The One Thing Everyone Was Sure They Already Knew

There is a particular kind of mistake you can only make about something very close to you.

You can spend years wearing the same pair of glasses and never once look at them. You look through them, all day, at everything else. And if they are scratched, you do not see scratched glasses - you see a world with marks on it.

The subject that was never consulted

His observation is simple and slightly devastating. Until the seventeenth century, the study of the soul consisted almost entirely of doctrines about the soul - and in all of them, the soul itself never got a hearing.

Why? Not stupidity. The opposite, in a way. The soul is the thing by which everything else is known: the immediate given, the nearest thing there is.

And because of that, every thinker felt so thoroughly acquainted with it that further investigation seemed unnecessary. A few good definitions seemed the most that could be wanted.

It is the difficulty of using an instrument to examine itself, and Jung's point is that it does not produce ignorance so much as a specific illusion - the properties of the instrument get read off as properties of the world.

"I know what's good for you"

He then shows what this looks like in practice, and it is uncomfortably familiar.

The ordinary person presumes to have opinions about the mind. So does the professional - and worse, not only about their own mind but about their subject's.

They believe they know what is going on inside another person, and what would be good for them.

And Jung names the assumption underneath. It is not arrogance exactly. It is a quiet, unexamined belief that all people are basically alike - from which it follows, without anyone noticing, that one's own private impressions must be generally valid.

Neither line is ever inspected. The second is the one that does the damage, and it is the engine of an enormous amount of well-meaning advice.

Why becoming yourself makes people think you are wrong

From that, Jung derives something that is worth carrying around, because it explains an experience many people have and few can name.

People are alike, he says, only so far as they are unconscious of their differences. The more someone becomes aware of their own particular shape, the less they conform to what others expect, and the less predictable they become.

Now add his second claim, which is the most quotable line in the chapter.

For a view to count as valid, it needs the acclaim of the greatest possible number - regardless of the arguments for it. "True" and "valid" describe, in practice, what most people believe.

And they work that way because agreement does something more comforting than informing us: it confirms that we are all the same.

Which means disapproval, at a certain stage, is not evidence that you have gone wrong. It may be the price of having become distinguishable.

How psychology became a science, and why that's not a flattering story

The usual story is that humanity grew up, put away dogma, and humbly consulted nature.

Jung's version is less flattering and more convincing.

Once enough individuals had differentiated, philosophies multiplied - roughly one per thinker - and none of them could be, in his phrase, uniformly fair to the diversity of individual subjects.

Argument could no longer settle anything, because every judge was also a party.

So people stopped arguing and started looking. Experience replaced debate. Psychology became a natural science not out of humility but out of deadlock.

There is a hidden cost, and it runs through the rest of the essay.

The experimental method works because everyone can look at the same thing - the pendulum, the precipitate, the planet. Psychology signed up to that method while possessing the one object that refuses to stand still in public: the observer.

The academy on the couch

The chapter's sharpest passage comes next, and it is the moment Jung turns his own tools on the institution that employs him.

The facts first: psychology was still lodged in the philosophy faculty; medical psychology had to take shelter with medicine; even the natural sciences were admitted only under a philosophical label.

Officially, he says, the situation was still largely medieval.

Then the diagnosis.

Psychology's position, he argues, is like that of a mental function that the conscious mind has inhibited. Only what fits the ruling attitude is admitted to exist.

Whatever does not fit is denied existence - in defiance of plentiful symptoms to the contrary.

And anyone who knows these processes recognises the manoeuvres by which the inconvenience is split off.

He names two. Experimental psychology was let in - but so cluttered with philosophical terminology that it could no longer bite.

And the study of mental illness was kept in another building altogether, classified as a curious appendix to psychiatry.

The joke in that word is precise. The appendix is the organ you ignore until it becomes inflamed - and it was inflaming as he wrote.

Three ways to make an unconscious disappear

The middle of the chapter is an argument with the psychology of his day, and it is more entertaining than it sounds, because you can watch the same three moves being made by anyone defending a position they cannot afford to lose.

The last defence was the strongest, and its proponent made the mistake of saying what would refute him.

If there were really two consciousnesses in one person, he wrote, they would have to be present simultaneously - and that, he declared, does not happen.

It does.

The French psychiatrist Pierre Janet had patients whose one consciousness would carry on a conversation out loud while, at the very same moment, the hand was answering the observer's quiet questions in a code of movements.

One body, two conversations, at once.

Coins in a coat, and the shape of a star

Two images from this chapter are worth keeping for life.

Being real and being thought about are two different things. Which means a person can be carrying something genuine and valuable and be entirely unaware of it.

The second image concerns what we are born with.

There was a heated argument in Jung's day about whether anything mental is inherited, and the ridicule was aimed at a silly idea: that a newborn arrives with pictures of everything it will one day do.

Jung agrees that this is absurd - and then makes a distinction that saves the whole question.

Think of a stencil: a card with a shape cut out of it. There is no picture on a stencil. Hold it up and you see a hole.

But press paint through it and the paint takes that shape, every time, in whatever colour you happen to be using.

What is inherited, Jung suggests, is stencils - not pictures. Forms without content. Your life supplies the paint.

And you never see the stencil in the finished result; you only infer it from the family resemblance between a great many finished pictures.

The ones who had said it already

The chapter ends by producing witnesses, and by pointing out how they were treated.

One of them, the philosopher Theodor Lipps, had written something Jung considered the theoretical basis for the whole psychology of the unconscious.

Observation of conscious life, Lipps said, shows that mental life proceeds unconsciously most of the time - and only occasionally, at special points, does the agent within us show itself directly, in images.

And the last line of the chapter is a small, quiet act of accusation.

Jung notes that a standard history of German psychology of the period does not so much as mention the two philosophers who had built entire systems on the unconscious - one of whom had written a bestseller on it.

So the chapter closes exactly where it opened.

At the start, the soul never gets a word in. At the end, its philosophers do not get a footnote.

Two questions I am left with

Questions rather than conclusions

If "valid" really means "believed by most people" - how would you ever tell a genuine insight from mere eccentricity?

Both look identical from outside: one person, out of step, convinced.

The people who turned out to be right and the people who turned out to be cranks were indistinguishable at the time, including to themselves.

Jung tells us how validity actually works, and it is not obvious that he leaves us any way to tell the difference in the moment - which is a problem for anyone who has ever had to decide whether to trust their own judgement against everyone else's.

And if every psychology is partly a confession - what is yours a confession of?

Jung's claim is that theories about people are also specimens of the person theorising.

He says it about the philosophers, and then, to his credit, admits it applies to him.

But it is not a comfortable thing to turn on oneself. Whatever you privately believe about what makes people tick - that they are mostly frightened, or mostly selfish, or mostly doing their best - where did that come from, and what would it look like as a description of you?