Step Three: The Values

So far we have seen how to invite the figures from the unconscious and how to enter into a dialogue with them. But this is not enough. We must also take an ethical stance. It is our job, as conscious human beings, to introduce the ethical element into the proceedings.

Once the imaginative process is launched, once the primordial, instinctual forces are invited to come up to the surface and be heard, some limits have to be set. It is the conscious ego, guided by a sense of ethics, that must set limits in order to protect the imaginative process from becoming inhuman or destructive or going off into extremes.

Jung took the audacious point of view that humanity holds a specific role in creation: to contribute the act of consciousness and the point of view of morality, in its highest sense. We are surrounded by a universe that is awesome and beautiful, but its forces behave in a way that is amoral. They are not concerned, as we are, with the specifically human values of justice, fairness, protection of the defenseless, service to our fellow humans, the keeping intact of the fabric of practical life. It is we who have to introduce these values into the world around us. And since the creatures who arise in our Active Imagination are often, for all practical purposes, personifications of the impersonal forces of nature, it is we who must bring the ethical, humane, and practical elements into Active Imagination.

Jung also observed that there is no development of consciousness, in the human sense, without ethical conflict. Consciousness always involves ethical confrontations: We become aware of the conflicting values, attitudes, and paths of conduct that are open to us and find that we must make moral choices.

All these principles find their way into Active Imagination. As the inner figures present themselves, as the different attitudes and possibilities rise to the surface, inevitably we have to take an ethical stance in order to strike a balance among conflicting values .

It is equally a grave mistake to think that it is enough to gain some understanding of the images and that knowledge can here make a halt. Insight into them must be converted into an ethical obligation. Not to do so is to fall prey to the power principle, and this produces dangerous effects which are destructive not only to others but even to the knower. The images of the unconscious place a great responsibility upon a man. Failure to understand them, or a shirking of ethical responsibility, deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life. (Jung, MDR , Step Three: The Values)

Jung told of a young man who dreamed that his girlfriend slid into an icy lake and was drowning beneath the water. Jung said, in effect, that the man could not just sit and let the cold forces of fate kill the inner feminine. He advised the man to go into Active Imagination, get something to pull her out of the water, build a fire for her, get some dry clothes for her, and save her life. This is the ethical, moral, and human thing to do. It is as much the ego’s duty to bring this sense of responsibility to the creatures of the inner world as it is for us to tend to the welfare of our fellow humans in the outside world. It is the health of our own, inner selves that is at stake.

I recall a case in which an inner archetypal figure demanded absolute control over a woman’s life, at the expense of her feminine nature. The woman was doing analysis with me, and her Active Imagination was mostly with a very powerful and wise masculine figure. He gave her good information, excellent insights, but he also tried to argue her out of some of her basic instincts as a woman. He was trying to take over more and more of her life at the expense of her essential character.

One day she was doing Active Imagination, and he suddenly said to her: “Give me your purse and your keys. From now on I am taking over.” And, in her imagination, she did what she was told. She turned over her purse and her keys.

As she read this episode to me, I jumped to my feet: “No way will you give him your purse and keys! That symbolizes all your resources and complete control of your life. If you do that you will abdicate your rightful role and turn your entire consciousness over to only one part of yourself. You can’t do that, no matter how wise or ‘right’ he seems to be. Only you can run your own life; you can’t turn that role over to anyone else.

“Now, you have to do it over again: Go back and tell him that you are taking your purse and keys back. Tell him that you will listen to him, respect him, and consider what he says—but you cannot turn your whole life over to him. Tell him that you need to think for your own self and make your own decisions.”

After my outburst, the woman did as I advised. She went back in Active Imagination and explained things to this powerful masculine figure. He understood the principle; he agreed; and he immediately gave her back the purse and keys.

Unfortunately, about a year later, after she had stopped analysis, this woman did turn herself over completely to her power drive. She let the power aspect of this masculine presence take over completely in her inner world. She went off on an inflation. She became a know-it-all, lectured everyone, and tried to dominate every situation.

This is an example of what happens when you allow yourself to go off on an inflation, be possessed by an archetype, and lose the independent position of your ego. How is making this choice an ethical problem? Whenever you allow one part of you to take over and subjugate all your other instincts and values, it is inherently destructive. Inevitably your conduct and your treatment of other people will be off balance.

Our word ethics , and our concept of ethical behavior, is derived from the Greek word that meant “proper conduct.” It is instructive that this word was in turn derived from the Greek ethos , meaning the “essential character or spirit” of a person or people. Ethics , therefore, in its deepest sense, means the personal standard of conduct that accords with an individual’s true inner character.

Ethics is a principle of unity and consistency. People who behave ethically are those who make an honest effort to conform their behavior to their values. If one’s conduct is grossly at odds with one’s essential character, it always reflects a fragmentation of the personality. As Jung said, “A shirking of ethical responsibility…deprives him of his wholeness and imposes a painful fragmentariness on his life. ”

From what we have said so far, we can summarize three specific elements involved in preserving the ethical aspect of Active Imagination:

First, you add the ethical element by holding out for the attitudes and conduct that are consistent with your character and your deepest values.

Second, ethical balance requires that we not let one archetype or one part of ourselves take over at the expense of the others. We can’t sacrifice essential values in order to pursue one narrow urge or goal.

Third, we must nurture and preserve the specifically human values that serve human life, that keep practical daily life going, and that keep our human relationships alive.

The great powers of the collective unconscious are so overpowering that we can be suddenly swept away by a flood of primitive energy that seizes the conscious mind—an energy that races toward its instinctual goal, heedless of the effect that it may have on ordinary human life or on the people around you.

Inevitably a powerful figure will appear in your Active Imagination and constellate this raw power drive. It may advise you in the strongest terms to drop all scruples that stand in the way of getting what you want, to drop the commitments and responsibilities that “hold you down.” These ideas usually produce a dramatic fantasy of asserting yourself, taking control of the situation where you work, having your own way with your family or friends, making everyone dance to your tune in one way or another.

When this sort of fantasy gets going you become convinced that you are going to resolve all your conflicts, settle everything, by simply laying down the law with everyone around you, telling off those who have stood in your way or opposed you, and doing exactly what you want.

These extremes are so attractive because there is some truth—a partial truth—in them. We all have areas where we have been weak, where we’ve failed to take a stand, both with ourselves and with the people around us. If we have been weak-willed, if we have been pushed around by our own compulsions, bogged down in the usual contradictions of life, it is not surprising that we get a clarion call from the unconscious summoning us to the opposite extreme. We are seized by a fantasy of what it would be like to solve everything with a pure, clear act of power and will. But if we take this message literally and try to act it out in its raw, unevolved form, we are led to behave like Attila the Hun. We leave a path of destruction behind us.

It is exactly at this point that your sense of ethical values must be brought into the equation. Otherwise you would go to a destructive—ultimately self -destructive—extreme. Your life would be turned into a desert, bereft of human values or human relationship.

It becomes the crucial task of the ego to answer back, to speak up for human values like fairness and commitment. The ego must ask, “What effect will this extreme, otherworldly doctrine have on my everyday life?” The ego must find the way to gentle and humanize these impersonal forces of the unconscious, with their overwhelming, sometimes inhuman, nature.

If an attitude comes roaring out of your unconscious that will destroy your practical existence, hurt your relationship with your family, cause trouble for you at your job, or get you into power struggles with everyone, then you have both the duty and the right to answer back, to present the ethical alternative.

You can say: “Look, there are some human values here that are very important to me. I am not going to give them up. I will not give up the love and relatedness that I have with my family and friends. I do not want to pursue some idealized goals to the exclusion of everyone and everything else.”

We have already learned that this must be a dialogue of equals. This means that we must not only honor the archetypes who speak to us in Active Imagination, but we must also consider ourselves to be equal to them, morally speaking, and therefore able to take an ethical stance—to speak back, assume a position, make it a true dialogue. We must neither seek to dominate nor allow ourselves to be dominated.

The critical need for an ethical sense at the ego level arises from the nature of the unconscious itself. In a certain sense, the unconscious is amoral: in that it is concerned with living out and expressing the powerful, impersonal leitmotivs of the psychic universe. Every archetype, every power, within the collective unconscious, is morally neutral, like the other forces of nature. By itself, it cannot put moral or ethical limits on what it does or what it demands. Only human consciousness can take into consideration other values that should be preserved, limits that must be put on this inner demand or this inner voice so that a balance is struck and life is served rather than diminished.

The archetypes burst into consciousness with all the pent-up instinctual power of the primordial jungle, and like wild animals in nature, they can have little concern with human ideas of fairness, justice, or morality. They serve a realm that is close to the instincts: They are concerned that nature be served, that evolution take place, that all the archetypal themes be incarnated into human life. But how that takes place, how much damage it might do, and what other values might be trampled on in the process—with these things, the raw, primitive archetypes do not know how to be concerned.

The primordial archetypes can be compared to lions in the jungle: When we look at them in their wild splendor, they appear as walking incarnations of nobility. But they are also impersonal forces of nature, each a law unto itself, following nature’s impersonal and amoral laws, unqualified by human considerations of pity, kindness, identification with the victim, love-relatedness, or a sense of fairness.

Many of the archetypes that make up the total human character manifest as pure, raw instincts of hunting, survival, aggression, territorial dominion. If they are qualified by human values, by a sense of love and moral responsibility, they are wonderful strengths. But if they dominate us without those other, humane feelings, they reduce us to mere brutes.

There is some truth and wisdom in every figure who comes to us in Active Imagination. Usually each brings a wisdom that we specifically need in order to compensate the one-sidedness of our egos and our habitual ways of looking at life. But the more completely an inner figure is identified with a pure archetype, the more certainly will it take a polarized viewpoint, present an extreme that is outside the bounds of ordinary humanness and common sense.

The critical task that each of us has, therefore, when we “take the lid off” of the unconscious, is to think independently and clearly. We must listen carefully to hear the truth that is hidden behind the overblown, seductive, dramatic urgings of the inner voices. You must refine that truth to something that is more civilized, more human, more bearable—something that can be integrated into ordinary human life without incinerating it. And, toward that truth, you must find your own individual ethical stance.