Reply

It is difficult to reply to Mrs. Jacoby's critique in a coherent way since her objections to my hypothesis seem to rest on a temperamental bias. This is illustrated by her remark that “It is difficult to see why this, or indeed, any diagram should be applicable to the drama in the Book of Job”. One may personally dislike the schematic, categorizing tendency of abstract thought, but without it we would have no theory of the structure of the psyche and no hypothesis to guide us in the interpretation of dreams. Indeed, our theory of the structure and dynamics of the adult psyche has been quite fully developed by Jung. It is only on the subject of psychic development throughout all stages of life that we lack a well-ordered, coherent theory. Neumann, however, has made major contributions to the construction of such a theory. My own paper is another attempt in that direction.

One of my concerns was the desire to understand why it is that most psychiatrists, and Freudians in particular, are unable to perceive the archetypes and the objective psyche; why Freud saw the id where Jung saw the collective unconscious and the self. My suggested explanation for this is the theory of ego-self identity. As long as the manifestations of the self or objective psyche occur in identification with the ego, they will appear as drives to lust or power. This corresponds to Freud's description of the id. Only when the ego has separated itself sufficiently from the self are lust and power transformed in their manifestations and experienced as suprapersonal, archetypal dynamisms. Although Freudian therapy rightly applies a reductive analytical approach to ego-self identity (the id), it often proves sterile or destructive because it has no conception of the ego-self axis and its vital needs. Jungians, on the other hand, have instinctively honoured the ego-self axis without having a clear concept about it.