Enantiodromia
… As you know (of course) from your Greek,
dromia is “to run”:
hippodrome is where the hippos (or
horses) run; a dromedary is a racing
camel.
Enantio means “in the other
direction.”
So, taken together,
enantiodromia means “running in the
opposite direction,” turning turtle.
Now, the interesting thing about middle life is that, quite
often, a chronic enantiodromia takes place.
You have been, let us say, a power man: you’ve had it all, you have
achieved what you set out to achieve, or at least your wits have been about you,
and you’ve realized it isn’t worth achieving.
When that moment comes, the change takes place.
You have disposable
libido, available
libido, and where does it go?
It goes over there to the twinkle-twinkle side, and Papa begins to see
the little girls. Then everybody
asks, “What has happened to Daddy?”
This is the normal phenomenon of the nervous breakdown in late middle age.
P2B 65
… almost everyone faces this kind of crisis.
The problem is, when this enantiodromia comes, are you going to be able
to absorb and integrate the other factor, the other side of your
personality?
In Wagner’s Ring, Albrecht gets the ring of power
by spurning
the allure of the
Enantiodromia - everything must ultimately flow into its opposite (Heraclitus)|
The
wise Chinese would say in the words of the
I Ching:
When yang has reached its greatest strength, the dark power of yin is born
within its depths, for night begins at midday when yang breaks up and begins to
change to yin.
Psychological
A physician is in a position to see this peripeteia enacted literally in life. He sees, for instance, a successful businessman attaining all his desires heedless of his peril, and then, having withdrawn from activity at the height of his success, falling in a short time into a neurosis, which changes him into a querulous old woman, fastens him to his bed, and thus finally destroys him. The picture is complete even to the change from a masculine to a womanish attitude.
In any case, it is a fact that consciousness heightened by a necessary one-sidedness gets so far out of touch with the archetypes that a breakdown follows. Long before the actual catastrophe, the signs of error announce themselves as absence of instinct, nervousness, disorientation, and entanglement in impossible situations and problems. When the physician comes to investigate, he finds an unconscious which is in complete rebellion against the values of the conscious, and which therefore cannot possibly be assimilated to the conscious, while the reverse, of course, is altogether out of the question.
Only after the decline of the Middle Ages, that is, in the course of the nineteenth century, when spirit began to degenerate into intellect, did a reaction set in against the unbearable dominance of intellectualism.
One-sidedness,
though it lends momentum, is a mark of barbarism.
This
characteristic phenomenon practically always occurs when an extreme, one-sided
tendency dominates conscious life; in time an equally powerful counterposition
is built up, which first inhibits the conscious performance and subsequently
breaks through the conscious control.
The
grand plan on which the
unconscious life of the
psyche is constructed
is so inaccessible to our understanding that we can never know what evil may not
be necessary in order to produce good by enantiodromia, and what good may very
possibly lead to evil.
The driving
force, so far as it is possible for us to grasp it, seems to be in essence only
an urge towards
self-realization.
If it were a matter of some general
teleological plan, then all
individuals
who enjoy a surplus of
unconsciousness
would necessarily be driven towards higher
consciousness
by an irresistible
urge.
After
having overcoming his half-right and half-wrong hysterical feeling of guilt,
(