Normality Is Not the Absence of Pathology but an Ecological Balance Between Two Domains of Adaptation

Steve Myers’s 2013 paper recovers a dimension of Jung’s thought that post-Jungian analytical psychology has largely abandoned: the psychology of normal people. The central move is deceptively simple but structurally consequential. Where Freud defined normality as freedom from neurosis — an “ideal fiction” no one attains — Jung defined it as “finding one’s needs being met in the situations of daily life,” a dynamic equilibrium between adaptation to the outer world (profession, family, society) and adaptation to the inner world (the vital demands of one’s own nature). Myers deploys Jung’s metaphor of specific gravity: the ego, like a hydrometer, sits at a particular level between two media, and neurosis results when it cannot find its natural position. This produces two types of neurosis on either side of normality — “collective people with underdeveloped individuality” and “individualists with atrophied collective adaptation.” The radical implication is that normality is not a single state but a pattern that embraces peculiarity, suffering, and even the domination of complexes. Jung’s phrase “normal peculiarities” captures this: complexes are the “normal foci of psychic happenings,” and suffering is “the normal counter pole to happiness.” This ecological definition sidesteps the normative trap that Foucault identified in mainstream psychiatry and psychoanalysis — norms derived from the mass and enforced through institutional power — because it locates normality within the individual’s own psychic equilibrium rather than in conformity to external standards.

Foucault’s Critique Hits Early Jung but Misses Late Jung — The Exact Inverse of Psychoanalysis

One of the paper’s most architecturally elegant arguments is the mirror-image relationship between analytical psychology and psychoanalysis vis-à-vis Foucault. Foucault’s critique of Freud was misplaced: Freud used pathological phenomena to understand normal ones, moving in the opposite direction from what Foucault claimed. But subsequent psychoanalytic developments — Glover’s “social standards of adaptation,” Joseph’s definition of normality as “what is average or expectable” — drifted back toward socially derived norms and thus became vulnerable to Foucauldian criticism. Jung’s trajectory is the reverse. His early word-association experiments were overtly normalizing, conducting tests on “normal subjects” to establish baselines for detecting pathology — precisely the kind of practice Foucault targeted. But as Jung matured, he rejected Adler’s socially oriented normalization for its “depreciating impact on the unconscious” and objected to statistical averages because “individual exceptions are murdered by statistics.” Myers shows that Jung arrived at a position more aligned with Foucault than Foucault ever recognized, holding the fact of normalization in tension with its potential damage to individuality. James Hillman’s dissection of normality in Re-Visioning Psychology deepens this reading: Hillman traces the very word norma (a carpenter’s square) to expose how statistical and ideal norms fuse under what he calls “Athenian consciousness” — the defensive, armored, practical intelligence that mistakes its own archetypal perspective for objective reality. Where Hillman treats normality as a fantasy to be deconstructed, Myers treats it as a concept to be reconstructed on genuinely Jungian foundations. The two projects are complementary, not contradictory.

The Ego-Persona Axis Is the Missing Structural Element in Post-Jungian Theory

The most consequential claim in the paper is that analytical psychology’s overwhelming focus on the ego-Self axis has created a theoretical lacuna. Andrew Samuels noted in Jung and the Post-Jungians that the post-Jungian concept of normality remains “relatively undeveloped” and that discussions of it cite mostly psychoanalytic sources — there is no entry for “normal” in A Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis. Myers identifies the structural reason: ego psychology broadened psychoanalysis to include adaptation to external reality, but no parallel development occurred in analytical psychology. The ego-persona relationship has been neglected, and with it the entire domain of collective life. This neglect is not merely academic. For what Myers calls “collective people” — those whose ambition is to be nothing but collective — individuation is not the appropriate goal. Their development involves forming a “properly developed persona,” which provides protection for the ego and a channel through which meaning emerges. Myers draws here on Paul Casement’s observation that “the development of a well-functioning persona is an essential task for any individual.” The persona, far from being the obstacle to growth that individuation-focused Jungians assume, is the very site where analytical psychology could interface with social psychology and serve the normal population. Myers argues for a triangular model — ego, Self, and persona — that affords value to all three vertices rather than privileging one axis.

Projection Is the Normal Person’s Mode of Unconscious Conflict Resolution — With Civilizational Consequences

Myers draws out an implication of Jung’s definition that deserves far more attention than it has received: for normal people, the conflicts between consciousness and the unconscious are not experienced as intrapsychic disturbance but are displaced into interpersonal and intergroup projection. The neurotic suffers from a conflict between ego and unconscious that manifests as symptoms. The normal person avoids this through one-sidedness — seeing good in oneself and projecting evil outward onto “willing carriers of our projections.” Myers cites Jerome Bernstein’s 1989 prediction, grounded in this principle, that the collapse of the US-USSR projection field would necessitate new carriers of American shadow projections — a prediction fulfilled with striking precision. The Solzhenitsyn passage Myers invokes — “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being” — crystallizes the point: normality depends on not recognizing this line, and the unconscious compensation that maintains psychic equilibrium in individuals can aggregate into civilizational catastrophe. Jung’s insistence that “man’s worst sin is unconsciousness” is not a statement about neurosis; it is a statement about normal psychology.

This paper matters because it names the exact mechanism by which analytical psychology marginalized itself: by treating individuation as its sole telos, it rendered itself irrelevant to the majority of human beings and ceded the territory of collective psychology to disciplines less equipped to understand it. Myers recovers Jung’s own corrective — the individuation-collectivity spectrum, the pressing problem of “the behaviour of the individual in the mass” — and demonstrates that the tools for a Jungian social psychology already exist in Jung’s disjecta membra, waiting to be assembled. No other work in the tradition performs this specific excavation with this degree of precision.