Born with the Film Already Loaded

The confession

For two hundred paragraphs Jung has been building a definition, and he has built it well. The psyche begins, he has said, where a function loosens itself from the compulsion of instinct and comes within reach of a will; and the will itself is nothing exalted, only disposable energy, the portion of our fuel not already spoken for.

Then he turns the definition over and reads what is written on its underside. A will requires a willer - "a disposing subject, capable of judgment and endowed with consciousness" - and so, if the psyche is whatever the will can reach, and the will requires a conscious subject, the psyche is consciousness after all. He has proved, he writes, "the very thing that we started by rejecting". It is the reason the book says psyche and never mind: the English word carries a lamp inside it, and would have sprung this trap on the first page.

A lesser writer would have eased the brick out unseen. Jung lays his hand on it and lets us watch the wall come down.

What follows is not a repair but a change of weather. Consciousness, he says, is relative through and through; its contents are "conscious under one aspect and unconscious under another", and between the lit and the unlit there runs no frontier, only a slope:

"The psyche is a conscious-unconscious whole."

Not two rooms with a door between them, but a field at dusk, where each thing is lit on the side that faces you and dark on the side that does not, and the line between them moves as you move.

We live in that field already. For a year you take the long way home, and only when someone names the street aloud do you understand that you have been walking round it. All morning you hum a tune, and at noon its words arrive, and they are the sentence you have been unable to say. The telephone rings, and from the shape of the first hello, before any news, you know that something has happened. Something in you knew; the part that says I was merely the last to be told.

And then the question towards which the whole book has been travelling. The forgotten and the half-noticed were once in the light and can be fetched back into it; Jung calls them the personal unconscious. But is there a psyche that was never lit - never learned, never once anyone's - and psyche all the same?

The ant

"There are, in fact, no amorphous instincts, as every instinct bears in itself the pattern of its situation. Always it fulfils an image, and the image has fixed qualities."

Amorphous is shapeless, and shapeless is how we are accustomed to imagine a drive: a pressure without a face, seeking somewhere to spend itself. Jung denies that any such thing exists. A drive arrives with its scene already about it, as a melody arrives in its key.

His witness is an ant that farms. The instinct of the leaf-cutter, he writes, "fulfils the image of ant, tree, leaf, cutting, transport, and the little ant-garden of fungi" - six frames of a single film - and "if any one of these conditions is lacking, the instinct does not function". Remove one frame and the reel will not turn. No one showed her the tree; the garden was in her before she had legs to carry her to it.

It is so with us. Consider grief, which no one is taught. Its stations arrive unbidden and in order: the need to see the body; the gathering of the living; the meal eaten afterwards with a hunger that shames us; the one object kept when everything else is given away; and the afternoon, months later, when a scent in a shop undoes us where we stand. No script is handed out. The scene was complete before the loss, and was waiting for a loss to begin it. The newborn who arrives already expecting arms is the same reel, run from the other end.

Nietzsche, the philosopher, had called such patterns relics, the fossils of an older thinking lodged in a modern skull. Jung will not have the word: "they are the ever-present and biologically necessary regulators of the instinctual sphere" - not an appendix but a heartbeat.

These inborn pictures of situations he names archetypes, and the name is misread the instant it is heard as inherited idea or ancestral memory. The ant does not remember a leaf. An archetype is a readiness, a shape held open for the world to fill.

From which comes the sentence to carry out of the book:

"The image represents the meaning of the instinct."

Do not ask a drive for its chemistry, nor for its motive. Look at the picture it is trying to complete.

The lamp in the cellar

And having built it, he tells us that it cannot be proved.

Instinctual patterns in human beings are, he allows, "probable"; but their types cannot be demonstrated as a zoologist demonstrates what a bird will do in April, because the one organ we possess for looking, consciousness, "is not only itself a transformation of the original instinctual image, but also its transformer".

Two difficulties lie folded in that sentence. The instrument is made of the material it is meant to measure: consciousness did not arrive from elsewhere to inspect the psyche; it is what the instinctual layer became. And the instrument alters whatever it touches: a pattern brought up into the light no longer behaves as it behaved in the dark.

Imagine a cellar you have never seen, and a lamp in your hand. You go down to learn what the dark is like, and wherever you turn there is light, and you will never, by any effort, see the dark as it was before you came. And the lamp burns the cellar's own oil.

"I must confess that I can see no direct way to solve this problem."

It is the scratched lens of the first post, met again at the deepest point in the book, and he does not look away. Then the hinge on which all the rest will turn: "And yet I have succeeded, or so I believe, in finding at least an indirect way of approach."

He ceases to ask what is down there, and asks instead what it will make, if he hands it something to work with.

That is the whole of analysis in a single sentence, and it is where the book goes next.