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demands and capacities of the individual, and the environmental conditions. 
	207 	It is the duty of a speaker to present a general survey of the 
question under discussion. Naturally this can be done only if, as a doctor, I can give an objective account of things as they are, and abstain from that stale, moralizing talk which veils the subject with a mixture of bashfulness and hypocrisy. Moreover, I am not here to tell you what ought to be done. That must be left to those who always know what is better for other people. 
	208 	Our theme is "The Love Problem of a Student," and I 
assume that "love problem" means the relation of the two sexes and is not to be construed as the "sexual problem" of a student. This provides a useful limitation of our theme, for the question of sex would need considering only so far as it is a love problem, or a problem of relationship. Hence we can exclude all those sexual phenomena that have nothing to do with relationship, such as sexual perversions (with the exception of homosexuality), masturbation, and intercourse with prostitutes. We cannot exclude homosexuality because very often it is a problem of relationship; but we can exclude prostitution because usually it does not involve a relationship, though there are exceptions which prove the rule. 
	209 	The average solution of the love problem is, as you know, 
marriage. But experience shows that this statistical truth does not apply to the student. The immediate reason for this is that a student is generally not in a position to set up house. A further reason is the youthful age of most students, which, partly because of their unfinished studies, and partly because of their need for freedom to move from place to place, does not yet permit the social fixation entailed by marriage. Other factors to be considered are psychological immaturity, childish clinging to home and family, relatively undeveloped capacity for love and responsibility, lack of experience of life and the world, the typical illusions of youth, and so on. A reason that should not be underestimated is the sagacious reserve of the girl students. Their first aim is to complete their studies and take up a profession. They therefore abstain from marriage, especially from marriage with a student, who so long as he remains a student is not a desirable marriage partner for the reasons already mentioned. Another, very important, reason for the infrequency of 
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-student marriages is the question of children. As a rule when a girl marries she wants a child, whereas a man can manage well enough for a time without children. A marriage without children has no special attraction for a woman; she prefers to wait. 
	210 	In recent years, it is true, student marriages have become 
more frequent. This is due partly to the psychological changes in our modern outlook, and partly to the spread of contraceptive measures. The psychological changes that have produced, among other things, the phenomenon of the student marriage are probably the result of the spiritual upheavals of the last few decades, the total significance of which we are as yet unable to grasp. All we can say is that, as a consequence of the general dissemination of scientific knowledge and a more scientific way of thinking, a change in the very conception of the love problem has come about. Scientific objectivity has effected a rapprochement between the sacrosanct idea of man as a su perior being and man as a natural being, and made it possible for Homo saPiens to take his place as part of the natural order. The change has an emotional as well as an intellectual aspect. Such a view works directly on the feelings of the individual. He feels released from the confines of a metaphysical system and from those moral categories which characterized the medieval outlook on the world. The taboos erected on man's exclusion from nature no longer prevail, and the moral judgments which in the last analysis always have their roots in the religious metaphysic of the age have lost their force. Within the traditional moral system everyone knows perfectly why marriage is "right" and why any other form of love is to be abhorred. But outside the system, on the playground and battlefield of nature, where man feels himself to be the most gifted member of the great family of animals, he must orient himself anew. The loss of the old standards and values amounts, at first, to moral chaos. All the hitherto accepted forms are doubted, people begin to discuss things that have long sheltered behind a moral prejudice. They boldly investigate the actual facts and feel an irresistible need to take stock of experience, to know and to understand. The eyes of science are fearless and clear; they do not flinch from gazing into moral darknesses and dirty corners. The man of today can no longer rest content with a traditional judg- 
101 

213 
211 
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ment; he must know why. This search leads to the creation of new standards of value. 
One of these is an evaluation of love in terms of hygiene. 
Through a franker and more objective discussion of sex a knowledge of the immense dangers of venereal disease has become much more widespread. The obligation to keep oneself healthy has superseded the guilty fears of the old morality. But this process of moral sanitation has not yet progressed to the point where public conscience would allow the same civic measures to be taken for dealing with venereal diseases as with other infectious diseases. Venereal diseases are still considered "indecent," unlike smallpox and cholera, which are morally acceptable in the drawing room. No doubt these fine distinctions will raise a smile in a more enlightened age. 
The widespread discussion of the sexual question has brought the extraordinary importance of sexuality in all its psychic ramifications to the forefront of our social consciousness. A major contribution was made during the last twentyfive years by the much-decried psychoanalytic movement. Today it is no longer possible to brush aside the tremendous psychological importance of sex with a bad joke or a display of moral indignation. People are beginning to see the sexual question in the context of the great human problems and to discuss it with the seriousness it deserves. The natural result of this is that much that was formerly held to be beyond dispute is now open to doubt. There is, for instance, a doubt as to whether the officially sanctioned form of sexuality is the only one that is morally possible, and whether all other forms are to be condemned out of hand. The arguments for and against are gTadually losing their moral acerbity, practical considerations force themselves into the discussion, and finally we are beginning to discover that legitimized sex is not eo iPsO the 
equivalent of moral superiority. 
In addition to this, the marriage problem with its usually 
sombre background has become a theme for romantic literature. Whereas the romance of the old style concluded with a happy betrothal or a wedding, the modern novel often begins after the marriage. In these novels, which get into everybody's hands, the most intimate problems are often treated with a lack of reticence that is positively painful. Of the veritable flood of 
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214 
215 

THE LOVE PROBLEM OF A STUDENT 
more or less undisguised pornographic writings we need hardly speak. A popular scientific book, Forel's The Sexual Question, not only had an enormous sale but found a good many imitators. In scientific literature, compilations have been produced which both in scope and in the dubious nature of their contents exceed anything found in Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, in a way that would have been inconceivable thirty or forty years ago. 
These widespread and widely known phenomena are a sign of the times. They make it possible for young people today to grasp the full importance of the problem of sex much earlier than they could have at any time during the last two decades. There are some who maintain that this early preoccupation with sex is unhealthy, a sign of urban degeneration. I remember reading an article fifteen years ago in Ostwald's A nnalen der NaturphilosoPhie, which said, quite literally: "Primitive people like the Eskimos, Swiss, etc., have no sexual problem." It scarcely needs much reflection to see why primitives have no sexual problem; beyond the concerns of the stomach they have no other problems to worry about. Problems are the prerogative of civilized man. Here in Switzerland we have no great cities and yet such problems exist. I do not think that discussion of the sexual question is unhealthy or in the least degenerate; I see it rather as a symptom of the gTeat psychological revolution of our time and the changes it has brought about. It seems to me that the more seriously and thoroughly we discuss this question, which is of such vital importance for man's health and happiness, the better it will be for all of us. 
It is no doubt the serious interest shown in this question that has led to the hitherto unknown phenomenon of student marriages. Such a very recent phenomenon is difficult to judge for lack of sufficient data. In former times there were early marriages in abundance, also marriages that must have seemed socially very unstable. In itself, therefore, the student marriage is perfectly permissible. The question of children, however, is another matter. If both partners are studying, children must obviously be ruled out. But a marriage that remains artificially childless is always rather problematical. Children are the cement that holds it together as nothing else could. And it is the parents' concentration on the children which in innumera- 
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ble instances keeps alive the feeling of companionship so essential for the stability of a marriage. When there are no children the interest of each partner is directed to the other, which in itself might be a good thing. In practice, unfortunately, this mutual preoccupation is not always of an amiable kind. Each blames the other for the dissatisfaction felt by both. In these circumstances it is probably better for the wife to be studying, otherwise she is left without an object; for there are many women who cannot endure marriage without children and become unendurable themselves. If she is studying, she at least has a life outside her marriage that is sufficiently satisfying. A woman who is very set on children, and for whom children are more important than a husband, should certainly think twice before embarking on a student marriage. She should also realize that the urge to maternity often appears in imperative form only later, that is, after she is married. 
	216 	As to whether student marriages are premature, we must 
take note of a fact that applies to all early marriages, namely, that a girl of twenty is usually older than a man of twenty-five, as far as maturity of judgment is concerned. With many men of twenty-five the period of psychological puberty is not yet over. Puberty is a period of illusion and only partial responsibility. The psychological difference is due to the fact that a boy, up to the time of sexual maturity, is as a rule quite childish, whereas a girl develops much earlier than he does the psychological subtleties that go hand in hand with adolescence. Into this childishness sexuality often breaks with brutal force, while, despite the onset of puberty, it often goes on slumbering in a girl until the passion of love awakens it. There are a surprising number of women whose real sexuality, even though they are married, remains virginal for years; they become conscious of it only when they fall in love with another man. That is the reason why very many women have no understanding at all of masculine sexuality-they are completely unconscious of their own. With men it is different. Sexuality bursts on them like a tempest, filling them with brute desires and needs, and there is scarcely one of them who escapes the painful problem of masturbation. But a girl can masturbate for years without knowing what she is doing. 
	217 	The onrush of sexuality in a boy brings about a powerful 
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change in his psychology. He now has the sexuality of a grown man with the soul of a child. Often the flood of obscene fantasies and smutty talk with schoolfellows pours like a torrent of dirty water over all his delicate and childish feelings, sometimes smothering them for ever. Unexpected moral conflicts arise, temptations of every description lie in wait for him and weave themselves into his fantasies. The psychic assimilation of the sexual complex causes him the greatest difficulties even though he may not be conscious of its existence. The onset of puberty also brings about considerable changes in his metabolism, as can be seen from the pimples and acne that so often afflict adolescents. The psyche is disturbed in a similar manner and thrown off its balance. At this age the young man is full of illusions, which are always a sign of psychic disequilibrium. They make stability and maturity of judgment impossible. His tastes, his interests, his plans alter fitfully. He can suddenly fall head over heels in love with a girl, and a fortnight later he cannot conceive how anything of the sort could have happened to him. He is so riddled with illusions that he actually needs these mistakes to make him conscious of his own taste and individual judgment. He is still experimenting with life, and must experiment with it in order to learn how to judge things correctly. Hence there are very few men who have not had sexual experience of some kind before they are married. During puberty it is mostly homosexual experiences, and these are much more common than is generally admitted. Heterosexual experiences come later, not always of a very beautiful kind. For the less the sexual complex is assimilated to the whole of the personality, the more autonomous and instinctive it will be. Sexuality is then purely animal and recognizes no psychological distinctions. The most inferior woman will do; it is enough if she has the typical secondary sexual characteristics. A false step of this kind does not entitle us to draw conclusions about a man's character, as the act can easily occur at a time when the sexual complex is still split off from the psyche's influence. Nevertheless, too many experiences of this nature have a bad effect on the formation of the personality, as by force of habit they fix sexuality on too Iowa level and make it unacceptable to moral judgment. The result is that though the man in question is outwardly a respectable citizen, inwardly he is prey to sexual fantasies of the 
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lowest kind, or else he represses them and on some festive occasion they come leaping to the surface in their primitive form, much to the astonishment of his unsuspecting wife-assuming, of course, that she notices what is going on. A frequent accompaniment is premature coldness towards the wife. Women are often frigid from the first day of marriage because their sensation function does not respond to this kind of sexuality in their husbands. The weakness of a man's judgment at the time of psychological puberty should prompt him to reflect very deeply on the premature choice of a wife. 
	218 	Let us now turn to other forms of relationship between the 
sexes that are customary during the student period. There are, as you know, characteristic liaisons between students, chiefly in the great universities of other countries. These relationships are sometimes fairly stable and may even have a psychological value, as they do not consist entirely of sexuality but also, in part, of love. Occasionally the liaison is continued into marriage. The relationship stands, therefore, considerably higher than prostitution. But as a rule it is limited to those students who were careful in the choice of their parents. It is usually a question of money, for most of the girls are dependent on their lovers for financial help, though they could not be said to sell their love for money. Very often the relationship is a beautiful episode in the girl's life, otherwise poor and empty, while for the man it may be his first intimate acquaintance with a woman, and in later life a memory on which he looks back with emotion. Often, again, there is nothing valuable in these affairs, partly owing to the man's crude sensuality, thoughtlessness, and lack of feeling, and partly owing to the frivolity and fickleness of 
the girl. 
	219 	Over all these relationships hangs the Damoclean sword of 
their transitoriness, which prevents the formation of real values. They are passing episodes, experiments of very limited validity. Their injurious effect on the personality is due to the fact that the man gets the girl too easily, so that the value of the loveobject is depreciated. It is convenient for him to dispose of his sexual problem in such a simple and irresponsible way. He becomes spoilt. But even more, the fact that he is sexually satisfied robs him of a driving-force which no young man can do without. He becomes blase and can afford to wait. Meanwhile he 
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can calmly review the massed femininity passing before him until the right party turns up. Then the wedding comes along and the latest date is thrown over. This procedure adds little of advantage to his character. The low level of relationship tends to keep sexuality on a correspondingly low level of development, and this can easily lead to difficulties in marriage. Or if his sexual fantasies are repressed, the result is only too likely to be a neurotic or, worse still, a moral zealot. 
	220 	Homosexual relations between students of either sex are by 
no means uncommon. So far as I can judge of this phenomenon, I would say that these relationships are less common with us, and on the continent generally, than in certain other countries where boy and girl college students live in strict segregation. I am speaking here not of pathological homosexuals who are incapable of real friendship and meet with little sympathy among normal individuals, but of more or less normal youngsters who enjoy such a rapturous friendship that they also express their feelings in sexual form. With them it is not just a matter of mutual masturbation, which in all school and college life is the order of the day among the younger age groups, but of a higher and more spiritual form which deserves the name "friendship" in the classical sense of the word. When such a friendship exists between an older man and a younger its educative significance is undeniable. A slightly homosexual teacher, for example, often owes his brilliant educational gifts to his homosexual disposition. The homosexual relation between an older and a younger man can thus be of advantage to both sides and have a lasting value. An indispensable condition for the value of such a relation is the steadfastness of the friendship and their loyalty to it. But only too often this condition is lacking. The more homosexual a man is, the more prone he is to disloyalty and to the seduction of boys. Even when loyalty and true friendship prevail the results may be undesirable for the ?evelopment of personality. A friendship of this kind naturally Involves a special cult of feeling, of the feminine element in a man. He becomes gushing, soulful, aesthetic, over-sensitive, etc. -in a word, effeminate, and this womanish behaviour is detrimental to his character. 
	221 	Similar advantages and disadvantages can be pointed out in 
friendships between women, only here the difference in age 
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and the educative factor are not so important. The main value lies in the exchange of tender feelings on the one hand and of intimate thoughts on the other. Generally they are high-spirited, intellectual, and rather masculine women who are seeking to maintain their superiority and to defend themselves against men. Their attitude to men is therefore one of disconcerting self-assurance, with a trace of defiance. Its effect on their character is to reinforce their masculine traits and to destroy their feminine charm. Often a man discovers their homosexuality only when he notices that these women leave him stonecold. 
	222 	Normally, the practice of homosexuality is not prejudicial 
to later heterosexual activity. Indeed, the two can even exist side by side. I know a very intelligent woman who spent her whole life as a homosexual and then at fifty entered into a normal relationship with a man. 
	223 	Among the sexual relations of the student period we must 
mention yet another, which is quite normal even if rather peculiar. This is the attachment of a young man to an older woman, possibly married or at any rate widowed. You will perhaps remember Jean Jacques Rousseau and his connection with Mme de Warens; this is the kind of relationship I have in mind. The man is usually rather shy, unsure of himself, inwardly afraid, sometimes infantile. He naturally seeks a mother, perhaps because he has had too much or too little love in his own family. Many women like nothing better than a man who is rather helpless, especially when they are considerably older than he is; they do not love a man's strength, his virtues and his merits, but his weaknesses. They find his infantilisms charming. If he stammers a little, he is enchanting; or perhaps he has a limp, and this excites maternal compassion and a little more besides. As a rule the woman seduces him, and he willingly submits to her mothering. 
	224 	Not always, however, does a timid youth remain half a child. 
It may be that this surfeit of maternal solicitude was just what was needed to bring his undeveloped masculinity to the surface. In this way the woman educates his feeling and brings it to full consciousness. He learns to understand a woman who has experience of life and the world, is sure of herself, and thus he has a rare opportunity for a glimpse behind the scenes. But he 
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THE LOVE PROBLEM OF A STUDENT 
can take advantage of it only if he quickly outgrows this relationship, for should he get stuck in it her mothering would ruin him. Maternal tenderness is the most pernicious poison for anyone who has to equip himself for the hard and pitiless struggle of life. If he cannot let go of her apron-strings he will become a spineless parasite-for most of these women have money-and sink to the level of a lap-dog or a pet cat. 
We must now discuss those forms of relationship which offer no solution of the sexual question for the reason that they are asexual or "platonic." If there were any reliable statistics on this subject, I believe they would show that in Switzerland the majority of students prefer a platonic relationship. Naturally, this raises the question of sexual abstinence. One often hears that abstaining from sexual intercouse is injurious to health. This view is incorrect, at least for people of the student age. Abstinence is injurious to health only when a man has reached the age when he could win a woman for himself, and should do so according to his individual inclinations. The extraordinary intensification of the sexual need that is so often felt at this time has the biological aim of forcibly eliminating the man's scruples, misgivings, doubts, and hesitations. This is very necessary, because the very idea of marriage, with all its doubtful possibilities, often makes a man panicky. It is only to be expected, therefore, that nature will push him over the obstacle. Abstention from sexual intercourse may certainly have injurious effects under these conditions, but not when there is no urgent physical or psychological need for it. 
This brings us to the very similar question concerning the injurious effects of masturbation. When for physical or psychological reasons normal intercouse is impossible, masturbation as a safety-valve has no ill effects. Young people who come to the doctor suffering from the harmful effects of masturbation are not by any means excessive masturbationists-these usually have no need of a doctor because they are not in any sense ill -rather, their masturbation has harmful effects because it shows psychic complications and is attended by pangs of conscience' or by a riot of sexual fantasies. The latter are particularly com~on among women. Masturbation with psychic complications IS harmful, but not the ordinary, uncomplicated kind. If, hbwever, it is continued up to the age when normal intercourse 
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227 
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becomes physically, psychologically, and socially possible, and is indulged in merely in order to avoid the necessary tasks of life, then it is harmful. 
Platonic relationships are very important during the student 
period. The form they most commonly take is flirting. Flirting is the expression of an experimental attitude which is altogether appropriate at this age. It is a voluntary activity which, by tacit agreement, puts neither side under an obligation. This is an advantage and at the same time a disadvantage. The experimental attitude enables both parties to get to know each other without any immediately undesirable results. Both exercise their judgment and their skill in self-expression, adaptation, and defence. An enormous variety of experiences which are uncommonly valuable in later life can be picked up from flirting. On the other hand, the absence of any obligation can easily lead to one's becoming an habitual flirt, shallow, frivolous, and heartless. The man turns into a drawing-room hero and professional heart-breaker, never dreaming what a boring figure he cuts; the girl a coquette, and a serious man instinctively feels that she is not to be taken seriously. 
A phenomenon that is as rare as flirting is common is the conscious cultivation of a serious love. We might call this simply the ideal, without, however, identifying it with traditional romanticism. For the development of personality, there can be no doubt that the timely awakening and conscious cultivation of deeply serious and responsible feelings are of the utmost value. A relationship of this kind can be the most effective shield against the temptations that beset a young man, as well as being a powerful incentive to hard work, loyalty, and reliability. However, there is no value so great that it does not have its unfavourable side. A relationship that is too ideal easily becomes exclusive. Through his love the young man is too much cut off from the acquaintance of other women, and the girl does not learn the art of erotic conquest because she has got her man already. Woman's instinct for possession is a dan- 
•	gerous thing, and it may easily happen that the man will regret all the experiences he never had with women before marriage and will make tip for them afterwards. 
Hence it must not be concluded that every relationship of this kind is ideal. There are cases where the exact opposite is 110 

23° 
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THE LOVE PROBLEM OF A STUDENT 
true-when, for instance, a man or girl trails round with a school sweetheart for no intelligible reason, from mere force of habit. Whether from inertia, or lack of spirit, or helplessness they simply cannot get rid of each other. Perhaps the parents on both sides find the match suitable, and the affair, begun in a moment of thoughtlessness and prolonged by habit, is passively accepted as a fait accompli. Here the disadvantages pile up without a single advantage. For the development of personality, acquiescence and passivity are harmful because they are an obstacle to valuable experience and to the exercise of one's specific gifts and virtues. Moral qualities are won only in freedom and prove their worth only in morally dangerous situations. The thief who refrains from stealing merely because he is in prison is not a moral personality. Though the parents may gaze benignly on this touching marriage and add their children's respectability to the tale of their own virtues, it is all a sham and a delusion, lacking real strength, and sapped by moral inertia. 
After this brief survey of the problems as we meet them in actual life, I will, in conclusion, turn to the land of heart's desire and utopian possibilities. 
Nowadays we can hardly discuss the love problem without speaking of the utopia of free love, including trial marriage. I regard this idea as a wishful fantasy and an attempt to make light of a problem which in actual life is invariably very difficult. It is no more possible to make life easy than it is to grow a herb of immortality. The force of gravity can be overcome only by the requisite application of energy. Similarly, the solution of the love problem challenges all our resources. Anything else would be useless patchwork. Free love would be conceivable only if everyone were capable of the highest moral achievement. The idea of free love was not invented with this aim in view, but merely to make something difficult appear easy. Love requires depth and loyalty of feeling; without them it is not love but mere caprice. True love will always commit itself and engage in lasting ties; it needs freedom only to effect its choice, not for its accomplishment. Every true and deep love is a sacrifice. The lover sacrifices all other possibilities, or rather, the illusion that such possibilities exist. If this sacrifice is not made, his illusions prevent the growth of any deep and responsible 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
feeling, so that the very possibility of experiencing real love is denied him. 
	232 	Love has more than one thing in common with religious 
faith. It demands unconditional trust and expects absolute surrender. Just as nobody but the believer who surrenders himself wholly to God can partake of divine grace, so love reveals its highest mysteries and its wonder only to those who are capable of unqualified devotion and loyalty of feeling. And because this is so difficult, few mortals can boast of such an achievement. But, precisely because the truest and most devoted love is also the most beautiful, let no man seek to make it easy. He is a sorry knight who shrinks from the difficulty of loving his lady. Love is like God: both give themselves only to their bravest knights. 
	233 	I would offer the same criticism of trial marriages. The very 
fact that a man enters into a marriage on trial means that he is making a reservation; he wants to be sure of not burning his fingers, to risk nothing. But that is the most effective way of forestalling any real experience. You do not experience the terrors of the Polar ice by perusing a travel-book, or climb the Himalayas in a cinema. 
	234 	Love is not cheap-let us therefore beware of cheapening it! 
All our bad qualities, our egotism, our cowardice, our worldly wisdom, our cupidity-all these would persuade us not to take love seriously. But love will reward us only when we do. I must even regard it as a misfortune that nowadays the sexual question is spoken of as something distinct from love. The two questions should not be separated, for when there is a sexual problem it can be solved only by love. Any other solution would be a harmful substitute. Sexuality dished out as sexuality is brutish; but sexuality as an expression of love is hallowed. Therefore, never ask what a man does, but how he does it. If he does it from love or in the spirit of love, then he serves a god; and whatever he may do is not ours to judge, for it is ennobled. 
	235 	I trust that these remarks will have made it clear to you 
that I pass no sort of moral judgment on sexuality as a natural phenomenon, but prefer to make its moral evaluation dependent on the way it is expressed. 
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WOMAN IN EUROPE 1 
You call yourself free? Your dominant thought I would hear, and not that you have escaped from a yoke. Are you one of those who had the right to escape from a yoke? There are some who threw away their last value when they threw away their servitude. 
Thus Spake Zarathustra 
	236 	To write about woman in Europe today is such a hazardous 
undertaking that I would scarcely have ventured to do so without a pressing invitation. Have we anything of fundamental importance to say about Europe? Is anyone sufficiently detached? Are we not all involved in some programme or experiment, or caught in some critical retrospect that clouds our judgment? And in regard to woman, cannot the same questions be asked? Moreover, what can a man say about woman, his own opposite? I mean of course something sensible, that is outside the sexual progTamme, free of resentment, illusion, and theory. Where is the man to be found capable of such superiority? Woman always stands just where the man's shadow falls, so that he is only too liable to confuse the two. Then, when he tries to repair this misunderstanding, he overvalues her and 
1 [Originally published as "Die Frau in Europa," Europiiische Revue (Berlin), Ill: 7 (Oct., 1927); republished by the Neue Schweizer Rundschau as a pamphlet (Zurich, 1929), which was reprinted by Rascher Verlag in 1932, 1948, and 1959 (cf. n. 2, infra). Trans. by C. F. and H. G. Baynes in Contributions to Analytical Psychology (London and New York, 1928), pp. 164-88, which version has been consulted here. The motto is from the trans. of Nietzsche by Common.-EDITORS.] 
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believes her the most desirable thing in the world. Thus it is with the greatest misgivings that I set out to treat of this theme. 
	237 	One thing, however, is beyond doubt: that woman today is 
in the same process of transition as man. Whether this transition is a historical turning-point or not remains to be seen. Sometimes, when we look back at history, it seems as though the present time had analogies with certain periods in the past, when great empires and civilizations had passed their zenith and were hastening irresistibly towards decay. But these analogies are deceptive, for there are always renaissances. What does move more clearly into the foreground is Europe's position midway between the Asiatic East and the Anglo-Saxon-or shall we say American?-West. Europe now stands between two colossi, both uncouth in their form but implacably opposed to one another in their nature. They are profoundly different not only racially but in their ideals. In the West there is the maximum political freedom with the minimum personal freedom; in the East it is just the opposite. We see in the West a tremendous development of Europe's technological and scientific tendencies, and in the Far East an awakening of all those spiritual forces which, in Europe, these tendencies hold in check. The power of the West is material, that of the East ideal.2 The struggle between these opposites, which in the world of the European man takes place in the realm of the scientifically applied intellect and finds expression on the battlefield and in the state of his bank balance, is, in woman, a psychic conflict. 
	238 	What makes it so uncommonly difficult to discuss the prob- 
lem of the modern European woman is that we are necessarily writing about a minority. There is no "modern European woman" properly speaking. Or is the peasant's wife of today different from her forbears of a hundred years ago? There is, in fact, a large body of the population that only to a very limited extent lives in the present and participates in present-day problems. We speak of a "woman's problem," but how many women have problems? In proportion to the sum-total of European women only a dwindling minority really live in the Europe of 
2 In the thirty years since this essay was written the significance of the "East" has changed and has largely assumed the form of the "Russian Empire." This already reaches as far as central Germany, but it has lost nothing of its Asiatic character. [Author's footnote in 1959 pamphlet edition.-EDlToRS.] 
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WOMAN IN EUROPE 
today; and these are city dwellers and belong-to put it cautiously-to the more complicated of their kind. This must always be so, for it is only the few who clearly express the spirit of the present in any age. In the fourth and fifth centuries of our era there were only a very few Christians who in any way understood the spirit of Christianity, the rest were still practically pagan. The cultural process that is characteristic of an epoch operates most intensely in cities, for it needs large agglomerations of men to make civilization possible, and from these agglomerations culture gradually spreads to the smaller, backward groups. Thus we find the present only in the large centres, and there alone do we encounter the "European woman," the woman who expresses the social and spiritual aspect of contemporary Europe. The further we go from the influence of the great centres, the more we find ourselves receding into history. In the remote Alpine valleys we can meet people who have never seen a railway, and in Spain, which is also a part of Europe, we plunge to a dark medieval age lacking even an alphabet. The people of those regions, or of the corresponding social strata, do not live in our Europe but in the Europe of 1400, and their problems are those of the bygone age in which they dwell. I have analysed such people, and have found myself carried back into an ambience that was not wanting in historical romance. 
	239 	The "present" is a thin surface stratum that is laid down in 
the great centres of civilization. If it is very thin, as in Tsarist Russia, it has no meaning, as events have shown. But once it has attained a certain strength, we can speak of civilization and progress, and then problems arise that are characteristic of an epoch. In this sense Europe has a present, and there are women who live in it and suffer its problems. About these, and these only, are we entitled to speak. Those who are satisfied with a medieval life have no need of the present and its experiments. But the man of the present cannot-no matter what the reasonturn back again to the past without suffering an essential loss. Often this turning back is altogether impossible, even if he were prepared to make the sacrifice. The man of the present must work for the future and leave others to conserve the past. He is therefore not only a builder but also a destroyer. He and his world have both become questionable and ambiguous. The 
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ways that the past shows him and the answers it gives to his questions are insufficient for the needs of the present. All the old, comfortable ways are blocked, new paths have been opened up, and new dangers have arisen of which the past knew nothing. It is proverbial that one never learns anything from history, and in regard to present-day problems it usually teaches us nothing. The new path has to be made through untrodden regions, without presuppositions and often, unfortunately, without piety. The only thing that cannot be improved upon is morality, for every alteration of traditional morality is by definition an immorality. This bon mot has an edge to it, against which many an innovator has barked his shins. 
	24° 	All the problems of the present form a tangled knot, and it 
is hardly possible to single out one particular problem and treat it independently of the others. Thus there is no problem of "woman in Europe" without man and his world. If she is married, she usually has to depend economically on her husband; if she is unmarried and earning a living, she is working in some profession designed by a man. Unless she is prepared to sacrifice her whole erotic life, she again stands in some essential relationship to man. In numerous ways woman is indissolubly bound up with man's world and is therefore just as exposed as he is to all the shocks of his world. The war, for instance, has affected woman just as profoundly as it has man, and she has to adapt to its consequences as he must. What the upheavals of the last twenty or thirty years mean for man's world is apparent to everyone; we can read about it every day in the newspapers. But what it means for woman is not so evident. Neither politically, nor economically, nor spiritually is she a factor of visible importance. If she were, she would loom more largely in man's field of vision and would have to be considered a rival. Sometimes she is seen in this role, but only as a man, so to speak, who is accidentally a woman. But since as a rule her place is on man's intimate side, the side of him that merely feels and has no eyes and does not want to see, woman appears as an impenetrable mask behind which everything possible and impossible can be conjectured-and actually seen!-without his getting anywhere near the mark. The elementary fact that a person always thinks another's psychology is identical with his own effectively prevents a correct understanding of feminine psychology. This is 
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abetted by woman's own unconsciousness and passivity, useful though these may be from the biological point of view: she allows herself to be convinced by the man's projected feelings. Of course this is a general human characteristic, but in woman it is given a particularly dangerous twist, because in this respect she is not naIve and it is only too often her intention to let herself be convinced by them. It fits in with her nature to keep her ego and her will in the background, so as not to hinder the man in any way, and to invite him to realize his intentions with regard to her person. This is a sexual pattern, but it has farreaching ramifications in the feminine psyche. By maintaining a passive attitude with an ulterior purpose, she helps the man to realize his ends and in that way holds him. At the same time she is caught in her own toils, for whoever digs a pit for others falls into it himself. 
	241 	I admit that this is a rather unkind description of a process 
which might well be sung in more lyrical strains. But all natural things have two sides, and when something has to be made conscious we must see the shadow side as well as the light. 
	242 	When we observe the way in which women, since the second 
half of the nineteenth century, have begun to take up masculine professions, to become active in politics, to sit on committees, etc., we can see that woman is in the process of breaking with the purely feminine sexual pattern of unconsciousness and passivity, and has made a concession to masculine psychology by establishing herself as a visible member of society. She no longer hides behind the mask of Mrs. So-and-so, with the obliging intention of having all her wishes fulfilled by the man, or to make him pay for it if things do not go as she wishes. 
	243 	This step towards social independence is a necessary response 
to economic and other factors, but in itself it is only a symptom and not the thing about which we are most concerned. Certainly the courage and capacity for self-sacrifice of such women is admirable, and only the blind could fail to see the good that has Come out of all these efforts. But no one can get round the fact that by taking up a masculine profession, studying and working like a man, woman is doing something not wholly in accord with, if not directly injurious to, her feminine nature. She is doing something that would scarcely be possible for a man to do, unless he were a Chinese. Could he, for instance, be 
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a nursemaid or run a kindergarten? When I speak of injury, I do not mean merely physiological injury but above all psychic injury. It is a woman's outstanding characteristic that she can do anything for the love of a man. But those women who can achieve something important for the love of a thing are most exceptional, because this does not really agree with their nature. Love for a thing is a man's prerogative. But since masculine and feminine elements are united in our human nature, a man can live in the feminine part of himself, and a woman in her masculine part. N one the less the feminine element in man is only something in the background, as is the masculine element in woman. If one lives out the opposite sex in oneself one is living in one's own background, and one's real individuality suffers. A man should live as a man and a woman as a woman. The contrasexual element in either sex is always dangerously close to the unconscious. It is even typical that the effects of the unconscious upon the conscious mind have a contrasexual character. For instance the soul (anima, psyche) has a feminine character which compensates the masculine consciousness. (Mystical instruction among primitives is exclusively a masculine concern, corresponding to the function of the Catholic priest.) 
	244 	The immediate presence of the unconscious exerts a mag- 
netic influence on the conscious processes. This explains the fear or even horror we have of the unconscious. It is a purposeful defence-reaction of the conscious mind. The contrasexual element has a mysterious charm tinged with fear, perhaps even with disgust. For this reason its charm is particularly attractive and fascinating, even when it comes to us not directly from outside, in the guise of a woman, but from within, as a psychic influence-for instance in the form of a temptation to abandon oneself to a mood or an affect. This example is not characteristic of women, for a woman's moods and emotions do not come to her directly from the unconscious but are peculiar to her feminine nature. They are therefore never naIve, but are mixed with an unacknowledged purpose. What comes to a woman from the unconscious is a sort of oPinion) which spoils her mood only secondarily. These opinions lay claim to being absolute truths, and they prove to be the more fixed and incorrigible the less they are subjected to conscious criticism. Like the moods and feelings of a man, they are somewhat hazy and often 
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totally unconscious, and are seldom recognized for what they are. They are in fact collective, having the character of the opposite sex, as though a man-the father, for example-had thought of them. 
	245 	Thus it can happen-indeed it is almost the rule-that the 
mind of a woman who takes up a masculine profession is influenced by her unconscious masculinity in a way not noticeable to herself but quite obvious to everybody in her environment. She develops a kind of rigid intellectuality based on so-called principles, and backs them up with a whole host of arguments which always just miss the mark in the most irritating way, and always inject a little something into the problem that is not really there. Unconscious assumptions or opinions are the worst enemy of woman; they can even grow into a positively demonic passion that exasperates and disgusts men, and does the woman herself the greatest injury by gradually smothering the charm and meaning of her femininity and driving it into the background. Such a development naturally ends in profound psychological disunion, in short, in a neurosis. 
	246 	Naturally, things need not go to this length, but long before 
this point is reached the mental masculinization of the woman has unwelcome results. She may perhaps be a good comrade to a man without having any access to his feelings. The reason is that her animus (that is, her masculine rationalism, assuredly not true reasonableness!) has stopped up the approaches to her own feeling. She may even become frigid, as a defence against the masculine type of sexuality that corresponds to her masculine type of mind. Or, if the defence-reaction is not successful, she develops, instead of the receptive sexuality of woman, an aggressive, urgent form of sexuality that is more characteristic of a man. This reaction is likewise a purposeful phenomenon, intended to throw a bridge across by main force to the slowly vanishing man. A third possibility, especially favoured in AngloSaxon countries, is optional homosexuality in the masculine role. 
	247 	It may therefore be said that, whenever the attraction of 
the animus becomes noticeable, there is a quite special need for the woman to have an intimate relationship with the other sex. Many women in this situation are fully aware of this necessity and proceed-faute de mieux-to stir up another of those 
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present-day problems that is no less painful, namely, the mar~ riage problem. 
Traditionally, man is regarded as the marriage breaker. This legend comes from times long past, when men still had leisure to pursue all sorts of pastimes. But today life makes so many demands on men that the noble hidalgo, Don Juan, is to be seen nowhere save in the theatre. More than ever man loves his comfort, for ours is an age of neurasthenia, impotence, and easy chairs. There is no energy left for window-climbing and duels. If anything is to happen in the way of adultery it must not be too difficult. In no respect must it cost too much, hence the adventure can only be of a transitory kind. The man of today is thoroughly scared of jeopardizing marriage as an institution. He is a firm believer in doing things on the quiet, and therefore supports prostitution. I would wager that in the Middle Ages, with its notorious bagnios and unrestricted prostitution, adultery was relatively more frequent than it is today. In this respect marriage should be safer now than it ever was. But in reality it is beginning to be discussed. It is a bad sign when doctors begin writing books of advice on how to achieve the "perfect marriage." Healthy people need no doctors. Marriage today has indeed become rather precarious. In America about a quarter of the marriages end in divorce. And the remarkable thing is that this time the scapegoat is not the man but the woman. She is the one who doubts and feels uncertain. It is not surprising that this is so, fbr in post-war Europe there is such an alarming surplus of unmarried women that it would be inconceivable if there were no reaction from that quarter. Such a piling up of misery has inescapable consequences. It is no longer a question of a few dozen voluntary or involuntary old maids here and there, but of millions. Our legislation and our social morality give no answer to this question. Or can the Church provide a satisfactory answer? Should we build gigantic nunneries to accommodate all these women? Or should tolerated prostitution be increased? Obviously this is impossible, since we are dealing neither with saints nor sinners but with ordinary women who cannot register their spiritual requirements with the police. They are decent women who want to marry, and if this is not possible, well-the next best thing. When it comes to the question of love, laws and institutions and ideals mean less to 
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25° 
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woman than ever before. If things cannot go straight they will have to go crooked. 
At the beginning of our era, three-fifths of the population of 
Italy consisted of slaves-human chattels without rights. Every Roman was surrounded by slaves. The slave and his psychology flooded ancient Italy, and every Roman became inwardly a slave. Living constantly in the atmosphere of slaves, he became infected with their psychology. No one can shield himself from this unconscious influence. Even today the European, however highly developed, cannot live with impunity among the N egroes in Africa; their psychology gets into him unnoticed and unconsciously he becomes a Negro. There is no fighting against it. In Africa there is a well-known technical expression for this: "going black." It is no mere snobbery that the English should consider anyone born in the colonies, even though the best blood may run in his veins, "slightly inferior." There are facts to support this view. 
A direct result of slave influence was the strange melancholy and longing for deliverance that pervaded imperial Rome and found striking expression in Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. The explosive spread of Christianity, a religion which might be said to have risen from the sewers of Rome-Nietzsche called it a "slave insurrection in morals" -was a sudden reaction that set the soul of the lowest slave on a par with that of the divine Caesar. Similar though perhaps less momentous processes of psychological compensation have repeatedly occurred in the history of the world. "Whenever some social or psychological monstrosity is created, a compensation comes along in defiance of all legislation and all expectation. 
Something similar is happening to women in present-day Europe. Too much that is inadmissible, that has not been lived, is accumulating in the unconscious, and this is bound to have an effect. Secretaries, typists, shop-girls, all are agents of this process, and through a million subterranean channels creeps the influence that is undermining marriage. For the desire of all these women is not to have sexual adventures-only the stupid could believe that-but to get married. The possessors of that bliss must be ousted, not as a rule by naked force, but by that silent, obstinate desire which, as we know, has magical effects, like the fixed stare of a snake. This was ever the way of women. 
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253 
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What is the attitude of the married woman to all this? She clings to the old idea that man is the scapegoat, that he switches from one love-affair to another a~ he pleases, and so on. On the strength of these outworn conceptions she can wrap herself still more deeply in her jealousies. But all this is only on the surface. N either the pride of the Roman patrician nor the thick walls of the imperial palace availed to keep out the slave infection. In the same way, no woman can escape the secret, compelling atmosphere with which her own sister, perhaps, is enveloping her, the stifling atmosphere of a life that has never been lived. Unlived life is a destructive, irresistible force that works softly but inexorably. The result is that the married woman begins to have doubts about marriage. The unmarried believe in it because they want it. Equally, the man believes in marriage because of his love of comfort and a sentimental belief in institutions, which for him always tend to become objects of feeling. 
Since women have to be down to earth in matters of feeling, a certain fact should not escape our notice. This is the possibility of contraceptive measures. Children are one of the main reasons for maintaining a responsible attitude towards marriage. If this reason disappears, then the things that are "not done" happen easily enough. This applies primarily to unmarried women, who thus have an opportunity to contract an "approximate" marriage. But it is a consideration that counts also with all those married women who, as I have shown in my essay "Marriage as a Psychological Relationship," 3 are the "containers." By this I mean women whose demands as individuals are not satisfied, or not wholly satisfied, by their husbands. Finally, contraception is a fact of enormous importance to women in general, because it does away with the constant fear of pregnancy and the care of an ever-increasing number of children. This deliverance from bondage to nature brings a release of psychic energies that inevitably seek an outlet. Whenever a sum of energy finds no congenial goal it causes a disturbance of the psychic equilibrium. Lacking a conscious goal, it reinforces the unconscious and gives rise to uncertainty and doubt. 
Another factor of great importance is the more or less open 
3 In The Development of Personality. 
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discussion of the sexual problem. This territory, once so obscure, has now become a focus of scientific and other interests. Things can be heard and said in society that formerly would have been quite impossible. Large numbers of people have learned to think more freely and honestly, and have come to realize how important these matters are. The discussion of the sexual problem is, however, only a somewhat crude prelude to a far deeper question, and that is the question of the psychological relationship between the sexes. In comparison with this the other pales into insignificance, and with it we enter the real domain of woman. 
	255 	Woman's psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, 
the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos. The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest. In the eyes of the ordinary man, love in its true sense coincides with the institution of marriage, and outside marriage there is only adultery or "platonic" friendship. For woman, marriage is not an institution at all but a human love-relationship-at least that is what she would like to believe. (Since her Eros is not naIve but is mixed with other, unavowed motives-marriage as a ladder to social position, etc.-the principle cannot be applied in any absolute sense.) Marriage means to her an exclusive relationship. She can endure its exclusiveness all the more easily, without dying of ennui, inasmuch as she has children or near relatives with whom she has a no less intimate relationship than with her husband. The fact that she has no sexual relationship with these others means nothing, for the sexual relationship is of far less importance to her than the psychic relationship. It is enough that she and her husband both believe their relationship to be unique and exclusive. If he happens to be the "container" he feels suffocated by this exclusiveness, especially if he fails to notice that the exclusiveness of his wife is nothing but a pious fraud. In reality she is distributed among the children and among as many members of the family as possible, thus maintaining any number of intimate relationships. If her husband had anything like as many relationships with other people she w~uld be mad with jealousy. Most men, though, are erotically bllllded-they commit the unpardonable mistake of confusing 
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Eros with sex. A man thinks he possesses a woman if he has her sexually. He never possesses her less, for to a woman the Erosrelationship is the real and decisive one. For her, marriage is a relationship with sex thrown in as an accompaniment. Since sex is a formidable thing on account of its consequences, it is useful to have it in a safe place. But when it is less of a danger it also becomes less relevant, and then the question of relationship moves into the foreground. 
	256 	It is just here that the woman runs into great difficulties with 
her husband, for the question of relationship borders on a region that for him is dark and painful. He can face this question only when the woman carries the burden of suffering, that is, when he is the "contained" -in other words, when she can imagine herself having a relationship with another man, and as a consequence suffering disunion within herself. Then it is she who has the painful problem, and he is not obliged to see his own, which is a great relief to him. In this situation he is not unlike a thief who, quite undeservedly, finds himself in the enviable position of having been forestalled by another thief who has been caught by the police. Suddenly he becomes an honourable, impartial onlooker. In any other situation a man always finds the discussion of personal relations painful and boring, just as his wife would find it boring if he examined her on the Critique at Pure Reason. For him, Eros is a shadowland which entangles him in his feminine unconscious, in something "psychic," while for woman Logos is a deadly boring kind of sophistry if she is not actually repelled and frightened by it. 
	257 	Just as woman began, towards the end of the nineteenth cen- 
tury, to make a concession to masculinity by taking her place as an independent factor in the social world, so man has made, somewhat hesitantly, a concession to femininity by creating a new psychology of complex phenomena, inaugurated by the sexual psychology of Freud. What this psychology owes to the direct influence of women-psychiatrists' consulting-rooms are packed with women-is a theme that would fill a large volume. I am speaking here not only of analytical psychology but of the beginnings of psychopathology in general. By far the greatest number of "classic" cases, beginning with the "Seeress of Prevorst," were women, who, perhaps unconsciously, took enor- 
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--------------------------------------- 
mous trouble to put their own psychology on view in the most dramatic fashion, and thus demonstrated to the world the whole question of psychic relationship. Women like Frau Hauffe and Helene Smith 4 and Miss Beauchamp have assured for themselves a kind of immortality, rather like those worthy folk whose miraculous cures brought fame and prosperity to the wonderworking spot. 
	258 	An astonishingly high percentage of this material comes from 
women. This is not as remarkable as it might seem, for women are far more "psychological" than men. A man is usually satisfied with "logic" alone. Everything "psychic," "unconscious" ete., is repugnant to him; he considers it vague, nebulous, and morbid. He is interested in things, in facts, and not in the feelings and fantasies that cluster round them or have nothing to do with them. To a woman it is generally more important to know how a man feels about a thing than to know the thing itself. All those things which are merely futile impedimenta to a man are important to her. So it is naturally woman who is the most direct exponent of psychology and gives it its richest content. Very many things can be perceived in her with the utmost distinctness which in a man are mere shadowy processes in the background, whose very existence he is unwilling to admit. But, unlike the objective discussion and verification of facts, a human relationship leads into the world of the psyche, into that intermediate realm between sense and spirit, which contains something of both and yet forfeits nothing of its own unique character. 
	259 	Into this territory a man must venture if he wishes to meet 
woman half way. Circumstances have forced her to acquire a number of masculine traits, so that she shall not remain caught in an antiquated, purely instinctual femininity, lost and alone in the world of men. So, too, man will be forced to develop his feminine side, to open his eyes to the psyche and to Eros. It is a task he cannot avoid, unless he prefers to go trailing after Woman in a hopelessly boyish fashion, worshipping from afar but always in danger of being stowed away in her pocket. 
	260 	For those in love with masculinity or femininity per se the 
traditional medieval marriage is enough-and a thoroughly 
4 [See Psychiatric Studies, index, s. VV.-EDITORS.] 
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praiseworthy, well-tried, useful institution it is. But the man of today finds it extremely difficult to return to it, and for many the way back is simply impossible, because this sort of marriage can exist only by shutting out all contemporary problems. Doubtless there were many Romans who could shut their eyes to the slave problem and to Christianity, and spend their days in a more or less pleasant unconsciousness. They could do this because they had no relation to the present, only to the past. All those for whom marriage contains no problem are not living in the present, and who shall say they are not blessed! Modern man finds marriage only too problematical. I recently heard a German scholar exclaim before an audience of several hundred people: "Our marriages are sham marriages!" I admired his courage and sincerity. Usually we express ourselves less directly, cautiously offering good advice as to what might be done-in order not to tarnish the ideal. But for the modern woman-let men take note of this-the medieval marriage is an ideal no longer. True, she keeps her doubts to herself, and hides her rebelliousness; one woman because she is married and finds it highly inconvenient if the door of the safe is not hermetically sealed, another because she is unmarried and too virtuous to look her own tendencies squarely in the face. Nevertheless, their newly-won masculinity makes it impossible for either of them to believe in marriage in its traditional form ("He shall be thy master"). Masculinity means knowing what one wants and doing what is necessary to achieve it. Once this lesson has been learned it is so obvious that it can never again be forgotten without tremendous psychic loss. The independence and critical judgment she acquires through this knowledge are positive values and are felt as such by the woman. She can never part with them again. The same is true of the man who, with great efforts, wins that needful feminine insight into his own psyche, often at the cost of much suffering. He will never let it go again, because he is thoroughly aware of the importance of what he has won. 
	261 	At first glance it might be thought that such a man and 
woman would be especially likely to make the "perfect marriage." In reality this is not so; on the contrary, a conflict begins immediately. What the woman, in her new-found self-assurance, wants to do is not at all pleasing to the man, while the feelings 
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he has discovered in himself are far from agreeable to the woman. What both have discovered in themselves is not a virtue or anything of intrinsic value; it is something comparatively inferior, and it might justly be condemned if it were understood as the outcome of a personal choice or mood. And that, indeed, is what usually happens. The masculinity of the woman and the femininity of the man are inferior, and it is regrettable that the full value of their personalities should be contaminated by something that is less valuable. On the other hand, the shadow belongs to the wholeness of the personality: the strong man must somewhere be weak, somewhere the clever man must be stupid, otherwise he is too good to be true and falls back on pose and bluff. Is it not an old truth that woman loves the weaknesses of the strong man more than his strength, and the stupidity of the clever man more than his cleverness? Her love wants the whole man-not mere masculinity as such but also its negation. The love of woman is not sentiment, as is a man's, but a will that is at times terrifyingly unsentimental and can even force her to self-sacrifice. A man who is loved in this way cannot escape his inferior side, for he can only respond to the reality of her love with his own reality. And this reality is no fair semblance, but a faithful reflection of that eternal human nature which links together all humanity, a reflection of the heights and depths of human life which are common to us all. In this reality we are no longer differentiated persons (Persona means a mask), but are conscious of our common human bonds. Here I strip off the distinctiveness of my own personality, social or otherwise, and reach down to the problems of the present day, problems which do not arise out of myself-or so at least I like to imagine. Here I can no longer deny them; I feel and know myself to be one of many, and what moves the many moves me. In our strength we are independent and isolated, and are masters of our own fate; in our weakness we are dependent and bound, and become unwilling instruments of fate, for here it is not the individual will that counts but the will of the species. 
262. What the two sexes have won through mutual assimilation IS an inferiority when viewed from the two-dimensional, personal world of appearances, and an immoral pretension if regarded as a personal claim. But in its truest meaning for life 
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and society it is an overcoming of personal isolation and selfish reserve in order to take an active part in the solution of presentday problems. If, therefore, the woman of today consciously or unconsciously loosens the cohesion of the marriage bond by her spiritual or economic independence, this is not the expression of her personal will, but of the will of the species, which makes her, the individual woman, its tool. 
	263 	The institution of marriage is such a valuable thing, both 
socially and morally-religious people even regard it as a sacrament-that it is quite understandable that any weakening of it should be felt as undesirable, indeed scandalous. Human imperfection is always a discord in the harmony of our ideals. Unfortunately, no one lives in the world as we desire it, but in the world of actuality where good and evil clash and destroy one another, where no creating or building can be done without dirtying one's hands. Whenever things get really bad, there is always some one to assure us amid great applause that nothing has happened and everything is in order. I repeat, anyone who lives and thinks like this is not living in the present. If we examine any marriage with a really critical eye, we shall findunless acute pressure of circumstances has completely extinguished all signs of "psychological" trouble-symptoms of its weakening and clandestine disruption, "marriage problems" ranging from unbearable moods to neurosis and adultery. Unfortunately, those who can still bear to remain unconscious cannot be imitated; their example is not infectious enough to induce more conscious people to descend again to the level of mere unconSCIOusness. 
	264 	As to all those-and they are many-who are not obliged to 
live in the present, it is extremely important that they should believe in the ideal of marriage and hold fast to it. Nothing is gained if a valuable ideal is merely destroyed and not replaced by something better. Therefore even the women hesitate, whether they are married or not, to go over openly to the side of rebellion. But at least they do not follow the lead of that well-known authoress who, after trying out all sorts of experiments, ended up in the secure haven of matrimony, whereupon marriage became the best solution, and all those who did not achieve it could brood on their mistakes and end their days in pious renunciation. For the modern woman marriage is not as 
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easy as that. Her husband would have something to say on this score. 
	265 	So long as there are legalistic clauses that lay down exactly 
what adultery is, women will have to remain with their doubts. But do our legislators really know what "adultery" is? Is their definition of it the final embodiment of the truth? From the psychological standpoint, the only one that counts for a woman, it is a wretched piece of bungling, like everything else contrived by men for the purpose of codifying love. For a woman, love has nothing to do with "marital misconduct," "extramarital intercourse," "deception of the husband," or any of the less savoury formulas invented by the erotically blind masculine intellect and echoed by the self-opinionated demon in woman. Nobody but the absolute believer in the inviolability of traditional marriage could perpetrate such breaches of good taste, just as only the believer in God can really blaspheme. Whoever doubts marriage in the first place cannot infringe against it; for him the legal definition is invalid because, like St. Paul, he feels himself beyond the law, on the higher plane of love. But because the believers in the law so frequently trespass against their own laws, whether from stupidity, temptation, or mere viciousness, the modern woman begins to wonder whether she too may not belong to the same category. From the traditional standpoint she does, and she has to realize this in order to smash the idol of her own respectability. To be "respectable" means, as the word tells us, to allow oneself to be seen; a respectable person is one who comes up to public expectations, who wears an ideal mask-in short, is a fraud. "Good form" is not a fraud, but when respectability represses the psyche, the God-given essence of man, then one becomes what Christ called a whited sepulchre. 
	266 	The modern woman has become conscious of the undeniable 
fact that only in the state of love can she attain the highest and best of which she is capable, and this knowledge drives her to the other realization that love is beyond the law. Her respectability revolts against this, and one is inclined to identify this reaction with public opinion. That would be the lesser evil; What is worse is that public opinion is in her blood. It comes to her like a voice from within, a sort of conscience, and this is the power that holds her in check. She is unaware that love, her most personal, most prized possession, could bring her into 
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conflict with history. Such a thing would seem to her most unexpected and absurd. But who, if it comes to that, has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood? 
	267 	So long as a woman lives the life of the past she can never 
come into conflict with history. But no sooner does she begin to deviate, however slightly, from a cultural trend that has dominated the past than she encounters the full weight of historical inertia, and this unexpected shock may injure her, perhaps fatally. Her hesitation and her doubt are understandable enough, for, if she submits to the law of love, she finds that she is not only in a highly disagreeable and dubious situation, where every kind of lewdness and depravity abounds, but actually caught between two universal forces-historical inertia and the divine urge to create. 
	268 	Who, then, will blame her for hesitating? Do not most men 
prefer to rest on their laurels rather than get into a hopeless conflict as to whether they shall or shall not make history? In the end it boils down to this: is one prepared to break with tradition, to be "unhistorical" in order to make history, or not? No one can make history who is not willing to risk everything for it, to carry the experiment with his own life through to the bitter end, and to declare that his life is not a continuation of the past, but a new beginning. Mere continuation can be left to the animals, but inauguration is the prerogative of man, the one thing he can boast of that lifts him above the beasts. 
	269 	There is no doubt that the woman of today is deeply con- 
cerned with this problem. She gives expression to one of the cultural tendencies of our time: the urge to live a completer life, a longing for meaning and fulfilment, a growing disgust with senseless one-sidedness, with unconscious instinctuality and blind contingency. The psyche of the modern European has not forgotten the lesson of the last war, however much it has been banished from his consciousness. Women are increasingly aware that love alone can give them full stature, just as men are beginning to divine that only the spirit can give life its highest meaning. Both seek a psychic relationship, because love needs the spirit, and the spirit love, for its completion. 
	270 	Woman nowadays feels that there is no real security in mar- 
riage, for what does her husband's faithfulness mean when she 
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knows that his feelings and thoughts are running after others and that he is merely too calculating or too cowardly to follow them? What does her own faithfulness mean when she knows that she is simply using it to exploit her legal right of possession, and warping her own soul? She has intimations of a higher fidelity to the spirit and to a love beyond human weakness and imperfection. Perhaps she will yet discover that what seems like weakness and imperfection, a painful disturbance, or an alarming deviation, must be interpreted in accordance with its dual nature. These are steps that lead down to the lowest human level and finally end in the morass of unconsciousness if the individual lets go of his personal distinctiveness. But if he can hold on to it, he will experience for the first time the meaning of selfhood, provided that he can simultaneously descend below himself into the undifferentiated mass of humanity. What else can free him from the inner isolation of his personal differentiation? And how else can he establish a psychic bridge to the rest of mankind? The man who stands on high and distributes his goods to the poor is separated from mankind by the height of his own virtue, and the more he forgets himself and sacrifices himself for others the more he is inwardly estranged from them. 
The word "human" sounds very beautiful, but properly understood it does not mean anything particularly beautiful, or virtuous, or intelligent, but just a low average. This is the step which Zarathustra could not take, the step to the "Ugliest Man," who is real man. Our resistance to taking this step, and our fear of it, show how great is the attraction and seductive power of our own depths. To cut oneself off from them is no solution; it is a mere sham, an essential misunderstanding of their meaning and value. For where is a height without depth, and how can there be light that throws no shadow? There is no good that is not opposed by evil. "No man can be redeemed ~rom a sin he has not committed," says Carpocrates; a deep saylIlg for all who wish to understand, and a golden opportunity for all those who prefer to draw false conclusions. What is down below is not just an excuse for more pleasure, but something We fear because it demands to play its part in the life of the more conscious and more complete man. 
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	272 	What I am saying here is not for the young-it is precisely 
what they ought not to know-but for the more mature man whose consciousness has been widened by experience of life. No man can begin with the present; he must slowly grow into it, for there would be no present but for the past. A young person has not yet acquired a past, therefore he has no present either. He does not create culture, he merely exists. It is the privilege and the task of maturer people, who have passed the meridian of life, to create culture. 
	273 	The European psyche has been torn to shreds by the hellish 
barbarism of the war. While man turns his hand to repairing the outer damage, woman-unconsciously as ever-sets about healing the inner wounds, and for this she needs, as her most important instrument, a psychic relationship. But nothing hampers this more than the exclusiveness of the medieval marriage, for it makes relationship altogether superfluous. Relationship is possible only if there is a psychic distance between people, in the same way that morality presupposes freedom. For this reason the unconscious tendency of woman aims at loosening the marriage structure, but not at the destruction of marriage and the family. That would be not only immoral but a thoroughly pathological misuse of her powers. 
	274 	It would take volumes of case-material to describe the in- 
numerable ways in which this goal is achieved. It is the way of woman, as of nature, to work indirectly, without naming her goal. To anything unsatisfactory she reacts purposively, with moods, outbursts of affects, opinions, and actions that all have the same end in view, and their apparent senselessness, virulence, and cold-blooded ruthlessness are infinitely distressing to the man who is blind to Eros. 
	275 	The indirect method of woman is dangerous, for it can hope- 
lessly compromise her aim. That is why she longs for greater consciousness, which would enable her to name her goal and give it meaning, and thus escape the blind dynamism of nature. In any other age it would have been the prevailing religion that showed her where her ultimate goal lay; but today religion leads back to the Middle Ages, back to that soul-destroying unrelatedness from which came all the fearful barbarities of war. Too much soul is reserved for God, too little for man. But God 
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himself cannot flourish if man's soul is starved. The feminine psyche responds to this hunger, for it is the function of Eros to unite what Logos has sundered. The woman of today is faced with a tremendous cultural task-perhaps it will be the dawn of a new era. 
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THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN 1 
	276 	I have always found it uncommonly difficult to make the 
meaning of psychology intelligible to a wider public. This difficulty dates back to the time when I was a doctor in a mental hospital. Like every psychiatrist, I made the astonishing discovery that it is not we who hold competent opinions on mental health and sickness, but the public, who always know much better than we do. They tell us that the patient does not really climb up the walls, that he knows where he is, that he recognizes his relatives, that he hasn't forgotten his name, that, consequently, he is not really ill but only a little depressed or a little excited, and that the psychiatrist's notion that the man is suffering from such and such an illness is entirely incorrect. 
	277 	This very common experience introduces us to the field of 
psychology proper, where things are even worse. Everyone thinks that psychology is what he himself knows best-psychology is always his psychology, which he alone knows, and at the time his psychology is everybody else's psychology. Instinctively he supposes that his own psychic constitution is the general one, and that everyone is essentially like everyone else, that is to say like himself. Husbands suppose this of their wives, wives suppose it of their husbands, parents of their children, and children of their parents. It is as though everyone had the most direct access to what is going on inside him, was intimately acquainted with it and competent to pass an opinion on it; as though his own psyche were a kind of master-psyche which suited all and sundry, and entitled him to suppose that his own situation was the general rule. People are profoundly aston- 
1 [Originally published as "Ueber Psychologie," Neue Schweizer Rundschau (Zurich), I (1933), no. 1,21-28, and no. 2, 98-106. Revised and expanded as "Die Bedeutung der Psychologie fUr die Gegenwart," Wil'klichkeit der See le (Zurich, 1934), pp. 32-67·-EoITORS.] 
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THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN 
ished, or even horrified, when this rule quite obviously does not fit-when they discover that another person really is different from themselves. Generally speaking, they do not feel these psychic differences as in any way curious, let alone attractive, but as disagreeable failings that are hard to bear, or as unendurable faults that have to be condemned. The painfully obvious difference seems like a contravention of the natural order, like a shocking mistake that must be remedied as speedily as possible, or a misdemeanour that calls for condign punishment. 
	278 	As you know, there actually are widely accepted psycholog- 
ical theories which start from the assumption that the human psyche is the same everywhere and can therefore be explained in the same way regardless of circumstances. The appalling monotony presupposed by these theories, however, is contradicted by the fact that individual psychic differences do exist and are capable of almost infinite variation. In addition to this, one of the theories explains the world of psychic phenomena mainly in terms of the sexual instinct, and the other in terms of the power drive. The result of this inconsistency is that both theories cling all the more rigidly to their principles and show clear tendencies to set themselves up as the one and only source of salvation. Each denies the other, and one asks oneself in vain which of them is right. But although the adherents of both views try their utmost to ignore each other's existence, these tactics do nothing to resolve the contradiction. And yet the answer to the riddle is absurdly simple. It amounts to this: both of them are right, in so far as each theory describes a psychology which resembles that of its adherents. We can well say with Goethe that it "matches the spirit that it comprehends." 2 
	279 	Turning back to our theme, let us consider more closely the 
well-nigh ineradicable prejudice of simple-minded persons that everybody is exactly the same as them. Although it is true in general that psychic differences are admitted as a theoretical possibility, in practice one always forgets that the other person is different from oneself, that he thinks differently, feels differently, sees differently, and wants quite different things. Even scientific theories, as we have seen, start from the assumption that the shoe pinches everyone in the same place. Quite apart 
2 Faust, Part One, trans. by Wayne, p. 48. 
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from this entertaining domestic quarrel among psychologists, there are other egalitarian assumptions of a social and political nature which are much more serious, because they forget the existence of the individual psyche altogether. 
	280 	Instead of vexing myself to no purpose over such narrow- 
minded and short-sighted views, I began to wonder why they should exist at all, and I tried to discover what the reasons might be. This inquiry led me to study the psychology of primitive peoples. I had long been struck by the fact that there is a certain naivete and childlikeness about those who are most prejudiced in favour of psychic uniformity. In primitive society one does in fact find that this assumption extends not only to human beings, but to all the objects of nature, the animals, plants, rivers, mountains, and so on. They all have something of man's psychology in them, even trees and stones can speak. And just as there are certain human beings who obviously do not conform to the general rule and are honoured as magicians, witches, chiefs, and medicine-men, so among the animals there are doctor-coyotes, doctor-birds, werewolves, and the like, whose honorific title is conferred whenever an animal behaves in any way out of the ordinary and upsets the tacit assumption of uniformity. This prejudice is evidently a vestige-but a very potent one-of a primitive frame of mind which is based essentially on an insufficiently differentiated consciousness. Individual consciousness or ego-consciousness is a late product of man's development. Its primitive form is a mere group-consciousness, and among the primitive societies that still exist today this is often so poorly developed that many tribes do not even give themselves a name that would distinguish them from other tribes. For instance, in East Africa I came across a tribe who simply called themselves "the people who are there." This primitive group-consciousness goes on living in our own familyconsciousness, and we often find that members of a family can give no account of themselves other than that they are called by such and such a name-which seems entirely satisfactory to the person concerned. 
	281 	But a group-consciousness in which individuals are inter- 
changeable is still not the lowest level of consciousness, for it already shows traces of differentiation. At the lowest and most primitive level we would find a sort of generalized or cosmic 
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THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN consciousness, with complete unconsciousness of the subject. On this level there are only events, but no acting persons. 
	282 	Our assumption that what pleases me must necessarily please 
everybody else is therefore an obvious relic from that primordial night of consciousness where there was no perceptible difference between I and You, and where everyone thought, felt, and acted in the same way. But if anything happened which showed that somebody was not of like mind, there was an immediate disturbance. Nothing arouses so much panic among primitives as something out of the ordinary; it is at once suspected of being dangerous and hostile. This primitive reaction survives in us too: how prompt we are to take offence when somebody does not share our convictions! We are insulted when somebody finds our idea of beauty detestable. We still persecute anyone who thinks differently from ourselves, we still try to force our opinions on others, to convert poor heathens in order to save them from the hell that indubitably lies in wait for them, and we are all abysmally afraid of standing alone with our beliefs. 
	283 	The psychic equality of all men is an unspoken assumption 
deriving from the individual's original unconsciousness of himself. In that far-off world there was no individual consciousness, but only a collective psyche from which gradually an individual consciousness emerged on the higher levels of development. The indispensable condition for the existence of an individual consciousness is its difference from other consciousnesses. One could liken the process of conscious development to a rocket that rises up from the darkness and dissolves in a shower of multicoloured stars. 
	284 	Psychology as an empirical science is of very recent origin. 
It is not yet fifty years old, and is therefore still in its swaddlingclothes. The premise of equality prevented it from being born earlier. From this we can see how young any kind of differentiated consciousness is. It has just crept out of its long sleep, slowly and clumsily taking cognizance of its own existence. It would be a delusion to imagine that we have attained anyth~ng like a high level of consciousness. Our present-day conSCIOusness is a mere child that is just beginning to say "I." 
	285 	It was one of the greatest experiences of my life to discover 
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CIVILIZATION IN TRANSITION 
equality of the psyche were not a primordial fact, the origin and matrix of all individual psyches, it would be a gigantic illusion. But despite our individual consciousness it unquestionably continues to exist as the collective unconscious-the sea upon which the ego rides like a ship. For this reason also, nothing of the primordial world of the psyche has ever been lost. Just as the sea stretches its broad tongues between the conti~ nents and laps them round like islands, so our original unconsciousness presses round our individual consciousness. In the catastrophe of mental disease the storm-tide of the sea surges over the island and swallows it back into the depths. In neurotic disturbances there is at least a bursting of dikes, and the fruitful lowlands are laid waste by flood. Neurotics are all shoredwellers-they are the most exposed to the dangers of the sea. So-called normal people live inland, on higher, drier ground, near placid lakes and streams. No flood however high reaches them, and the circumambient sea is so far away that they even deny its existence. Indeed, a person can be so identified with his ego that he loses the common bond of humanity and cuts himself off from all others. As nobody wants to be entirely like everybody else, this is quite a common occurrence. For primitive egoism, however, the standing rule is that it is never "I" who must change, but always the other fellow. 
	286 	Individual consciousness is surrounded by the treacherous 
sea of the unconscious. This consciousness of ours has the appearance of being stable and reliable, but in reality it is a fragile thing and rests on very insecure foundations. Often no more than a strong emotion is needed to upset the sensitive balance of consciousness. Our turns of speech are an indication of this. We say that a person was "beside himself" with rage, he "forgot himself completely," one "couldn't recognize him," "the devil had got into him," ete. Something makes you "jump out of your skin," "drives you mad," so that you "no longer know what you are doing." All these familiar phrases show how easily our ego-consciousness is disrupted by affects. These disturbances do not show themselves only in acute form; often they are chronic and can bring about a lasting change of consciousness. As a result of some psychic upheaval whole tracts of our being can plunge back into the unconscious and vanish from the surface for years and decades. Permanent changes of 
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THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN 
character are not uncommon. We therefore say, quite correctly, that after some such experience a person was a "changed man." These things happen not only to people with a bad heredity or to neurotics, but to normal people as well. Disturbances caused by affects are known technically as phenomena of dissociation) and are indicative of a psychic split. In every psychic conflict we can discern a split of this kind, which may go so far as to threaten the shattered structure of consciousness with complete disintegration. 
	287 	But even the inland dwellers, the inhabitants of the normal 
world who forgot the sea, do not live on firm ground. The soil is so friable that at any moment the sea can rush in through continental fissures and maroon them. Primitive man knows this danger not only from the life of his tribe but from his own psychology. The most important of these "perils of the soul," as they are technically called, are loss of soul and possession. Both are phenomena of dissociation. In the first case, he will say that a soul has wandered away from him, and in the second, that a strange soul has taken up its abode in him, generally in some unpleasant form. This way of putting it may sound odd, but it describes exactly the symptoms which today we call phenomena of dissociation or schizoid states. They are not by any means purely pathological symptoms, for they are found just as much in normal people. They may take the form of fluctuations in the general feeling of well-being, irrational changes of mood, unpredictable affects, a sudden distaste for everything, psychic inertia, and so on. Even the schizoid phenomena that correspond to primitive possession can be observed in normal people. They, too, are not immune to the demon of passion; they, too, are liable to possession by an infatuation, a vice, or a onesided conviction; and these are all things that dig a deep grave between them and those they hold most dear, and create an aching split in their own psyche. 
	288 	Primitive man feels the splitting of the psyche as something 
unseemly and morbid, just as we do. Only, we call it a conflict, n<:rvousness, or a mental breakdown. Not for nothing did the BIble story place the unbroken harmony of plant, animal, man, and God, symbolized as Paradise, at the very beginning of all psych~c development, and declare that the first dawning of consclOusness-"Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil"- 
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was a fatal sin. To the naive mind it must indeed seem a sin to shatter the divine unity of consciousness that ruled the primal night. It was the Luciferian revolt of the individual against the One. It was a hostile act of disharmony against harmony, a separation from the fusion of all with all. Therefore God cursed the serpent and said: "I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heeL" 
	289 	And yet the attainment of consciousness was the most pre- 
cious fruit of the tree of knowledge, the magical weapon which gave man victory over the earth, and which we hope will give him a still greater victory over himself. 
	290 	The fact that individual consciousness means separation and 
opposition is something that man has experienced countless times in his long history. And just as for the individual a time of dissociation is a time for sickness, so it is in the life of nations. We can hardly deny that ours is a time of dissociation and sickness. The political and social conditions, the fragmentation of religion and philosophy, the contending schools of modern art and modern psychology all have one meaning in this respect. And does anyone who is endowed with the slightest sense of responsibility feel any satisfaction at this turn of events? If we are honest, we must admit that no one feels quite comfortable in the present-day world; indeed, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable. The word "crisis," so often heard, is a medical expression which always tells us that the sickness has reached 
a dangerous climax. 
	291 	When man became conscious, the germ of the sickness of 
dissociation was planted in his soul, for consciousness is at once the highest good and the greatest evil. It is difficult to estimate the sickness of the age in which we live. But if we glance back at the clinical history of mankind, we shall find earlier bouts of sickness which are easier to survey. One of the worst attacks was the malaise that spread through the Roman world in the first centuries after Christ. The dissociation showed itself in an unexampled breakdown of the political and social conditions, in religious and philosophical dissension, and in a deplorable decline of the arts and sciences. If we reduced humanity as it then was to a single individual, we would see before us a highly differentiated personality who, after mastering his environment 
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THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN 
with sublime self-assurance, split himself up in the pursuit 0 his separate occupations and interests, forgetting his own origin and traditions, and even losing all memory of his former self so that he seemed to be now one thing and now another, anc thus fell into a hopeless conflict with himself. In the end th( conflict led to such a state of enfeeblement that the world h( had conquered broke in like a devastating flood and completed the process of destruction. 
	292 	After long years spent in the investigation of the psyche, 
there gradually took shape in me, as it had in the minds of other investigators, the fundamental axiom that a psychic phenomenon should never be looked at from one side only, but from the other side as well. Experience has shown that everything has at least two sides, and sometimes several more. Disraeli's maxim that not too much importance should be attached to important things, and that unimportant things are not so unimportant as they seem, is another formulation of the same truth. A third version would be the hypothesis that every psychic phenomenon is compensated by its opposite, in agreement with the proverb, "Les extremes se touchent," or, "There is no misfortune so great that no good may come of it." 
	293 	Thus, the sickness of dissociation in our world is at the same 
time a process of recovery, or rather, the climax of a period of pregnancy which heralds the throes of birth. A time of dissociation such as prevailed during the Roman Empire is simultaneously an age of rebirth. Not without reason do we date our era from the age of Augustus, for that epoch saw the birth of the symbolical figure of Christ, who was invoked by the early Christians as the Fish, the Ruler of the aeon of Pisces which had just begun.3 He became the ruling spirit of the next two thousand years. Like the teacher of wisdom in Babylonian legend, Oannes, he rose up from the sea, from the primeval darkness, and brought a world-period to an end. It is true that he said, "I am come not to bring peace but a sword." But that which brings division ultimately creates union. Therefore his teaching was one of alluniting love. 
	294 	. Our distance in time puts us in the favourable position of 
bemg able to see these historical events quite clearly. Had we 
3 [Cf. Aion, passim.-EDIToRS.] 
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lived in those days we would probably have been among the many who overlooked them. The Gospel, the joyful tidings, were known only to the humble few; on the surface everything was politics, economic questions, and sport. Religion and philosophy tried to assimilate the spiritual riches that poured into the Roman world from the newly conquered East. Few noticed the grain of mustard-seed that was destined to grow into a great 
tree. 
	295 	In classical Chinese philosophy there are two contrary prin- 
ciples, the bright yang and the dark yin. Of these it is said that always when one principle reaches the height of its power, the counter-principle is stirring within it like a germ. This is another, particularly graphic formulation of the psychological law of compensation by an inner opposite. Whenever a civilization reaches its highest point, sooner or later a period of decay sets in. But the apparently meaningless and hopeless collapse into a disorder without aim or purpose, which fills the onlooker with disgust and despair, nevertheless contains within its darkness the germ of a new light. 
	296 	But let us go back for a moment to our earlier attempt to 
construct a single individual from the period of classical decay. I tried to show you how he disintegrated psychologically, how in a disastrous fit of weakness he lost control of his environment, and finally succumbed to the forces of destruction. Let us suppose that this man came to me for a consultation. I would make the following diagnosis: "You are suffering from overstrain as a result of your numerous activities and boundless extraversion. In the profusion and complexity of your business, personal, and human obligations you have lost your head. You are a kind of Ivar Kreuger,4 who is a typical representative of the modern European spirit. You must realize, my dear Sir, that you are rapidly going to the dogs." 
	297 	This latter realization would be particularly important for 
him, because patients have in any case a pernicious tendency to go on muddling through in the same old way, even though it has long since proved ineffective, and to make their situation only worse. Waiting is useless. Therefore the question immediately arises: "What is to be done?" 
4 [Swedish financier (1880-1932), known as "The Match King," whose complicated peculations led to his financial collapse and suicide.-EDlToRs.] 
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THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN 
	298 	Our patient is an intelligent man. He has tried all the patent 
medicines, both good and bad, every kind of diet, and all the bits of advice given him by all the clever people. We must therefore proceed with him as with Till Eulenspiegel, who always laughed when the way went uphill, and wept when it went down, in shocking defiance of sound commonsense. But hidden beneath his fool's garment was a wise man, who when going uphill was rejoicing in the coming descent. 
	299 	We must direct our patient's attention to the place where 
the germ of unity is growing within him, the place of creative birth, which is the deepest cause of all the rifts and schisms on the surface. A civilization does not decay, it regenerates. In the early centuries of our era a man of discernment could have cried out with unshakable certainty amid the political intrigue and wild speculation of the Caesar-worshipping, circus-besotted Roman world: "The germ of the coming era has even now been born in the darkness, behind all this aimless confusion; the seed of the Tree that will overshadow the nations from Thule in the far West to Poland, from the mountains of the North to Sicily, and unite them in one belief, one culture, and one language." 
	300 	That is the psychological law. My patient, in all probability, 
will not believe a word of it. At the very least he will want to have experienced these things for himself. And here our difficulties begin, for the compensation always makes its appearance just where one would least expect it, and where, objectively considered, it seems least plausible. Let us now suppose that our patient is not the pale abstraction of a long-dead civilization, but a tlesh-and-blood man of our own day, who has the misfortune to be a typical representative of our modern European culture. We shall then find that our compensation theory means nothing to him. He suffers most of all from the disease of knowing everything better; there is nothing that he cannot classify and put in the correct pigeonhole. As to his psyche, it is essentially his own invention, his own will, and it obeys his reason exclusively; and if it should happen that it does not do so, if he should never~heless have psychic symptoms, such as anxiety-states, obsessional Ideas, and so on, then it is a clinically identifiable disease with ~ thoroughly plausible, scientific name. Of the psyche as an origmal experience which cannot be reduced to anything else he has no knowledge at all and does not know what I am talking about, 
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but he thinks he has understood it perfectly and even writes articles and books in which he bemoans the evils of "psychologism." 
	301 	This kind of mentality, barricading itself behind a thick 
wall of books, newspapers, opinions, social institutions, and professional prejudices, cannot be argued with. Nothing can break through its defences, least of all that little germ of the new which would make him at one with the world and himself. It is so small and ridiculous that for modesty's sake it would rather give up the ghost at once. Where, then, must we lead our patient in order to give him at least a glimmer of an inkling of something different, something that would counterbalance the everyday world he knows only too well? We must guide him, by devious ways at first, to a dark, ridiculously insignificant, quite unimportant corner of his psyche, following a long-disused path to the longest-known illusion, which as all the world knows is nothing but ... That corner of the psyche is the dream) which is nothing but a fleeting, grotesque phantom of the night, and the path is the understanding of dreams. 
	302 	With Faustian indignation my patient will cry out: 
This witch's quackery disgusts my soul! 
Is this your promise then, that I be healed By crooked counsel in this crazy hole, 
In truth by some decrepit dame revealed? 
Cannot you brew an ichor of your own? 5 
	303 	To which I shall reply: "Haven't you tried one remedy after 
another? Haven't you seen for yourself that all your efforts have only led you round in a circle, back to the confusion of your present life? So where will you get that other point of view from, if it cannot be found anywhere in your world?" 
	304 	Here Mephistopheles murmurs approvingly, "That's where 
the witch comes in," thus giving his own devilish twist to Nature's secret and perverting the truth that the dream is an inner vision, "mysterious still in open light of day." The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost and most secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long 
5 Faust, Part One, trans. by Wayne. pp. 110£. 
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before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness extends. For all ego-consciousness is isolated; because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only those that can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood. 
	305 	It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be 
it never so childish, grotesque, and immoral. So flower like is it in its candour and veracity that it makes us blush for the deceitfulness of our lives. No wonder that in all the ancient civilizations an impressive dream was accounted a message from the gods! It remained for the rationalism of our age to explain the dream as the remnants left over from the day, as the crumbs that fell into the twilit world from the richly laden table of our consciousness. These dark depths are then nothing but an empty sack, containing no more than what falls into it from above. Why do we always forget that there is nothing majestic or beautiful in the wide domain of human culture that did not grow originally from a lucky idea? 'Vhat would become of mankind if nobody had lucky ideas any more? It would be far truer to say that our consciousness is that sack, which has nothing in it except what chances to fall into it. We never appreciate how dependent we are on lucky ideas-until we find to our distress that they will not come. A dream is nothing but a lucky idea that comes to us from the dark, all-unifying world of the psyche. What would be more natural, when we have lost ourselves amid the endless particulars and isolated details of the world's surface, than to knock at the door of dreams and inquire of them the bearings which would bring us closer to the basic facts of human existence? 
	306 	Here we encounter the obstinate prejudice that dreams are 
so much froth, they are not real, they lie, they are mere wishfulfilments. All this is but an excuse not to take dreams seriously, for that would be uncomfortable. Our intellectual hybris of consciousness loves isolation despite all its inconveniences, and for this reason people will do anything rather than admit 
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that dreams are real and speak the truth. There are some saints who had very rude dreams. Where would their saintliness be, the very thing that exalts them above the vulgar rabble, if the obscenity of a dream were a real truth? But it is just the most squalid dreams that emphasize our blood-kinship with the rest of mankind, and most effectively damp down the arrogance born of an atrophy of the instincts. Even if the whole world were to fall to pieces, the unity of the psyche would never be shattered. And the wider and more numerous the fissures on the surface, the more this unity is strengthened in the depths. 
	307 	No one, of course, who has not experienced it himself will 
be convinced that there could be any independent psychic activity outside consciousness, and certainly not an activity that takes place not only in me but simultaneously in all men. But when we compare the psychology of modern art with the find· ings of psychological research, and this again with the products of mythology and philosophy, we shall discover irrefutable proofs of the existence of this collective, unconscious factor. 
	308 	Our patient, however, is so accustomed to treat his psyche 
as something he has under his control that he will retort that he has never yet observed anything objective about his psychic processes. They are, on the contrary, the most subjective things one can possibly imagine. To this I rejoin: "Then you can make your anxiety-states and your obsessional ideas disappear at once. The bad moods you are riddled with will be no more. You have only to speak the magic word." 
	309 	Naturally, in his modern naivete, he has entirely failed to 
notice that he is as much possessed by his pathological states as any witch or witch-hunter in the darkest Middle Ages. It is merely a difference of name. In those days they spoke of the devil, today we call it a neurosis. But it comes to the same thing, to the same age-old experience: something objectively psychic and strange to us, not under our control, is fixedly opposed to the sovereignty of our will. We are in no better case than the Proktophantasmist in Faust, when he exclaimed: 
Preposterous! You still intend to stay? 
Vanish at once, you've been explained awayl By rules this devil's crew is nothing daunted: 
For all our wisdom, Tegel still is haunted.6 6 Cf. Wayne trans., p. 178. 
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THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN 
	310 	If our patient can submit to the logic of this argument, mud 
will have been gained. The way to experience of the psyche i: open. But soon one comes to another prejudice that blocks fur ther progress. "Granted," he will say, "that I am experiencing, psychic force that thwarts my will, an objective-psychic factor, il you like to call it that. But it still remains something purel) psychological, vague, unreliable, and of no importance in tht practical affairs of life." 
	311 	It is amazing how people get caught in words. They alway~ 
imagine that the name postulates the thing-just as if we wen: doing the devil a serious wrong when we call him a neurosis I This touchingly childlike trait is another remnant left over from the year 1, when mankind still operated with magical words. But what is behind the devil or the neurosis does not bother about the name we give it. Naturally we do not know what the psyche is. We speak of the "unconscious" merely because we are not conscious of what it is in reality. We know this as little as the physicist knows what matter is. He simply has theories about it, certain views, picturing it now in one way and now in another. For a time the picture fits, then a new discovery brings quite a different view. But that has no effect on matter. Or is the reality of matter in some way diminished? 
	312 	We simply do not know what we are dealing with when we 
encounter this strange and disturbing factor which we call the unconscious or the objective psyche. With some semblance of justification, it has been defined as the sexual instinct or the power drive. But this does nothing like justice to its real significance. What is behind these instincts, which are certainly not the be-all and end-all of existence, but merely represent the limits of our understanding? In this field every interpretation has free play. You can also take the unconscious as a manifestation of the life-instinct, and equate the force which creates and sustains life with Bergson's elan vital, or even with his duree creatrice. Another parallel would be Schopenhauer's Will. I know people who feel that the strange power in their own psyche is something divine, for the very simple reason that it has given them an understanding of what is meant by religious experience. 
	313 	I admit that I fully understand the disappointment of 
my patient and of my public when I point to dreams as a source of information in the spiritual confusion of our 
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modern world. Nothing is more natural than that such a paradoxical gesture should strike one as completely absurd. What can a dream do, this utterly subjective and nugatory thing, in a world brimful of overpowering realities? Realities must be countered with other, equally palpable realities, and not with dreams, which merely disturb our sleep or put us in a bad mood the next day. You cannot build a house with dreams, or pay taxes, or win battles, or overcome the world crisis. Therefore my patient, like all other sensible people, will want me to tell him what can be done in this insufferable situation, and with appropriate, common-sense methods. The only snag is that all the methods that seem appropriate have already been tried out with no success whatever, or consist of wishful fantasies that are impossible in practice. These methods were all chosen with a view to meeting the existing situation. For instance, when someone gets his business into a mess, he naturally considers how he can set it on its feet again, and he employs all the remedies that are designed to restore his languishing business to health. But what happens when all these remedies have been tried, when, contrary to all reasonable expectations, the situation only slithers from bad to worse? In that case he will be compelled to give up the use of these so-called reasonable methods as speedily as possible. 
	314 	My patient, and perhaps our whole age, is in this situation. 
Anxiously he asks me, "What can I do?" And I must answer, "I don't know either." "Then there's nothing to be done?" I reply that mankind has got into these blind alleys countless times during the course of evolution, and no one knew what to do because everybody was busy hatching out clever plans to meet the situation. No one had the courage to admit that they had all taken the wrong turning. And then, suddenly, things somehow began to move again, so that the same old humanity still exists, though somewhat different from before. 
	315 	When we look at human history, we see only what happens 
on the surface, and even this is distorted in the faded mirror of tradition. But what has really been happening eludes the inquiring eye of the historian, for the true historical event lies deeply buried, experienced by all and observed by none. It is the most private and most subjective of psychic experiences. Wars, dynasties, social upheavals, conquests, and religions are but the 
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THE MEANING OF PSYCHOLOGY FOR MODERN MAN superficial symptoms of a secret psychic attitude unknown even to the individual himself, and transmitted by no historian; perhaps the founders of religions give us the most information in this regard. The great events of world history are, at bottom, profoundly unimportant. In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of the individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations first take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately spring as a gigantic summation from these hidden sources in individuals. In our most private and most subjective lives we are not only the passive witnesses of our age, and its sufferers, but also its makers. We make our own epoch. 
	316 	So when I counsel my patient to pay attention to his dreams, 
I mean: "Turn back to the most subjective part of yourself, to the source of your being, to that point where you are making world history without being aware of it. Your apparently insoluble difficulty must, it is obvious, remain insoluble, for otherwise you would wear yourself out seeking for remedies of whose ineptitude you are convinced from the start. Your dreams are an expression of your inner life, and they can show you through what false attitude you have landed yourself in this blind alley." 
	317 	Dreams are impartial, spontaneous products of the uncon- 
scious psyche, outside the control of the will. They are pure nature; they show us the unvarnished, natural truth, and are therefore fitted, as nothing else is, to give us back an attitude that accords with our basic human nature when our consciousness has strayed too far from its foundations and run into an impasse. 
	318 	To concern ourselves with dreams is a way of reflecting on 
ourselves-a way of self-reflection. It is not our ego-consciousness reflecting on itself; rather, it turns its attention to the objective actuality of the dream as a communication or message from the unconscious, unitary soul of humanity. It reflects not on the ego but on the self; it recollects that strange self, alien to the ego, which was ours from the beginning, the trunk from which the ego grew. It is alien to us because, through the aberrations of consciousness, We have alienated ourselves from it. 
	319 	But even if we accept the proposition that dreams are not 
arbitrary inventions but are natural products of unconscious psychic activity, we shall still, when confronted with a real dream, lack the courage to see in it a message of any importance. 
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