About 'The Undiscovered Self' by Dr. Carl G. Jung

Although written more than five decades ago, The Undiscovered Self by Dr. Carl G. Jung, one of history’s brightest minds and probably the brightest minds in analytical psychology transcends time and history to map the dangers posed by the modern mass society to the individual, who is the protagonist in this masterpiece with the role of the antagonist being executed by the state.

Jung’s proposition in this work is that today’s society has the inadvertent proclivity to transform the intrinsically valuable individual into a mere unit of a huge social mass where he is classified as an average.

This inclination completely prods the unique ones who refuse to be part of this hive-minded mass and terms them as the irregulars who are often regarded as of lesser extrinsic value than those in the mass. And as he humorously states, a bunch of zeroes do not make a one.

The state strongarms the individual with laws, subjective truth, creeds and looks to reduce him into just a social unit who has no unique right and authority over his thoughts and actions.

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Hence the state ignores and denies the role of the uniqueness while rendering him to an anonymous unit. This phenomenon makes the individual vulnerable to the influence of the authorities and powers to use him as a resource to serve their agendas. He argued that it was the case in Russia then and will be the case in the Western world, as it is prevalently now.

So, what is the key to resist this authority is the million-dollar question raised by thinkers leading up to him.

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The answer proposed by Jung is rather baffling. He suggests the need of an extramundane authority, including religion but not limited to, which counteracts the power of the state by illuminating him of his intrinsic worth to the church, in this case and essentially to God. Though Jung struggles with the idea of God throughout his other works, he has rather explicitly stated that a private relationship with a spiritual being leads to the expression of the inner man as opposed to its suppression by the state.

This complex work is made rather simple by Jung, who weaves a number of different, distant ideas and thoughts into a long stream of introspective thinking which forces you to tap into your inner self and counter the oppressive nature of the modern society.

Jung warns us that our own unconscious is the last resort to this hostile takeover and what horrified him continues to horrify us today and forces us to reflect and retrospect on his words.

Updated: Aug 29, 2022
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About 'The Undiscovered Self' by Dr. Carl G. Jung. (2022, Feb 28). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/about-the-undiscovered-self-by-dr-carl-g-jung-essay

About 'The Undiscovered Self' by Dr. Carl G. Jung essay
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