The Mind of East and West
C. G. Jung
The author of this book, the entire text of which unfortunately I have not seen, has talked to me about her project and about her ideas with regard to the difference between eastern and western psychology. Thus I was able to note many points of agreement between us, and also a competence on her part to make judgments which is possible only to one who is a European, and at the same time possesses the invaluable advantage of having spent more than half a lifetime in the Far East, in close contact with the mind of Asia. Without such firsthand experience it would be a hopeless task to approach the problem of eastern psychology.
One must be deeply and directly moved by the strangeness, one might almost say by the incomprehensibility, of the eastern soul. Decisive experiences of this kind cannot be transmitted through books; they come only from living in immediate, daily relationship with the people. Having had unusual advantages in this respect, the author is in a position to discuss what is perhaps the basic, and is in any case the extremely important, question of the difference between eastern and western psychology.
I have often found myself in situations where I had to take account of this difference, as in the study of Chinese and East Indian literary texts and in the psychological treatment of Asiatics. Among my patients, I am sorry to say, I have never had a Chinese or a Japanese, nor have I had the privilege of visiting either China or Japan. But at least I have had the opportunity to experience with painful clarity the insufficiency of my knowledge. In this field we still have everything to learn, and whatever we learn will be to our immense advantage. Knowledge of eastern psychology of course provides the indispensable basis for a critique of western psychology, as indeed for any objective understanding of it. And in view of the truly lamentable psychic situation of the West, the importance of a deeper understanding of our accidental prejudices can hardly be overestimated.
Long experience with the products of the unconscious has taught me that there is a very remarkable parallelism between the specific character of the western unconscious psyche and the “manifest” psyche of the East. Since our experience shows that the biological role which the unconscious plays in the psychic economy is compensatory to consciousness, one can venture the hypothesis that the mind of the Far East is related to the West as the unconscious is, that is, as the left hand to the right.
Our unconscious has, fundamentally, a tendency toward wholeness, as I believe I have been able to prove. One would be quite justified in saying the same thing about the eastern psyche, but with this difference: that in the East it is consciousness that is characterized by an apperception of totality, while the West has developed differentiated and therefore necessarily one-sided attention or awareness. With it goes the western concept of causality, a principle of cognition irreconcilably opposed to the principle of synchronicity which forms the basis and the source of eastern “incomprehensibility,” and explains as well the “strangeness” of the unconscious with which we in the West are confronted. The understanding of synchronicity is the key which unlocks the door to the eastern apperception of totality that we find so mysterious … The author seems to have devoted particular attention to just this point. I do not hesitate to say that I look forward to the publication of her book with the greatest interest.
C. G. Jung requires no introduction, but we take this opportunity of announcing that our next issue will contain a translation of an article by Hans Schar, written for the recent celebrations of the great psychologist’s eightieth birthday. We join in the chorus of congratulations and heartfelt good wishes to Dr. Jung, as he enters his ninth decade still actively writing: his Mysterium Coniunctionis is now appearing in three volumes.
This article is the preface to Ostasien Denkt Anders, by Lily Abegg. Since this preface was not included in the American edition of Miss Abegg’s book, The Mind of East Asia (NewYork: Thames and Hudson, 1952), Dr. Jung has very kindly given us permission to publish a translation of it which had appeared in the Bulletin of the Analytical Psychology Club of New York, Vol. 15, No. 3. We are indebted to the Bulletin for allowing us to reproduce this Preface, and to Hildegard Nagel and Ellen Thayer for their translation.