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Video Description
There is a difference between having a personality and achieving one — and Carl Jung thought the difference is everything. This lecture from Academy of Ideas examines Jung’s account of that rare accomplishment. Personality, as Jung meant it, is not given at birth; it is won through adversity, solitude, and the courage to follow your own inner law against the crowd. And far from being selfish, such individuals are society’s antidote to collective panic — the mountain peaks that rise above the herd. The video ends with Jung’s call: to escape the group soul is to light a watchfire, and become a seed freed from the stone.
Full Video Transcript
In a chapter titled The Development of Personality, contained in Volume 17 of his collected works, Carl Jung provides a fascinating account of what he called the achievement of personality, which he described as
the prototype of the only meaningful life, that is, of a life that strives for the individual realization of its own law.
Jung’s insights in this chapter, as we’ll see, are very pertinent in the modern world,
where many people are falling under the spell of divisive collective ideologies and, in
the process, devaluing themselves as individuals.
While the term personality is commonly used to describe the set of qualities and traits
which form an individual’s character, Jung had a more specific meaning in mind when he
wrote this chapter.
he explained,
So long as one lives a life more concerned with conformity than individual development
and authenticity, the seeds of personality will obviously remain dormant.
“…only the sharpest need is able to rouse it,” wrote Jung.
The development of personality obeys no wish, no command, and no insight, but only need.
It wants the motivating coercion of inner or outer necessities.
The impetus to achieve personality is some form of severe adversity which awakens one
to the existence of previously unrealized potentials, and forces one to realize that
the way they had been living is no longer adequate.
Not everyone reaches such a point in their life, for as long as one’s suffering and
circumstances remain bearable, the individual will do all he can to avoid the often burdensome
and lonely process of developing personality.
Jung explained. The saying, for many are called but few are chosen, applies here as nowhere else.
For the development of personality from its germinal state to full consciousness is at once
a charism and a curse. Its first result is the conscious and unavoidable separation of the single
being from the undifferentiated and unconscious herd. This means isolation, and there is no more
comforting word for it. Neither family nor society nor position can save him from it.
The development of personality is a favor that must be paid for dearly. The development of
personality is initiated when the individual, with conviction, decides to go his own way.
With the very decision to put his own way above all other ways, Jung wrote, he has already in
large part fulfilled his liberating vocation. He has cancelled the validity of all other ways for
himself. He has placed his law above all conventions. This decision is not met with
an encouraging attitude from others, but ridicule and reproach. Following one’s own path instead of
the well-trodden path will, in many cases, make one’s behavior appear foolish to the more mediocre.
Describing the ridicule and resultant internal conflict which manifests in the early stages of
achieving personality, Jung noted,
For he has decided to follow the law that confronts him from within his own law
Everyone will cry he alone knows better has to know better
It is the law the vocation as little his own as the lion that fells him
Although it is undoubtedly this particular lion that kills him and not any other lion
Only in this sense can you speak of his vocation his law in following his own law?
even in the presence of constant derision from others, the individual both frees and isolates
himself from the masses, whose behavior is instinctively fashioned and dictated by the
social conventions of the day. Some may wonder why anyone would want to go their own way,
for social conventions, especially in more morally developed societies, can help maintain order.
Jung, however, believed it is not social convention in and of itself that is the problem,
but the tendency of people to follow it unconsciously.
For when a society faces unexpected disruptions, as they inevitably do,
a population composed of too few individuals capable of autonomous thought and action
will find itself in a position similar to a herd of wild animals, seized by panic and terror.
As Jung warned,
The fact is that the group, because of its unconsciousness, has no freedom of choice,
so that within it psychic life works itself out like an uncontrolled law of nature. There is set
going a causally connected process that comes to rest only in catastrophe. For when new conditions
not provided for by the old conventions arise then panic seizes the human being who has been
held unconscious by routine much as it seizes an animal and with equally unpredictable results.
It is individuals who have achieved personality and thrust themselves up like mountain peaks out
of the mass who act as the much-needed antidote to the hysteria that can so easily possess and
overtake the unconscious herd. Personality, wrote Jung, does not allow itself to be seized by panic
for it already has terror behind it. It is equal to the changing conditions brought by time
and is unknowingly and unwillingly a leader. While it is easy to look at the great personalities
past and present, with a sense of awe, it is crucial to realize that the potential for achieving
personality is not limited to a select few. The inner voice which calls one to personality
may be less audible in some than others, but it exists in all nonetheless. Insofar as every
individual has his own inborn law of life, it is theoretically possible for every man to follow
this law before all others, and so to become a personality, that is, to achieve completeness.
In concluding his profound exposition on the nature of personality, Jung admitted that ultimately,
what is called personality is a great and mysterious question, and acknowledged that
while he has made a preliminary attempt at describing its nature, there is still much
to be discovered. Although the mystery of personality still remains with us today,
we do know that the achievement of personality has a liberating effect on both the life of the
individual and the society in which such people are embedded. Therefore, in our tumultuous times,
we can, with Jung, put forth a cry for the rise of personality. Not for nothing is it just our
own epic that calls for the liberating personality, for the one who distinguishes himself from the
inescapable power of collectivity, thus freeing himself at least in a psychic way, and who lights
a hopeful watchfire, announcing to others that at least one man has succeeded in escaping from
the fateful identity with the group soul. Just as great personality acts upon society to alleviate,
liberate, transform, and heal, so the birth of personality has a restoring effect upon the
individual. It is as if a stream that was losing itself in marshy tributaries suddenly discovered
its proper bed, or as if a stone that lay upon a germinating seed were lifted away,
so that the sprout could begin its natural growth.
Source: Academy of Ideas