Observations On Perception

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A person does not acquire an understanding of himself in isolation.   From childhood onward, conduct meets approval, resistance, affection, expectation, disappointment and judgment.   Through these encounters, a person learns not only how others respond to him but also how to recognize himself.   Some of that recognition is indispensable.   Without relations with others, language itself could scarcely provide the distinctions through which experience becomes intelligible.   Yet the same process introduces a difficulty: a form of recognition that initially helps a person understand himself can eventually become something he must preserve in order to remain intelligible to himself.

The difficulty does not reside in having an identity.   No person proceeds through life without some continuity between memory, conduct and expectation.   The difficulty arises when maintaining that continuity begins to determine what the person can acknowledge.   A settled conception of oneself may then cease to register experience and begin instead to select from experience whatever confirms it.   Contradiction becomes harder to admit because the contradiction no longer concerns only an action or judgment.   It threatens the person through whom the action or judgment has been understood.

The desire to be good makes this relation particularly visible.   Ethical regard requires that we consider our conduct and its consequences for others.   Concern for how we are perceived can also expose conduct that private intention would excuse too readily.   Neither goodness nor concern for another person’s judgment is therefore suspect in itself.   A different condition appears when being recognized as good becomes necessary to the person’s conception of himself.   He may then preserve the appearance of generosity when he resents what generosity requires, consent when he wishes to refuse, or suppress anger because anger contradicts the person he believes himself to be.

Carl Jung’s concept of the persona identifies part of this difficulty.   The persona describes the social presentation through which a person enters relations with others.   Such presentation is unavoidable.   Different circumstances properly call forth different aspects of conduct, and no single encounter reveals the entirety of a person.   The problem begins when the social presentation acquires authority over what the person can recognize in himself.   The appearance of goodness then does more than communicate character to others.   It regulates which reactions may enter the person’s own account of his character.

Jung’s shadow addresses what such an account excludes.   The value of the concept does not depend upon imagining a hidden repository of unacceptable qualities.   Its diagnostic force lies in a simpler observation: what a person cannot reconcile with his conception of himself does not therefore cease to operate.   Anger denied because it conflicts with kindness may appear as resentment.   A wish to refuse may survive beneath repeated consent.   Competition may accompany generosity without appearing in the generous person’s explanation of his conduct.   The discrepancy matters because conscious intention no longer accounts adequately for what the person does.

Recognition of that discrepancy complicates another conduct ordinarily regarded as virtuous: helping.   A person may respond to another’s need because the need warrants assistance.   Repeated assistance, however, also establishes a relation between the person who helps and the person who receives help.   Within that relation, the helper may acquire usefulness, authority, gratitude, intimacy or a sense of necessity.   None of these consequences invalidates the assistance.   They become diagnostically significant when the continuation of another person’s need begins to preserve something necessary to the helper.

The distinction cannot be settled by observing generosity alone.   Identical acts may proceed from different relations to oneself and to another person.   A more revealing moment may occur when assistance is declined, becomes unnecessary, or succeeds.   If another person’s independence produces resentment, loss of purpose or an impulse to restore the former dependency, the reaction discloses a function that helping had acquired.   The conduct that appeared to concern another person’s welfare had also begun to sustain the helper’s conception of his own importance.

Such a possibility does not warrant classifying habitual helpers as psychologically dependent upon those they assist.   The classification would obscure the very relation that requires examination.   A diagnostic inquiry asks instead what the conduct is doing in a particular life.   Helping may express affection, obligation, generosity, control, fear of abandonment, desire for recognition, or several of these at once.   The relevant distinction emerges from the relation among conduct, circumstance and response, not from assigning the person to a psychological type.

The same distinction becomes more difficult when the desired response from another person is understanding rather than need.   Human beings explain themselves because understanding permits communication, intimacy and correction.   To wish to be understood is therefore intrinsic to many relations.   But explanation can acquire another function.   A person may continue explaining after the relevant facts have been communicated because disagreement or incomprehension has begun to unsettle his confidence in his own judgment.   Another person’s understanding then ceases to be the object of communication and becomes a condition required for certainty about oneself.

The difference between understanding and validation is easily obscured.   Someone who refuses all external judgment does not thereby possess greater independence.   Another person may perceive an inconsistency that the person acting cannot see.   Evidence may require revision, and disagreement may reveal error.   Independence of judgment therefore cannot mean insulation from correction.   It consists instead in preserving the distinction between evidence that challenges a judgment and another person’s failure to ratify it.   Without that distinction, agreement can be mistaken for truth and disagreement for invalidation.

If the need to be understood allows another person’s perception to govern one’s understanding of oneself, projection permits the inverse movement.   One person’s expectation can govern what he recognizes in another.   Jung’s treatment of projection becomes useful at precisely this point because it directs scrutiny toward the contribution made by the perceiver to what appears to have been discovered in someone else.

The operation is particularly difficult to recognize when expectation assumes the form of hope.   To perceive another person’s capacities is not necessarily to misperceive that person.   People learn, reconsider, deteriorate, recover and change.   Present conduct cannot exhaust every future possibility.   Yet possibility can also displace evidence.   A person repeatedly encountered as unreliable may continue to be treated according to the reliability he might someday develop.   Someone who repeatedly injures another may be encountered through an anticipated transformation rather than through the conduct that continues to occur.   Hope then ceases to enlarge perception and begins to protect the perceiver from what present circumstances disclose.

Projection reveals why perception of another person cannot be examined solely by asking whether the description appears plausible.   The perceiver also enters the description.   What he fears, desires or requires can organize which features become prominent and which remain subordinate.   The recognition of this participation is one of Jung’s durable contributions.   Its value lies in returning an interpretation to the person making it rather than granting that person privileged access to the psychological truth of someone else.

The same discipline becomes necessary when interpretation turns toward the past.   Injury differs from projection because the event may be demonstrable and its consequences enduring.   A person who has suffered abandonment, humiliation, violence or loss does not falsify experience by recognizing that the event changed him.   Memory preserves facts that neither psychological development nor the passage of time can repeal.   The diagnostic question concerns something else: the relation between what happened and the authority subsequently granted to what happened.

An injury can explain a present reaction without explaining the whole person who reacts.   It can constrain later possibilities without determining every later choice.   It can remain painful without requiring every new relation to reproduce its original terms.   The distinction becomes important when a past event supplies a stable interpretation for circumstances that differ from the event itself.   What once explained a response may then begin to organize responses before present circumstances have been adequately perceived.

This does not mean that a person should relinquish an identity formed through suffering, as though identity could be discarded by decision.   Nor does it authorize an observer to determine when another person has remembered an injury for too long.   Such judgments would reproduce the error under examination by allowing an interpretation to precede the experience it claims to explain.   The relevant question remains diagnostic: whether memory continues to register what happened or whether what happened has acquired governing authority over what can happen now.

Goodness, helping, understanding, hope and memory therefore reveal variations of a common problem without becoming instances of a common pathology.   Each establishes a necessary relation between a person and something beyond the immediate assertion of self.   Goodness encounters judgment.   Helping encounters need.   Explanation encounters another consciousness.   Hope encounters another person’s possibility.   Memory encounters the persistence of what has occurred.   In each case, the relation can inform perception; in each case, the relation can also begin to regulate the identity of the person engaged in it.

Jung’s psychology becomes particularly valuable at this juncture.   Persona, shadow and projection do not have to be treated as compartments within a psychological anatomy.   They can identify relations that expose the insufficiency of conscious self-description.   The persona draws attention to the social form through which a person presents himself.   The shadow registers what that presentation and its accompanying self-conception exclude.   Projection examines what the perceiver contributes to an apparently external perception.   Individuation gathers these confrontations into a continuing process in which the person becomes less completely governed by an established account of who he is.

The strength of this approach lies in its refusal to equate consciousness with the account consciousness gives of itself.   A person may sincerely misunderstand his own conduct.   He may act from several motives while recognizing only one.   He may perceive accurately and still introduce into perception an expectation he does not recognize.   He may preserve a truthful memory while allowing that memory to determine circumstances that no longer reproduce it.   Jung provides a vocabulary for examining these discrepancies without requiring that conscious intention be dismissed as fraudulent.

The same vocabulary, however, introduces a further difficulty when Jung moves from recurring psychological relations to archetypes.   Human lives undoubtedly contain recurrences.   Birth, dependency, separation, sexuality, rivalry, authority, danger, loss, aging and death confront human beings under widely different historical and cultural conditions.   Stories and images produced from these conditions consequently exhibit correspondences.   Recognition of those correspondences can enlarge perception by allowing one representation to illuminate features of another that might otherwise remain unnoticed.

An archetype remains useful while it identifies such recurrence without determining its meaning.   The difficulty begins when recurrence is taken as evidence of an underlying psychic structure and that structure is then invoked to explain why the recurrence exists.   The direction of inquiry has changed.   An affinity first discovered among experiences becomes the antecedent from which those experiences are said to proceed.

This movement creates an interpretive advantage that is also a methodological weakness.   If two representations resemble one another, their resemblance can be cited as evidence of an archetypal form.   If they differ, the differences can be understood as particular cultural or individual manifestations of the same form.   The archetype can therefore survive both resemblance and variation.   As its capacity to accommodate different manifestations increases, the conditions under which the interpretation could prove inadequate become more difficult to specify.

A further problem follows.   An archetype does not identify itself.   An interpreter decides that different images, stories or experiences disclose the same recurrent form.   That decision may be illuminating, but the act of comparison belongs to the interpreter.   If the resulting archetype is subsequently treated as a structure inherent in the phenomena themselves, the interpretive operation that produced the resemblance disappears from view.   A method devised partly to expose projection can then conceal the interpreter’s own participation in constructing the category.

The tension does not require either accepting or rejecting archetypal thought as a whole.   It requires preserving a distinction between recognition and explanation.   Recurrent forms deserve examination because recurrence may disclose relations that isolated observation misses.   Recurrence does not by itself establish that a universal psychic structure produced them.   The archetype can remain a means of comparison without becoming an ontology of human consciousness.

The same restraint clarifies individuation.   If individuation is understood as the recovery of a true self concealed beneath social adaptation, the concept merely replaces one fixed identity with another.   The authentic person becomes another model to inhabit, complete with expectations about autonomy, integration and freedom from dependence.   But if individuation describes an increasing capacity to encounter what an established identity excludes, no final identity has to be prescribed.   The process alters the person’s relation to self-description rather than revealing a completed self beneath it.

This distinction returns the inquiry to the identities with which it began.   The purpose is not to cease wanting to be good, helping others, seeking understanding, recognizing possibility or remembering injury.   Each remains part of human relation.   Nor is the purpose to uncover a purified self from which dependency has disappeared.   A person continues to exist among other people, to be affected by them, to depend upon judgment, memory and expectation, and to participate in relations that cannot be reduced to individual autonomy.

What changes under examination is not necessarily the relation itself but its authority.   A person can ask whether the desire to be good prevents acknowledgment of an ungenerous response; whether helping another has become necessary to feeling necessary; whether explanation seeks communication or ratification; whether hope recognizes possibility or displaces present evidence; whether memory informs present judgment or determines it in advance.   None of these questions supplies its answer through the category used to formulate it.

That limitation is also their value.   Diagnostic thought does not need to tell a person what he secretly is.   It can examine what his conduct requires him not to notice in order for an established account of himself to remain coherent.   Jung’s most durable concepts assist that examination when they expose a relation without claiming to have exhausted its cause.   They become less reliable when the name assigned to a recurrent relation begins to substitute for the inquiry that made the relation perceptible.

The question that remains is therefore neither which identity should be abandoned nor which archetype contains its explanation.   It is whether the identity through which a person recognizes himself continues to answer to experience, or whether experience has begun to answer to the identity.

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