Seminar on Jungian Psychology and the Development of the Archetypes of Personality:
You can watch the complete version of this seminar in the video file below.

As children, all of us are blind to the darker dimension of ourselves and of the world. The lack of knowledge and awareness of the external world that belongs to childhood disappears as we grow older, and as this pleasurable unawareness recedes it is replaced by a painful consciousness of the reality of life's suffering, the cruelty of nature, our limitations, our finitude and death. As adults, we are compelled to carry the burden of existence and to live with this increasing suffering and pain.

Over the past several years, I have spent each day with patients who are affected by a range of psychological problems and by difficulties involving alcohol, psychoactive substances and drugs. Deep within the suffering of these people—people who have felt the pain of Being and the burden of existence through the fabric of their lives, and who have encountered the cruelty and injustice of life—there is an unsuccessful effort to return to the lost primordial unawareness of childhood.

This attempt to return to unawareness may take the form of alcohol or drugs; the unconscious destruction of the structure of external reality in mental illness; or various personality difficulties, from emotional dependency to obsessive efforts to control oneself, others and events as a way of forgetting the genuine lack of control we have over our fate.

The hidden dream of all of us, whether we know it or not, is to return to that sweet and painless unawareness of childhood that has been lost. At the heart of the myth of Adam and Eve lies the truth that by tasting the forbidden fruit of consciousness/self-consciousness we were expelled from paradise. At the heart of all religions, suffering is the greatest truth of life.

In his first teachings after awakening, the Buddha named suffering as the first truth of life. The entire existential literature and philosophy, from Dostoevsky to Kierkegaard, Camus, Heidegger and Sartre, is founded on accepting this painful and frightening anxiety of life as a first principle of our Being. We all try to forget it—in one another, and in anything that helps us think less about this suffering.

Carl Jung believed that what gives rise to our suffering is not consciousness itself but our “limited consciousness,” and that the suffering of our existence is reduced not by falling back into unconsciousness but by trying to overcome the limitations of our consciousness. For this reason, he believed that the central problem of many psychologically distressed people is not that they know and continually remember what has happened to them, but that they do not know precisely what has happened to them. What deepens their suffering is that they remain trapped in the dense fog of their past, in a condition in which they are neither blind nor able to see. We are a limited and fragmented consciousness within the consciousness of the world, and this is the root of our suffering.

It is consciousness in its limited form that creates suffering, and the only way to free ourselves from this suffering is to increase consciousness. But this transcendence of consciousness must begin by recognising the darkness within us and becoming aware of it. If we cannot see our own inner darkness, our consciousness will remain divided between darkness and light, half asleep and half awake, and the darkness of our unconscious mind may take control of part, or even all, of our consciousness. By recognising inner darkness and bringing it into conscious awareness, however, darkness is no longer given the opportunity to break loose within us without restraint. It may still express itself, but it will always be interwoven with and held within the bounds of our awareness.

In fact, before reflecting on, understanding and recognising this darkness, we live within a childish and naive unawareness of the world. Nietzsche called the ordinary morality of people cowardice—not because, in his view, living morally was itself cowardice, but because people often hide their fear and weakness under the name of morality so as to conceal their weakness even from themselves. Yet when they acquire the power to express their darkness, their dark side may become capable of any destructive act without their even having the strength or courage to see and accept the destructive consequences of their own conduct.

The difference between a good person who has integrated the unconscious dimension of personality with the conscious, and a naive person who has never looked at the darkness within and merely imagines himself to be good, is that every decision and act of the genuinely good person is considered in full awareness of his own inner capacity for evil. A good person is a dangerous person: he knows the paths of the inner Ahriman well, is conscious of them, and with all that awareness chooses not to follow them.