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INDIVIDUATION IN 20 0 1 : A SPACE ODYSSEY

Jung did not write extensively on film, but he did comment on it as an art form and a source of archetypal images, Movies, he said, "are able to produce amazing symbols to show the collective unconscious since their methods of presentation are so unlimited." Somewhat more fully, Jungian analyst and film critic John Beebe has observed the following:As a Jungian... I feel that the issue with the movies is the hope that a bit of truth will be captured and that in some way our consciousness will be raised.... In our own individu­al life we only get a chance to see perhaps one little piece of a whole archetypal pattern, but in a movie we can have the whole pattern laid out for us in a couple of hours, and in a great enough film, there’s really a sense of having Been translocated from one’s own personal experience and the little bit that one has experienced, to something truly uni­versal, and I think that’s what the archetype can do. It's a sort of ticket of admission to a broader perspective.1I think Beebe Is right. In a movie, it is possible to have a whole archetypal pattern laid out for us In a couple of hours.For me, Stanley Kubrick's 1968 2 001: A Space Odyssey is such a mo­vie. Indeed, I think it is one of those great movies of which Beebe speaks in which personal experience Is translocated to something truly universal—in Jungian terms, to the realm of the collective unconscious. In this paper, I will examine some correspondences between the universal level of meaning in 2001 and the central Jungian concept of individuation— for Aniela Jaffé the ultimate myth of meaning in Jungian theory, for Anthony Storr Jung’s major contribution to an understanding of human experience.2Let me begin with the structure of the film, which— as the subtitle "A Space Odyssey" indicates——is that of an epic journey or voyage. In the novel, which Arthur Clarke wrote during the time he was collaborating with Kubrick on the screenplay, this epic theme is made very explicit when Dave Bowman (Keir Dullea)— one of the two astronauts awake during the voyage of the spaceship Discovery to Jupiter— becomes fascinated by his reading of the great explorations of the past, but especially with Homer’s Odyssey, "which of all books spoke to him most vividly across the gulf of time."3 It is hardly surprising in the scientific culture of the late twentieth-century West that this epic journey should material­ize as a voyage into outer space. Archetypal patterns and images-- what Joseph Campbell calls elementary ideas— are not limited by cultural or linguistic boundaries. But each culture or historical epoch imposes its own signature-— what Campbell calls an ethnic idea— on these elementary ideas in terms of local geography, history, and society.4 In a scientific age, the epic journey is naturally rendered in scientific terms.But what kind of voyage is this epic journey? In The Inner

Reaches of Outer Space, Campbell proposes two possibilities.

303Epic journeys, he says, may be into outer or inner space (p. 31).As an outer journey, 2001 is a realistic space exploration film, with real space travelers in real spaceships flying to a real moon and beyond. Moreover, they are following a radio signal to Jupiter from a real black monolith uncovered on the moon— an ex­act replica of which really appeared to a band of pre-humans some four million years Before. Undoubtedly, much, of the. audience re­sponse to this movie, past and present, is based on its special effects in simulating the reality of space travel and in portray­ing the space age technology on which such travel would depend.In. the midst of so much credible and careful detail, it is quite possible to forget that anything else is going on in the movie.But there are some problems with reading 2001 realistically and leaving it at that. For one, there is the black monolith. What is it and where does it come from? Clarke answers these questions clearly in the novel. The monolith is the tool of an advanced race of extraterrestrials who are using it as a part of their long range plan to encourage the development of mind in the universe wherever they find it. But, in my view, the movie is never this explicit about the monolith. One can infer the existence of an extraterres­trial intelligence, but inference is not certainty. The difference between Clarke and Kubrick is important. I think Kubrik wants us to wonder where the monolith comes from and to experience it as an ultimately mysterious, maybe even religious, object.Then, of course, there is the final segment of the film, where Bowman voyages alone and silent toward Jupiter, encounters yet an­other monolith in orbit around that planet, finds himself in a mys­terious earth-like bedroom, ages, and then suddenly becomes a fetus enclosed in the amniotic membrane as if ready for birth. Is this an outer or an inner journey? Has the film--which until this final seg­ment entitled "Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite" shows mankind's con­quest of the outer world with its tool-making ability— suddenly shifted focus to the world of inner space? In an early essay on 2001, Norman Holland admits his inability to answer this question satisfactorily.5 Indeed, he concludes, the "film seems to me suf­ficiently ambiguous so that either position can be sustained--and that's too ambiguous to constitute a great film" (p. 23). I agree with Holland that the ending is ambiguous, but I think this ambigu­ity is a part of the strength of the film--especially as against the explicitness of Clarke's version of the same material in his novel.What happens to this problem of ambiguity if we take the en­tire film, not just the ending, as an inner journey? On this view, the epic journey is--as for Campbell all epic journeys are--a meta­phorical rather than a literal one. I suggest that this is a valid way to understand 2001 and that Kubrik, in opting for the ambigui­ty which bothers Holland and which Clarke avoids in his novel, wants us to understand it in this way. Kubrick wants us, in other words, to experience the film internally as well as externally. Ex­ternally, it is the story of human conquest of the environment. In­ternally, it is the story of the intrapsychic evolution of the human race— or,more accurately, given its scientific focus, of the Western phase of that evolution. 2001, in short, and in Jungi­an terms, is about the individuation of mankind.

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At first glance, this is bound to seem an unusual use of the idea of individuation. Usually, individuation refers to the intra­psychic development of a single person. One of Jung's many defini­tions highlights this point. Individuation, Jung says, is the pro­cess of "becoming an in­dividual, and, in so far as 'individuality' embraces our innermost, last, and incomparable uniqueness, it also implies becoming one's own self. We could therefore translate indi­viduation as 'coming to selfhood' or 'self-realization.'"6 Presum­ably, only an individual can individuate. For a therapist dealing with one person at a time, it is certainly natural to think in such terms. Yet Jung often speaks in terms of group experience (the mythic communities of African or Native American tribes, for example), of the collective consciousness of specific. historical epochs (the Hellenistic period, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the twentieth-century West), or the levels of religious conscious­ness. In The and of Consciousness (1949), ErichNeumann examines the nature of human consciousness in general, not in individual human beings. And in The Roots of War (1989), Anthony Stevens studies war as an archetypal activity of the human race as a whole. There is thus plenty of precedent in Jungian thought for the idea of levels of intrapsychic development in the cumulative history of mankind. What is important for my purpose is that, ap­plied to 2001, the idea of collective individuation--which is, by definition, concerned with intrapsychic experience— provides an entry into the inner space of Kubrick's film. Was Kubrick consci­ously using Jung? I don’t know, and it doesn't matter anyway (though my guess is that he was). The archetypal symbols of indi­viduation were readily available to him from the culture or, spon­taneously , from his own psyche. I am interested only in the points of correspondence between the stages of intrapsychic evolution in Jungian theory and in the completed film.In 2001, each of these stages is marked by a crucial encoun­ter with the black monolith. As the beginning of the cycle of de­velopment, the first encounter is the most crucial. For it estab­lishes the essential human condition— that is, the need for per­petual self-realization. The monolith first appears to a band of prehumans— what Clarke calls in the novel man—apes. This band of man-apes is not really a community. It is a loosely affiliated cluster of individuals— as likely to turn on each other as on the members of rival bands--who seek safety in numbers against the myriad dangers that surround them. By day, and though game is plentiful, the members of the group forage for plants in the drought-ridden desert they inhabit. By night, they huddle together in fear of the predators which roam the land and against which they have no defense. As the film shows, they are easy prey for such predators as the leopard. As the film also shows by the se­quence of alternating day and night, they live in a perpetual pre­sent. There is no memory of the past, no imagining of the future. Psychically, these ape-men exist in what Jung calls mystique. Consciousness of differentiation, Jung says, "is a re­latively late achievement of mankind, and presumably but a rela­tively small sector of the indefinitely large field of original identity. Differentiation is the essence, the sine qua non of con­sciousness. Everything unconscious is undifferentiated, and every­thing that happens unconsciously proceeds on the basis of non-

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differentiation— that is to say, there is no determining whether it belongs or does not belong to the self. "7 In participation mys­tique, then, there Is no consciousness and no subject/object separ­ation.The monolith changes everything. After its communication with one of the ape-men (called Moon-Watcher in the novel, and at twenty- five already the wise old man of the band), participation mystique ends. Now there is consciousness as well as unconsciousness, ob­ject as well as subject— both of which are dramatized in the scene where Moon-Watcher realizes that the femur of a dead animal can be used as a weapon. Culture also begins at this moment. The direct line from this first weapon to the modern, scientific West (as well as all cultural moments in between) is clear when the femur hurled into the air after roan's first human kill abruptly becomes a space­craft on its way to the moon--surely one of the great moments in the movie. I don't know what Jung would have thought of this repre­sentation of the origins of consciousness. Jung, in fact, had no particular view as to how this crucial event occurred. For him, one of the great mysteries--the great mystery--was why there should have been consciousness at all. But I think he might have approved of the film's suggestion that human consciousness began in relation to a symbol--in this case, the monolith.Like any good symbol, the monolith is over-determined. Its phallic posture reflects perfectly the kind of phallic thrust of man's "outward, tool-using drives" of which Holland speaks in his essay. Its tombstone shape suggests an association with death, or perhaps a consciousness of death as a new element in the human con­dition. This motif is made explicit in the movie when the monolith appears at the foot of the aged Bowman's bed at the moment of his death (or, more accurately, his transformation from human to something else) .But I am interested in the monolith as a symbol of the col­lective unconscious. Its numinosity is the first clue to this interpretation--a numinosity suggested in the film by the mystery surrounding its appearance and re-appearance and by the religious tone of the choral music which marks each of the three major en­counters with it: the encounter of the ape-man, the encounter with the excavated monolith on the moon: and Bowman's final en­counter approaching Jupiter. The aura of a numinous religious en­counter Is especially suggested in the scene on the moon. Here, the camera shot of the approach to the exposed monolith suggests an entry Into a cathedral-like space, into something that can only be called holy. The monolith compels not only by its mysterious­ness but also by the abrupt radio signal which it emits and which pierces the ears of the humans gathered around it. It literally seizes or possesses everyone, as for Jung all archetypal symbols do when they emerge spontaneously from the collective unconscious.As a symbol of the collective unconscious, the monolith can only come from the collective unconscious. The monolith, in short is a projection--a four-sided archetypal image which Jungians call the quaternity, Four, says Edward Edinger, is the "number for wholeness , the self."8 So the quaternity is a symbol of the Self-- which is for Jung the central archetype, the archetype of the

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human potential for balance, the unity of opposites, and whole­ness, Strictly speaking, the self-realization that is individua­tion is not simply an expansion of the ego. It is, rather, a con­scious dialectical relationship between the ego (the center of the conscious personality) and the Self (the center of the total psyche) --what Edinger calls the ego-Self axis (Edinger, p . 7). Or, as An­thony Stevens says, individuation "involves the progressive inte­gration of the unconscious timeless self in the personality of the time-bound individual." 9 The effect of this encounter is of some­thing supra-personal--some thing outside the ego directing one's life to its own ends. Which is precisely what the monolith does for humanity collectively in 20 01. Though it is an intrapsychic projection, it has the compelling force of something external or superordinate (to use one of Jung's favorite words) to humanity to whose numinous power the human ego must respond.In interpreting the monolith psychologically--that is, as an external projection of an inner potential for self-realization de­fined as a dialectical relationship between ego and Self--it is now possible to understand why the metaphor of a perpetual epic journey which is at the heart of 2001 is appropriate to the human experience. Strictly speaking, though there is unity in participa­tion mystique, it is not the unity or wholeness of being human.Once consciousness and subject/object differentiation appear, hu­manity begins. For Jung, individuation does not restore the con­dition of participation mystique In individuation, consciousness remains, but in touch with, not separated from, the Self. As all Jungians know , given the propensity of the ego to assume that it alone represents psychic reality, this relationship is difficult to maintain. Yet it is also-- individually and collectively--the goal of human life. Because of the vastness and ultimate unknow­ability of the Self (as Jungians understand it), individuation is bound to be an unending quest of the ego for the Self--or, stated narratively, a perpetual epic journey into the inner world.That is precisely the view in 2001. Bowman's rebirth at the end of the movie may end one epic cycle. But is also starts an­other one, which will in turn end and lead to a new beginning and a new end, and so on for as long as humanity lasts. Human conscious­ness, in short, as the movie shows and Jungian theory argues, can never catch up to, exhaust, or fully comprehend the wisdom in na­ture (which for Jungian analyst Mario Jacobi is the meaning of the archetypal image of the wise old man10) or the unconscious know­ledge of the Self.. The movie appropriately ends with these two ar­chetypal images, as Bowman changes from wrinkled wise old man to wrinkled fetus (that is, to divine child, yet another symbol of the Self) ready to be born into the next epic journey.Contrary to appearances, this epic journey is not progressive. To think so is to go back to the journey as the outer rather than the inner. As I have already suggested, it is possible to do so and to view 2001 as the story of mankind's scientific and technolo­gical development. I am sure that many people continue to respond to the film on that level. But I would argue that to see 2001 as the story of the evolution of scientific consciousness and techno­logical mastery is to see the film very superficially. It is im­portant to remember that each cycle of human creativity comes, not from the human ego and reason, but from a crucial encounter with

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the symbolic monolith--that is, with the collective unconscious, the Self. It is the Self which is both the source and the goal of human development. Jung always insisted that there "is no linear evolution; there is only a circumambulation of the Self. Uniform development exists, at most, only at the beginning; later, every­thing points toward the center."ll In 2001, there is apparent linear evolution, but only in external things such as improved technology. In reality, humanity in its truly creative moments circumambulates the Self. Or, as the film puts it, humanity real­izes itself by following the monolith whenever it appears and wherever it leads.So the journey of individuation is both unending and non­linear. It is also, inevitably, one-sided. Jung may describe the Self as the archetype of balance, the unity of opposites, and wholeness and individuation as the process of reaching this con­dition. But this is the ideal. In reality, the infinite nature of the Self and the finite nature of the ego means that each ego-Self encounter, however valid at the moment, is only partial. Over time, this partial understanding will turn into a one-sided, exaggerated consciousness which must then be replaced by a compensatory reac­tion from the unconscious. This is as true for whole cultures as it is for individuals. Thus, for example, for Jung even the most valid and culturally transforming religion may turn out to have left out essential components of human wholeness— as for him Christianity had left out the material world and the feminine (both of which he found in compensatory form in alchemistry) . Or, to take an example perhaps more relevant to 2001 , Jung typically characterized the modern era in the West as one of hypertrophied extraverted-think­ing compatible with a scientific age. What is missing is introversion--and especially that introverted-feeling and introverted- intuition which, integrated with extraverted-thinking, would pro­duce a higher level of individuation.Does 2 00 7 deal with the one-sidedness of modern, scientific, Western culture? I think so--though here I feel on even thinner ground than anywhere else in this paper. As I have already indi­cated, I do not doubt that, on one level, this movie is a tribute to human scientific ingenuity. We have only to look at the long sequence of the space ship docking on the moon to the strains of Strauss's "Blue Danube" to see that Kubrick wants us to glory in the beauty, precision, and intelligence that have gone into Wes­tern culture's scientific/technological enterprise.Yet this enterprise does have a dark side. It produces human beings who are the servants of machines and who are, indeed, machine-like in their behaviour. I am thinking of the emotional flatness, the almost robotic neutrality of the scientists meeting on the moon to discuss the excavated monolith and the astronauts aboard the space ship journeying to Jupiter. As the filmshows, the encounter with the monolith on the moon is a numinous experience. Yet, on the way to see the monolith for the first time, Dr. Heywood Floyd (the scientist sent from the earth to handle this puzzling phenomenon) is more concerned with what kind of sandwich be will have for lunch than with the mystery of what he is about to discover. These people are, as Jung would say, thinking machines.

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The ultimate thinking machine is HAL— the computer which con­trols and operates every facet of Discovery, including the lives ofthe astronauts. HAL is programmed for two things: first, to com­plete the mission; and second, to keep the true purpose of the mis­sion a secret from the astronauts on board. It is only after Bowman, the lone survivor of the crew, disconnects HAL in one of the cru­cial scenes of the movie and heads alone toward Jupiter and beyond that the mission comes under human rather than machine control.Now, as far as I know, there is no scientific reason for HAL to go berserk. HAL runs amok because of a double-bind (which is much more explicit in the novel than in the movie). He is programmed to complete the mission. He is also programmed to tell the crew what it needs to know but not to reveal the true aim of the mission. This leads to a sense of guilt perpetuated by a conflict between the command to reveal and the command to conceal. And this conflict in time leads to an effort to cut off the source of these contradictory commands— the unit in the spaceship which communi­cates with central control. When Frank Poole (Gary Lockwood) tries to repair this break, HAL kills him, the rest of the sleeping crew, and forces the showdown with Bowman. But why not simply program HAL to keep the mission's goal secret and not feel guilty?I conclude that Kubrick does want to show, if not exactly the one-sidedness of science and technology, at least their threat to human life (as we know from Dr. Strangelove, a subject of great interest to him). In addition, the epic pattern of the movie requires that the hero must confront a monster and defeat it. In this case, as Bo w man enters HAL's central control room, the confronta­tion conforms to the epic descent into the underworld or to the night sea journey where the hero enters the very body of the monster and emerges victorious and transformed. Alan Brady sees the battle between hero and villain in an American romance (with HAL as the Chillingworth figure) . For him, the contest is between spiritless intellect and spiritual imagination.12 Only through spirit, rather than pure intellect, can human individuation continue. As American romance or epic confrontation,the implication is that Bowman is doing battle with a monster--the monster of technology--which,though created by the human intellect, is now a threat to its cre­ator. After the film was released, Kubrick said that he thought he had made an optimistic film about rebirth (the final image of the movie) and a new messiah.13 I think he did. He has dramatized hu­man individuation as a "biological phenomenon proceeding in a cos­mic context."14 and as a process of unending transformation for humanity. But here, I must admit that Holland has a point about the ambiguity of the ending. It may be clear what Bowman is saving us from. But what is he saving us for? Does he really represent a compensatory reaction of the Self against a one-sided scientific ego? Is human transformation taking us toward Clarke's idea in the second and third novel of his 2001 trilogy that the goal of human evolution is the appearance of pure mind?15 The problem is that it's just not clear that Kubrick had any particular content in mind for his messianic symbolism. Kubrick's ending allows for either of these or many other options. Indeed, his ending is open enough to allow each viewer to project his or her needs and inter­

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pretation onto the film. This may be too open for some viewers.But I'm not so sure that the film needs to be more definite. It's worth remembering that even Jung didn't really know where indivi­duation was going. Why should we?

Richard W. Noland, Ph.D.Dept. of EnglishUniversity of Massachusetts at Amherst Amherst, MA 01003

F O O T N O T E S1) Stephen Segaller and Merrill Berger, The. Wi s d o m o f t h e The World of C.G. Jung (Boston, 1989), pp. 167-168.2) See Aniela Jaffé, The Myth of Meaning in the Works of C.G. Jung(Zürich. 1984), and Anthony Storr, C.G. Jung (New York, 1973), p. 75.3) Arthur C . Clarke, 2001: A Space Odyssey (New York, 1968),p. 103.4) Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space (New York,1986), pp. 99-100.5) Norman Holland, "2001: A Psychological Exploration," Hart-

ford Studies in literature, Volume 1 (1969), 20-25.6) C.G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, C W 7 (Prince­ton, 1977), p. 173.7) Jung, Ibid., p . 206.8) Edward F. Edinger, Ego and Archetype (Baltimore, 1973), p. 193.9) Anthony Stevens, On Jung (London and New York, 1990), p. 188.10) Mario Jacoby, Individuation and Narcissism: The Psychology

of Self in Jung and Kohut (London and New York, 1990) , p. 174.11) C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections (New York, 1968)pp. 196-197.12) Alan Brady. "2001 and the Paradox of the Fortunate Fall,"Hartford Studies in Literature, Volume 1 (1969), 7-19.13) Holland, 2001: A Psychosocial Exploration," 23.14) Stevens, On Jung, p. 188.15) See Clarke, 2010: 0dyssey Two (New York, 1982) and 2061:0dyssey Three (New York, 1987). For an earlier version (not exactly the same) of Clarke's interest in the pos­sibility and limitations of human life, see Childhood's End (New York, 1991— first published in 1953).

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