic tensions to various external problems, usually insoluble ones. As we have seen, these disruptions really come from the pressure of unrecognized but essential personality aspects—in our time, most frequently repressed feeling and religious or spiritual values. A great many people who think they live in fear of the threat of the atom bomb are in reality afraid of a psychic atom bomb—the compressed power of unknown inner needs which are vaguely sensed as a threat that might shatter the seeming peace which the conscious adaptation has established. (Whitmont, 1969/1991, p. 292)
References
Jung, C.G. (1961/1985). Freud and Psychoanalysis. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press.
Whitmont, E. (1969/1991). The Symbolic Quest. Princeton, NJ. Princeton University Press.