The Undiscovered Self by Carl Gustav Jung [Actionable Summary]

The Book In Three Or More Sentences:

Born in the aftermath of World War 2, The Undiscovered Self wants to aid humanity by preventing further catastrophic developments in the world. Carl Jung, by helping the individual resolve his inner clashes, wants to liberate him from the totalitarian regimes. According to Jung, confronting oneself is the only way we can resolve the conflicts happening on the world stage as only a change in the attitude of the individual can ignite a change in the psychology of the nation.

The Core Idea:

The recurring theme of the book is how individuality is often misinterpreted and neglected because it’s observed by the lens of the general, not individual understanding. You can’t clearly sense the real character in the surrounding people, because you compare them to others which corrupts your judgment about the individual person. Therefore, the more you isolate yourself from what you know, the better you’ll understand what you don’t know about yourself and others. This self-knowledge, as presented in the book, is foundational for cleansing the dogmatic oppressors and elevating the fate of the individual human being.

5 Key Lessons from The Undiscovered Self:

Lesson #1: To Understand Ourselves We Must Look at Ourselves, Unbiased

When we meet someone new, we are quick to make conclusions based on the observable facts about the person – gender, race, nationality, looks, our previous experiences. But these only delude us. We start to appoint attributes to people who don’t actually possess them. Or, we fail to spot the uniqueness of the person because of the same initial false conclusions.

Carl Jung explains that you can authentically understand a person only if you turn your back on everything that is known about man since he existed.

We should take the same unbiased approach to reveal our inner selves. Try to look deep within ourselves without allowing known social attitudes to cloud our thinking.

We are confused, though.

We confuse knowledge – what we know about the world – with “self-knowledge”- what we know about ourselves. We mistakenly categorize our own inner contents because we’re biased. All of this, because we measure ourselves by taking into account the people around us. The environment we know.

Based on the text, “thanks” to this biased approach, we create a false self-image about ourselves which further buries the important parts of our psyche. What’s inside us remains hidden from us because we analyze ourselves based only on what is known, what is available to us.

And what is available to us further damages our ability to understand ourselves.

What does this mean?

The abstracted examples are quite common for Jung. But in general, what the author wants to explain is that all the decisions we make are based on our own facts and observations – what we know. But since what we know about the world is not all that is available as knowledge, we usually end up not addressing the situation accordingly.

The real problem is when nations rely solely on general conclusions based on statistics.

Since theories and analyses are based on observations, they are statistical. Meaning that they cannot, never, represent and touch our real self. They are a mere reflection of averages that aim to showcase a single point of view that is based on everyone but actually not helping anyone. It’s an abstraction, a deviation of reality that sounds good on paper, but it can hardly help an individual to determine his place in the world.

A simple example is this: the average pay of the nation can be $50,000 annually. But this doesn’t mean that everyone is getting this amount. Not at all. Rich people influence the average number greatly which means that there are a lot of poor people. However, nations, governments, etc., don’t look at individuals, they look at statistics.

The same simple method applies to everything about humans – how people think and behave.

Therefore, the undiscovered self remains undiscovered. The more we look at data and seek answers in external sources, the more we infect our minds with theories that are not close to ourselves but close to an abstract reality of what a person looks like and how he thinks.

If we want to look behind the curtain of our apparent psyche, we can only do so if we approach this task with a free and open mind. Absent from statistical analysis.

The problem, as described in the book, is that making conclusions about people is hard without at least partly relying on knowledge about mankind in general.

“But the psychology of the individual corresponds to the psychology of the nation. What the nation does is done also by each individual, and so long as the individual does it, the nation also does it. Only the change in the attitude of the individual is the beginning of the change in the psychology of the nation.” Carl Jung