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The title gives the theme of this article, in which M. Jacoby concerns himself with the part that analytical psychology plays in gaining an insightful understanding of the world in which we live. Psychologically, he argues, the myth of parricide or castration of the father is constellated and rendered in symbolic form by the Greeks in the myth of the Titans: Uranos and Cronos. Revolt follows when total obedience to inner or outer authority leads to violation of instinctual drives.
Uranos heads the procession of defeated authoritarians. The story of Cronos and Zeus is in essence a repetition. Equally the archetypal opposites are constellated in Jahwe's jealousy of Baal, who belonged to the realm of Astarte, the great mother goddess. Jahwe gives the norm for moral behaviour between men in the ten commandments, an ordering principle for generations to come, operating within and without.
Order must be, and norms come and go, and onesidedness tends to its opposite. Rebellion is not the result of conscious decision, a faculty given to man not shared by the animals as are the ‘biological commandments’. Deciding necessitates consciousness of opposites.
Man, worthy heir to Uranos, now rapes the earth, and the vision of Aldous Huxley has all but been realised. The biologist Illies, in ‘Zoologie des Menschen’ (Piper, München, ) warns that survival is no longer a given certainty; the onus of maintenance of order has moved from the collective and has become the responsibility of the individual. To quote with Jacoby C. G. Jung: ‘Individual self-reflection, return of the individual to the ground of human nature, to his own deepest being with its individual and social destiny—here is the beginning of a cure for that blindness which reigns at the present hour.’ ( Coll. Wks., 7, p. 5.)