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Carl Jung Depth Psychology Facebook Group
Two Essays on Analytical Psychology
It has become abundantly clear to me that life can flow forward only along the path of the gradient.
But there is no energy unless there is a tension of opposites; hence it is necessary to discover the opposite to the attitude of the conscious mind.
It is interesting to see how this compensation by opposites also plays its part in the historical theories of neurosis: Freud’s theory espoused Eros, Adler’s the will to power.
Logically, the opposite of love is hate, and of Eros, Phobos (fear); but psychologically it is the will to power.
Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking.
The one is but the shadow of the other: the man who adopts the standpoint of Eros finds his compensatory opposite in the will to power, and that of the man who puts the accent on power is Eros.
Seen from the one-sided point of view of the conscious attitude, the shadow is an inferior component of the personality and is consequently repressed through intensive resistance.
But the repressed content must be made conscious so as to produce a tension of opposites, without which no forward movement is possible.
The conscious mind is on top, the shadow underneath, and just as high always longs for low and hot for cold, so all consciousness, perhaps without being aware of it, seeks its unconscious opposite, lacking which it is doomed to stagnation, congestion, and ossification. Life is born only of the spark of opposites. ~Carl Jung, CW 7, Para 78
