The one thing she seems to aim at is Individuality; yet she cares nothing for individuals?
Among primitives, and wherever the conditions are primitive, the conflict between individual consciousness and the collective tendencies of the unconscious is resolved in favor of the collective and at the cost of the individual.
Often the instinctive reactions bear no relation to the ego, but only to the collective,
the species, etc.
Nature is always showing that she sets no store by the individual.
As Goethe says:
The one thing she seems to aim at is Individuality; yet she cares nothing
for individuals?
In contrast with this, however, the development of consciousness also serves the interests of the individual.
While the ego is coming to terms with the unconscious, more and more attempts are made to protect the personality, to consolidate the conscious system, and to dam up the danger of inundation and invasion from the unconscious side.
Thus, as the ego develops, it is imperative to prevent a situation from arising in which the dynamic-emotional component of an unconscious image or archetype would drive the ego into an instinctive reaction and so overwhelm consciousness.
For this reason there is sound sense in the tendency to separate the reaction from the perceptual image which releases it and to break down the original reflex arc until the material and the dynamic components of the collective unconscious are finally segregated.
If the emergence of an archetype is not immediately followed by an instinctive reflex action, so much the better for conscious development, because the effect of the emotional dynamic components is to disturb, or even prevent, objective knowledge, whether this be of the external world or of the psychic world of the collective unconscious.
Consciousness with all its four functions, introverted as well as extraverted, is the cognitive organ par excellence, and its differentiation and that of the functions is possible only when the emotional components of the unconscious are excluded.
The sure aim of the differentiated function is continually being obscured by the intrusion of emotional components. ― Erich Neumann, The Origins and History of Consciousness, Page 333-334
