The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality.
~ Carl Jung
I’ve been writing about patterns in our lives that lead us away from individuation—becoming who we were meant to be—and bog us down into a quagmire of inheritances, habits, “shoulds” and other types of collective thinking that can never lead us to wholeness.
As an example, I began writing about what I learned this Thanksgiving week, when I realized that I had been re-enacting with my children a pattern that originated in my relationship with my mother. Though I saw what was happening mid-stride, reading it, too, on my daughters’ faces, even in that moment I did not yet have the picture I needed in order to free myself and continue on my individual path.
The picture I needed came later that night, as I dreamed. The dream I dreamed showed my dream ego in conflict with my husband, who represented my male side, or my animus. The action of the dream required me to finally break away from him in the most unlikely of circumstances, so that I could “get home” in the dream. Though I ended up going home by walking for hours in my pajamas and house slippers, I made it there and found myself in surprising surroundings with much work to do at the end. The dream also indicated that, in order to be free, I would have to overcome my inner, nice, obedient, good 13-year-old, and that I would need to do some work on my inner child of around six to eight years old.
Now, that’s a lot of information to get from one dream. But after I woke up and journaled the dream, I found myself weeping for my loss of freedom as a child, and over the fear of my mother I’d felt for so many years, even for years after I’d given up the fantasy that some day I’d be close to her.
Later that day, my brother came to pick up my nephews. As we re-hashed our Thanksgiving with our parents, I made an offhand (but unconsciously fruitful) comment about Mother. He playfully chided me for my little snipe, turned to my children and said, “Now, kids, don’t let your mom talk bad about Grandma. Grandma is old and we have to be nice to her, so make your mom Be Nice.”
My brother is one of my favorite people in the world, and that moment was no time to discuss family of origin issues, for he was on his way out the door. So I smiled inwardly and remained silent as my children looked at him, wide-eyed, knowing what my real response would have been, had I opened my mouth. And my real response—the one that’s true and that will lead me to the wholeness for which I’m intended—is this:
The more a man’s life is shaped by the collective norm, the greater is his individual immorality.
This is what Jung wrote. Put another way, King Solomon wrote that “bad company corrupts good morals.” One’s own individual way is easily lost through the influence of the collective, which is perhaps the biggest obstacle to the individual’s psychological health. The way to wholeness comes first from being prepared to live with the collective in healthy ways by having been raised in a healthy, loving, nurturing, accepting family. One then launches in a healthy, loving, nurturing, accepting way and goes out to live a healthy, loving, nurturing, accepting life by individuating—”leaving and cleaving,” as the Bible puts it—by becoming one. I do not speak with regard to marriage, here, but with regard to the Divine Marriage, the hieros gamos, the Holy Marriage. This is how life works at its best, if we have been loved.
If we have not been loved at all, or if we have been loved in part but wounded in part, we enter adulthood confused, believing that our actual marriage to a spouse will cause oneness and wholeness, and spending 20 or 30 years discovering what a bitterly wrong idea that was. We think that having children and houses and all the right clothes, possessions, activities, and friends will get us there, too. But they don’t. Twenty or thirty years in churches, at the job, or anywhere involving other people will reveal just how fallen and fragmented we all are, because we’re designed to become one with the Divine and ourselves before we are able to offer anything to the world; but we confuse our obligation to Spirit and we live our lives in the collective. And one year we wake up—some people do only on their death beds—and ask, “What was I thinking?”
The thing is that we can never become individuated while clinging to collective norms. The collective mind tells us how to live, what we should do for a living, how we should dress, what cars we should drive, what neighborhoods we should live in. Be responsible, do the right thing, do things in order; don’t push, don’t be rude, don’t be mean; respect your elders. “Don’t talk bad about Grandma; she’s old; we have to be nice to her; Be Nice.” When young people launch from the childhood home into a collective that looks as perfectly typecast as actors in a serialized drama or comedy, one can be sure that they are just as trapped as they were in their childhood homes. By the time they are 35 or 40 and have their two children and their so-called dream home that gives them all the right feelings, they will be filled with all the wrong feelings because the collective mind is corrupting and evil in the sense that it numbs people and leads them away from what only they can offer the world: their own selves.
And isn’t that what Mother or Father tried to snuff out in the first place, if they did—the Real Self? Isn’t that the design of public education and collective education and collectives of all other varieties? And yet we most admire the individual who rises above collectives by breaking free of them, and who thinks original thoughts, paints original paintings, writes original songs, pens poems that transport us out of the mire we’re in.
Individuation is a crime against collective values, Jung wrote, because we have to snub our noses at the group and walk away in order to go on the path that arises from the call to adventure and do what only we can do. Every step a person makes to integrate what has been unconsciously denied, therefore, has a healing effect and restores yet another part of the individual. And every step a person makes toward the collective leads him away again, or as Jung wrote “through his contamination with others, he falls into situations and commits actions which bring him into disharmony with himself” (CW 7:373).
And yet we hesitate to act in harmony with our own selves, for it was our earliest influences who taught most of us that our selves were to be rejected. Whether the collective was the family or the kindergarten class, we had to get in line and cooperate, and all too often “getting in line” meant giving up our true selves.
Lest the non-traditional types among us pat yourselves on the back because you resisted collective living and wear different clothes or refuse to shop at Abercrombie, would never buy Chanel or do not use that sort of education for your children, just stop a moment and consider your social network. We all collectivize. We can hardly stop ourselves. As an example, I had to smile recently when young missionary friends sent us photos of their evangelization team in the country where they live. Everyone on the team was dressed similarly, with similar hair styles, similar piercings, similar lifestyles. If you passed any single one of them in an aisle at the grocery store, you’d think to yourself, “Ah, now there’s someone who’s different!” But in fact, there’s nothing different about our friends at all. They are still part of a collective that is full of “shoulds” and “oughts” and shows them by example how to live. They are beloved, vibrant, self-sacrificing, wonderful human beings, but they are not much individuated, for there is not one person in the group who has anything original or different to say, when compared with their group. And, in fact, if one were to quit that group and become a Banana Republic-wearing financial planner, the rest of the group would say, “Ah, too bad; he sold out.”
That’s a collective. A collective is a group mind from which one cannot be free, out of which one cannot possibly become a self. One becomes a self by leaving the collective first, and only afterward by providing his or her own individual part in that great collective. The only way one can provide oneself is by supplying, as Saint Paul wrote, what each individual part supplies. Individual, meaning “each one part.” The “one” there, in the Greek, means one, a primary number.
It means every single one.
