"But woe unto you, who replace this incompatible multiplicity with a single God! … How can you be true to your own nature when you try to turn the many into one?"

-- C.G. Jung, The Black Books

"We are a psychic process which we do not control, or only partly direct."

-- C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

Countless lives inhabit us.

I don’t know, when I think or feel,

Who is thinking or feeling.

I am merely the place

Where things are thought or felt.

I have more than just one soul.

There are more I’s than I myself.

           -- Fernando Pessoa as Ricardo Reis

At the end of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, Jung made some perplexing remarks about his own subjectivity: “The older I have become, the less I have understood or had insight into or known about myself.  …. In fact, it seems to me as if that alienation that so long separated me from the world has become transferred into my own inner world and has revealed to me an unexpected unfamiliarity with myself.” As Jungians we have been accustomed to the enigma of the unconscious, but there seems to be another mystery hidden in plain sight: “Who is the I, that I claim that I am?” “What is the I?”

Jung had already questioned the nature of the subject during his Black Books-Red Book period.  At the beginning of Scrutinies, Jung questions nature of the subject itself and the identity of the “I”: “I resist, I cannot accept this hollow nothing that I am.  What am I? What is my I? I always presuppose my I.  Now it stands before me—I before my I.  I speak to you now, my I.” (The Red Book, para. 333) Jung others himself, sees division in the subject, and cannot wholly identify with the “I” that carries self-states that he abhors.

In 1929, Jung stopped calligraphing and painting The Red Book and moved toward exploring alchemy to create a comparative framework for his experiences of active imagination from The Black Books and to further build conceptual structure of his psychology project. I argue that in the move towards alchemy Jung has not included the material from The Black Books from June 1916, forward. The excluded material present in Volumes 6 and 7 problematizes Jung’s core ideas on the relationship between the “ego” and the “self”; it complicates the notion of the single subject “I.” From the multilogues of Ha, Ka, Philemon, soul, and Jung’s I, the subject “I” emerges as a complicated, enigmatic, manifold notion.  On 11/20/1917 (BB7, p. 170], Ka envisions multiplicity of the “I”: “Is not every cell of the tree-I an I, and again every grain in the cell an I of the cell, the I of the leaf, the I of the tree?”

Jung’s recognition of reality of inner figures and his questioning of the nature of the “I “was preceded by that of poets. In 1871, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote, “Je est un autre” (“I is another”). In 1910, the greatest Portuguese poet, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935), writing in English, for the first time used “other” as a verb: “I find me listening to myself, the noise / Of my words othered in my hearing them.” (Sonnet XIII). 

Questioning of the nature of the subject “I” and the recognition and respect for other subjects found its climax in Pessoa’s work.  Walt Whitman might have contained multitudes, but Pessoa let each of them—whom he called heteronyms —write in their distinctive styles. Pessoa was the pioneer in subjecting the very notion of the “I” to radical analysis.  While at the time different psychoanalytic schools were examining the relationship of the ego to the unconscious, assuming the ego was a single subject, Pessoa would question the subject itself: Who is the real author of this poem just written?  Am I the subject?” How many I’s am I? What is an I? What if unified identity, or clearly defined subjectivity or personality, is an illusion?  In his explorations of subjectivity, he pre-dates contemporary philosophical debates by seven decades. As a French philosopher Alain Badiou put it in 1998: “If Pessoa represents a singular challenge for philosophy, if his modernity is still ahead of us, remaining in many respects unexplored, it is because his thought-poem inaugurates a path that … to this day, philosophy has yet to comprehend.

Psychology has yet to consider Pessoa’s contributions. We will engage Pessoa’s thought to bring his poetic light to illuminate questions of the subject “I,” other, identity, and self-othering and relate them to Jung’s own soul quest in his The Black Books and The Red Book.

NOTE: While “pseudonym” is an author writing and signing his work with a different name, “heteronym” is fully a person writing in the style different from Pessoa’s own.

Sylvester Wojtkowski, Ph.D., is a clinical psychologist and a Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. He received his diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute of New York and his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the New School. He serves on the faculty of the C.G. Jung Foundation for Analytical Psychology and is a founding member of the Jungian Psychoanalytic Association (JPA) where he is a seminar instructor, control analyst, and supervisor.

Dr. Wojtwowski also serves on the editorial board of Spring Publications and teaches nationally and internationally on archetypal psychology, imagination, and art.  He presented at several international conferences on Jung and art, on Fellini, on Banksy, and on the poetry of Reiner Maria Rilke. One of his recent presentations was “Origins of C.G. Jung’s Psychology Project: The Black Books and the Hypothesis of Autonomy of the Unconscious in the Individuation Process” at XXII IAAP Congress in Buenos Aries, 2022.