Six Elements of Modern Ethics

The erotic as the antidote to these times according to Audre Lorde and Jung

“Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.”

-Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider

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I’ve read Jung’s essay The Undiscovered Self at least a dozen times, but I am astounded by its continued relevance every time I return to it. Jung wrote it as a plea to a world that he would soon be leaving: we are in danger, he was saying, and the danger is us. The human psyche “should be worthy of all the attention we can give it,” Jung wrote. “It needs only an almost imperceptible disturbance of equilibrium in a few of our rulers’ heads to plunge the world into blood, fire, and radioactivity.”¹

We’re living with that unbearable truth every day. Blood, fire, bombs, and unnatural disasters that leaders should be seeking to mitigate in every possible way but aren’t.

It was 1957 when Jung was writing, but he knew the solution to the suffering was a long way off. He knew that people, us, some seventy years into the future, would wrestle with the same dangers he observed, if not worse. He knew that we were the problem and the solution.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how Jung defined an ethical life while living in a wildly complex world. He viewed these ethics as psychological work, not religious dictums. It’s a response to other models that seek to suppress or control the inner life in order to be good. They’re psychological antidotes to the collective insanity.

In my subscriber workshop that same month, I outlined the six elements of modern ethics that arise in Jung’s writing and within Erich Neumann’s masterwork Depth Psychology and a New Ethic.

This is the outline I shared.

Six Elements of Modern Ethics

1. Withdrawing projection and facing the personal shadow. This relieves others from carrying the burden of one’s disowned parts, mitigating reactivity, prejudice, conflict, abuse, and unconscious actions.

2. Seeking integration of the opposites when in doubt or in inner conflict versus certainty, control, or the suppression of doubt. (What creative insight or third thing is trying to emerge from the inner opposition?)

3. Freeing the libido to seek its own path. The libido is the creative, sometimes “the feminine,” the erotic, the wild and instinctive self that is corralled and diminished by modern life. The suppression of sexuality has always gone hand in hand with the suppression of creativity and self-knowledge, regardless of gender or orientation.

4. Recovering care means facing the vulnerability to care about oneself and other life—animal, human, and plant—and the ability to care about one’s vulnerable desires and interests versus dismissing them as unimportant (“I don’t care”).

5. Elevating relationships and communication over ideology. When not balanced with day-to-day relationships, rigid ideologies lead to extremism, and extremism leads to control. Emphasizing embodied relationships helps to test values and ideals to counter dissociated ideology.

6. Pursuing individuation, which requires all of the above, improves relationships and communities piece by piece. This is not individualism. Jung: “Individuation does not isolate, it connects. I never saw relationships thriving on unconsciousness.”²

Typically, when people try to make sense of Jung’s understanding of modern ethics, they emphasize the first of these points—shadow work and the withdrawal of projection—to the exclusion of all others. Elements two through six remain less emphasized because they are the least understood and the most radically opposed to the dominant cultural worldview.

“Individuation does not isolate, it connects. I never saw relationships thriving on unconsciousness.”

-Carl Jung, correspondence

When I teach Jung’s work, I often pair his thoughts with those of poet and activist Audre Lorde. Lorde was far better at expressing embodied, libidinal, vibrant ideas in writing. She drew focus to the realities of active relationships, the embodied soul, and the feminine.

Lorde’s essay, “Uses of the Erotic,” is one of the most important ever written. Having detoxed from the militaristic white supremacist patriarchal heteronormative capitalist toxins in which we all swim, she could see the true social shadow and the way toward wholeness.

Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.³

Jung wrote all the time about the libido, which he defined as both a sexual and creative life force and which he also spoke of sometimes as Eros. He did not speak of it as “the erotic” as Lorde does, but I believe they were talking about the same thing. This is what allows the soul to express itself through each individual in the world. It’s what makes us uniquely creative, not just one among many, but singular and specific. This is the energy that can keep us from “merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama” and help us to create a new world, an alternate future in which we are thriving instead of just (barely) surviving.

The world doesn’t have to look like this.

Every crisis and horrific injustice is demoralizing. It’s deflating. Even the safest of us are exhausted and beaten down by the state of the world. But we need to protect our creative energy too—not just to fight against things, but to create things. Part of an ethical life is bringing new healing, love, care, concern, and creative projects into the world. We need to believe a new future is possible. We need to model that for each other and celebrate that in our lives. The culture of militarism and the disregard for nature must be replaced by something far more inspiring. And that begins with us.

Lorde animates these ideas fully, emphasizing that self-work and activism are not merely intellectual, oppositional, or ideological affairs.

This is a long quote, but it is worth every word.

When we live outside ourselves, and by that I mean on external directives only rather than from our internal knowledge and needs, when we live away from those erotic guides from within ourselves, then our lives are limited by external and alien forms, and we conform to the needs of a structure that is not based on human need, let alone an individual’s.

But when we begin to live from within outward, in touch with the power of the erotic within ourselves, and allowing that power to inform and illuminate our actions upon the world around us, then we begin to be responsible to ourselves in the deepest sense. For as we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with the numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within.

In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.⁴

I know of no greater antidote to the times in which we live.

How does the recovery of the life force, creativity, feeling, and the erotic contribute to your survival today? How do Audre Lorde’s words impact you? What strikes you about these Six Elements of Modern Ethics?

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I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast. All links can be found here.

Anonymous Textile Design, Alsace, France, 1840; The Metropolitan Museum of Art

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Related:

Evolving Good and Evil

Collective Guilt and Our Shadow Selves

1. The Undiscovered Self, Carl Jung, 1957, para. 561

2. C.G. Jung Letters, Carl Jung, 1948

3. “Uses of the Erotic,” in Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde, p. 59

4. “Uses of the Erotic,” in Sister Outsider, Audre Lorde, p. 58