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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 goes 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 that conception.   Contradiction becomes harder to admit because it no longer concerns only an action or judgment.   It threatens the conception of the person through which that action or judgment has been understood.

The desire to be good makes this relation particularly visible.   Ethical regard requires that a person consider his conduct and its consequences for others.   Concern for how he is 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 while resenting 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 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 understanding of that character.

Jung’s shadow addresses what such an understanding 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.   Rivalry 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.

That discrepancy establishes a distinction that will become necessary later.   The shadow retains diagnostic value so long as it names a divergence that can be examined among conduct, reaction and the explanation a person gives of himself.   It need not posit an invisible structure as the cause of that divergence.   One thing is to recognize that conscious self-description fails to account for what is observed; another is to infer from that insufficiency an entity or prior structure responsible for producing it.   The first operation leaves inquiry open.   The second introduces an explanation whose presence no longer necessarily depends upon what can be observed.

Recognition of this discrepancy complicates another form of 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 the helper requires in order to recognize himself.

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 difficulty appears 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 belongs 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 turning point may become visible when the explanation no longer changes what is being communicated and seeks only to change the listener’s response.   If the facts have been stated, the reasons have been understood and the person nevertheless continues reformulating them until assent is obtained, the persistence discloses something other than an effort at clarification.   The conversation has begun to sustain a need for ratification.   Disagreement is no longer received only as a difference of judgment:   it threatens the stability of the interpretation the person maintains of his own experience.

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 reveals its displacement when repetition ceases to modify expectation.   If a form of conduct recurs, produces recognizable consequences and nevertheless continues to be interpreted each time as an exception preceding a change that remains perpetually imminent, future possibility has begun to protect the perceiver from present evidence.   Hope no longer enlarges what may occur.   It reduces the authority of what is occurring.

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.   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 do not therefore form a catalogue of symptoms or five interchangeable variations of a single disposition.   Each engages a different relation:   another person’s judgment enters into goodness; another person’s need modifies the meaning of help; understanding introduces the relation between communication and ratification; hope introduces the distance between present conduct and future possibility; memory confronts the persistence of what has occurred with the openness of new circumstances.   What they share is not a hidden common cause, but the possibility that each relation may acquire authority over 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 the discrepancy among that presentation, the accompanying conception of oneself and what conduct discloses.   Projection examines what the perceiver contributes to an apparently external perception.

Individuation occupies a broader place in Jung than these particular operations.   It does not merely designate the detection of contradictions within one’s identity, but a process of differentiation and integration through which contents previously subordinated, excluded or projected may enter into a less unilateral relation with consciousness.   The notion therefore retains a distinct place within Jungian thought before it serves the inquiry pursued here.   Its relevance to this essay lies in the fact that the process does not require treating a person’s self-explanation as complete, while neither does it turn every discrepancy into evidence of an unseen structure.

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’s concepts provide 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 discrepancies and relations that can be confronted with experience 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.

Here the distinction between observable discrepancy and postulated structure becomes important again.   A contradiction between conduct and the explanation a person gives of himself can be examined in the very terms in which it appears.   An archetype, by contrast, proposes that separate recurrences refer to a psychic organization that precedes them.   Similarity among phenomena may justify comparison; by itself, it does not establish the existence of the structure invoked to explain that similarity.

An archetype remains useful while it allows recurrence to be recognized without determining its meaning in advance.   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 permits a return to individuation without reducing it to the method of this essay.   Within Jung’s thought, individuation retains its broader scope as a process of differentiation and integration of the personality.   Outside any doctrinal acceptance of that process, a more limited consequence remains useful:   no established self-description should be exempt from what experience reveals in contradiction with it.   This formulation neither turns individuation into a general theory of authenticity nor assumes the recovery of a true self concealed beneath social adaptation.

If individuation were understood as the recovery of such a true self, the concept would merely replace one fixed identity with another.   The authentic person would become another model to inhabit, complete with expectations about autonomy, integration and freedom from dependence.   By contrast, recognizing that an identity may exclude aspects of experience does not require prescribing a final identity.   Inquiry alters the authority granted to self-description without asserting that a completed self lies hidden 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 the authority it acquires.   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 an explanation continues to seek understanding or has begun to demand ratification; whether hope remains open to possibility or converts repeated contrary evidence into exception; whether memory informs present judgment or determines it before current circumstances can disclose themselves.   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 disclose a discrepancy or relation without claiming to have exhausted its cause.   They become less reliable when the name assigned to a recurrence begins to substitute for the inquiry that made the recurrence 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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