Page:Emanuel Swedenborg, Scientist and Mystic.djvu/198

182 frightened. But he drew the conclusion he shouldn't work so late at night.7

Such threats from an ebullient sub-psychon-system, either trying to become more or resenting becoming less, are not uncommon in periods of spiritual adjustment.

Ever since childhood Swedenborg had tended to disregard his introspective life, enthralled as he was by experimental science. Busy as science kept him, he may also have kept down his emotional life, or not given it enough practice, while at the same time he yearned for the release of feeling that abandonment of self which he described as the real essence of love.

In the language of Dr. Jung, it could be said that Swedenborg was an introvert type who flung himself into an extrovert career. But his real bent kept pulling him toward psychological and religious interests, culminating in the religious crisis when the introvert philosopher conquered the extrovert scientist in a battle that took the form of spiritual versus worldly ambition.

What was subjective and what was objective was certainly not so subtly disentangled in Swedenborg's day as it is now. At that time it was not strange that he should have been "aware" of, or have "seen," as dark forces outside of himself, the things in himself with which he was struggling.

This, in modern terms, is called projecting a dissociated fragment of yourself. Jung calls it an integral part of the mechanism of the unconscious, and says it stands wholly outside the conscious will.8

In Jungian psychology the battle in Swedenborg would not necessarily be ascribed to unbalanced sexuality or to unbalanced desire for power, as it would with Freud or Adler. Jung recognizes other "drives"; he recognizes, in his own words, "before and above all that which belongs to man alone—the spiritual and religious need inborn in the psyche." 9

Turning from Swedenborg the mystic, however, back to the Swedenborg whose consciousness was being "torn asunder," he was certainly "dissociated," or, in Mr. Carington's terms, a subsystem of his general psychon-system was leading a dark life of its own, or perhaps several of them were doing so. Does this prove