The Undiscovered Self

The Undiscovered Self is a work by C.G. Jung (1957).

Core claims

• The Undiscovered Self is not a political essay with psychological footnotes but a diagnostic manual for mass psychosis, arguing that the statistical erasure of individuality is itself the pathology from which totalitarianism emerges.
• Jung’s critique of science and organized religion in this text operates on the same axis: both institutions traffic in collective abstractions that sever the individual from the unconscious, producing the precise psychic vacuum that demagogues fill.
• The book’s concluding argument—that self-knowledge radiates outward as an involuntary “mana” influence rather than through persuasion or ideology—constitutes Jung’s most compressed statement on why individuation is a political act, not merely a therapeutic one.

Related questions

• How does Jung’s argument in The Undiscovered Self that the shadow is the source of collective infection compare to Erich Neumann’s systematic treatment of shadow projection in Depth Psychology and a New Ethic?
• Jung claims the Christian symbol “carries in itself the seeds of further development”—how does this position relate to Hillman’s deliberate de-theologizing of psychic imagery in Re-Visioning Psychology?
• In what ways does Edinger’s concept of the ego-Self axis in Ego and Archetype formalize the relationship between individual self-knowledge and collective psychic health that Jung sketches in his discussion of “mana” influence at the close of The Undiscovered Self?

See also

• Library page: /library/the-psyche/jung-undiscovered-self/

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