Personal Freedom

22 Jan, 2024

Jung has some thought-provoking reflections to offer on the question of how free the will actually is. As we will see in the chapters to come, the ego is only a small part of a much larger psychological world, like the earth is a small part of the solar system. Learning that the earth revolves around the sun is similar to becoming aware that the ego revolves around a greater psychic entity, the self. Both insights are disturbing and destabilizing to the person who has put the ego at the center. The freedom of the ego is limited. “Inside the field of consciousness [the ego] has, as we say, free will,” Jung writes. “By this I do not mean anything philosophical, only the well-known psychological fact of ‘free choice’, or rather the subjective feeling of freedom.” Within its own domain, ego-consciousness has an amount of apparent freedom. But what is the extent of this? And to what degree do we make our choices on the basis of conditioning and habit? Choosing a Coke rather than a Pepsi reflects a measure of freedom, but in fact this choice is limited by previous conditioning such as advertising and by the availability or lack of other alternatives. A child may be encouraged to practice free will and to make discriminations by being given a choice among three kinds of shirts, for example. The child’s ego feels gratified, for it is free to choose the one it wants. Yet the child’s will is limited by many factors: the subtle wish to please the parent, or contrarily the wish to rebel against the parent; by the range of possibilities offered; by peer group pressures and requirements. Our actual range of free will is, like the child’s, limited by habit, pressure, availability, conditioning and many other factors. In Jung’s words, “just as our free will clashes with necessity in the outside world, so it also finds its limits outside the field of consciousness in the subjective inner world where it comes into conflict with the facts of the self.” The outside world inflicts political and economic limitations, but subjective factors limit us equally much from exercising free choice.

Stein, Murray. Jung’s Map of the Soul: An Introduction. Chicago, Ill., Open Court, 1998, p. 40.