The irrational cannot be and must not be extirpated.
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
Old Heraclitus, who was indeed a very great sage, discovered the most marvellous of all psychological laws: the regulative function of opposites.
He called it enantiodromia, a running contrariwise, by which he meant that sooner or later everything runs into its opposite. (Here I would remind you of the case above of the American business man, a beautiful example of enantiodromia.)
Thus the rational attitude of culture necessarily runs into its opposite, namely the irrational devastation of culture.
We should never identify ourselves with reason, for man is not and never will be a creature of reason alone, a fact to be noted by all pedantic culture-mongers.
The irrational cannot be and must not be extirpated.
The gods cannot and must not die.
I said just now that there seems to be something, a kind of superior power, in the human psyche, and that if this is not the idea of God, then it is the “belly.”
I wanted to express the fact that one or other basic instinct, or complex of ideas, will invariably concentrate upon itself the greatest sum of psychic energy and thus force the ego into its service.
As a rule the ego is drawn into this focus of energy so powerfully that it identifies with it and thinks it desires and needs nothing further.
In this way a craze develops, a monomania or possession, an acute one-sidedness which most seriously imperils the psychic equilibrium.
Without doubt the capacity for such one-sidedness is the secret of success — of a sort, for which reason our civilization assiduously strives to foster it.
The passion, the piling up of energy in these monomanias, is what the ancients called a “god,” and in common speech we still do the same.
Do we not say, “He makes a god of this or that”? A man thinks that he wills and chooses, and does not notice that he is already possessed, that his interest has become the master, arrogating all power to itself. Such interests are indeed gods of a kind which, once recognized by the many, gradually form a “church” and gather a herd of believers about them.
This we then call an “organization.”
It is followed by a disorganizing reaction which aims to drive out the devil with Beelzebub.
The enantiodromia that always threatens when a movement attains to undisputed power offers no solution of the problem, for it is just as blind in its disorganization as it was in its organization. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 111
