Critical Notices

The Undiscovered Self, by C. G. Jung. London,  Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1958. Pp.  113. 105. 6d.

One of the marks of greatness in Dr. Jung is that, all through his long and still active life, he has managed to be a doer and a thinker at the same time. Each side of his work has fructified the other. In this little book he has given us some of the results of his ripe wisdom and experience. The book is short but the contents are of capital importance. The book throws timely new light on the problems of the individual and of society, at the present moment and at all times.

Dr. Jung starts from a truth that must be borne in upon a practising physician. The only realities are individual human beings. The world itself exists only in human consciousness; and the consciousness that is aware of it is always some individual's. There is no collective consciousness; and if we personify the collective products of relations between individuals—states, churches, and other institutions—we are making false and dangerous myths.

Dr. Jung distinguishes sharply between understanding a concrete individual human being and knowing, in the scientific sense of the word, about human nature. The intellect operates by classifying; this means picking out regularities and uniformities; and that means ignoring what is unique—which, in human affairs, at any rate, is of the essence of reality. The great practical and theoretical successes of the human intellect, so far, have been in its dealings with external reality. We have shirked the more important task of understanding ourselves, because this task is more refractory to intellectual operations. Accordingly, our intellectual picture of ourselves is quite inadequate. It reduces each of us to an insignificant specimen of a species. The individual is lost in the mass; so he loses confidence in himself, and this puts him at the mercy of people who know and use the black art of manipulating mankind in the mass in order to gain tyrannical power over their fel