There is a growing global mood today characterised variously as alarm, stress, anxiety, even dread—let’s call it tension! The root of the word is ten-, meaning “stretch.” As Owen Barfield has shown, words that once referred to an outer meaning came to refer to an inner meaning. So we do talk today about tension as mental or emotional strain but we really mean to say that such tension is as if our mind were painfully stretched. Minds don’t really stretch! Such is the manner in which we reduce the reality of the objective psyche to a playful game with empty words. After all, reality has convincing value only if our physical bodies (i.e., our sense organs) are involved somehow in the assessment. I agree with this judgment! There is one exception to this game of reducing reality to a material base. In a letter (1957) to Aniela Jaffé, C. G. Jung wrote
Unlike me, you torment yourself with the ethical problem. I am tormented by it. It is a problem that cannot be caught in any formula, twist and turn it as I may; for what we are dealing with here is the living will of God since it is always stronger than mine. I find it always confronting me: I do not hurl myself upon it, it hurls itself upon me.
Jung is here indicating that for him the problem of the psychic opposites has gripped him from the start and that means gripping him in such a way that his physical body and its perceptual system are fully engaged with his assessment of the reality of the grip i.e. the grip of the objective psyche….
Read the essay here: Enantiodromia
