Book Club: Demian by Hermann Hesse

[Originally published on my Medium page: link here]

• Rate: 4/5
• Time: Can be read in less than a day
• Length: Smidge over 100 pages (short)

Demian is a coming-of-age novel of the protagonist and narrator Emil Sinclair. The reader is pulled into Sinclair’s psychological labyrinth as it grows desire, fear, confusion, and frustrations with the world and his own being. The underlying themes of the book bringing up age-old discussion and interpretations that reads differently towards every reader. I’d like to say that the first half reads as an autobiography of an ordinary person. The last bit of the novel does venture deep into Carl Jung’s’ theory of the collective unconscious, embedding archetypes and symbolisms that would make Jung proud.

I planned to take my time, reading only two chapters a sitting. However, it became impossible to want to put it down. Didn’t love Sinclair nor felt particularly any hate for him, I was curious to see where Sinclair ended up; Hesse has a way of introducing a character and wrapping you into them, as opposed to their world or relationships. I will say that I had to double-take when trying to figure out the Emil/Demian/Eva scenes.

Would you need to know psychology to enjoy the book? Nope, it’s a good story for readers that love classics and take pride in discussion (either alone or with a book club!)

Would it help to know a little psychology? Yes, and it’ll take you on a margin scribbling joyride.

Final sayings? Totally PG should be in the school curriculum, and the egg/bird quote is phenomenal

If you’ve already read it or don’t care for spoilers keep reading below.

Concept Spoilers:

1. TWO WORLDS: At first glance, this concept seems to reflect heavily on religious upbringing that a vast majority of individuals experience. The notion of growing up with preconceived ideologies attach Sinclair to dogmatic judgements of everything from the world, his peers, and even towards himself. While this concept and system of rights and wrongs does hold some foundation, it doesn’t encompass the complexity of the real world. The black and white perspective gets ultimately defeated and rendered useless when the argument of what is forbidden and permitted come up. The individual is in control of the rights and wrongs through their own boundaries, the external enforcement (be it laws or religion) deters back the Lawrence Kohlberg’s first level of cognitive development.
2. DEMIAN: Theres an interesting push and pull throughout the novel, as Demian, this enigmatic characters is a key figure in the development of Sinclair, allows Sinclair to do as he pleases only acting and speaking in pivotal scenes. Arriving with a district interpretation of the biblical Cain and Abel, he embodies the conflict and the temptation of breaking out of the two worlds view. He lets Emil retreat into his safe heaven after rescuing him from Franz’ tormenting, withdrawing his thoughts when going too far, and not interfering when seeing him at his lowest point. Guidance is the main word that comes up when thinking of Demian and he plays the role flawlessly.
3. ABRAXAS: I think the presence of the bird/egg painting and Abraxas is the major turning point in the novel where Emil goes from going through life to seeking a purpose and venturing into and outside of himself. Can write a 10 page essay on just how much I love the quote. The processes of Emil being introduced to his passion and his life goal and desires depends desperately on him breaking free from his past self and world. To be reborn into something new there must be the destruction of the old self/way. Abraxas also has strong attachment towards mysticism, mystery, and exclusivity of acquired knowledge - it is something that is not found by accident, but by intention.
4. PSYCHOLOGY: The concepts are there and this book provides great points of psychological discussion involving Freuds’ Oedipus complex and the majority of archetypes and symbols in Jung’s Collective unconscious. This shifts a lot of the relationships between the characters to be treated more like symbolic events/theories and personas. It’s would be simple to say Emil love Eva, but it wouldn’t do the novel justice by dismissing many other references that fit into this; such as the great mother, the dual mothers, and the animus-anima. Pick your poison, explore, and discuss.

Noteworthy Quotes:

• When poets write novels they are apt to behave as if they were gods, with the power to look beyond and comprehend any human story and serve it up as if the almighty himself, omnipresent, were relating it in all its naked truth. (Prologue, Demian)
• When I pictured the devil to myself, I found no difficulty in visualizing him in the streets below, disguised or undisguised, or at the fair or at the taverns but never at home. (Chapter 1, Demian)
• He too was a ‘temper’ and moreover my link with the second, evil world with which I never wanted anything more to do. (Chapter 2, Demian)
• Therefore each one of us must discover for himself what is permitted and what is forbidden as far as he himself is concerned. It is possible never to do a forbidden thing yet be the real villain. (Chapter 3, Demian)
• It was the pattern of my life and death; It expressed the tone and rhythm of my fate. (Chapter 4, Demian)
• The bird is struggling out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born must first destroy a world. The bird id flying to god. The name of the god is called Abraxas. (Chapter 5, Demian)
• When we hate someone we are hating something that is within ourselves, in his image. We are never stirred up by something which does not already exist within us. (Chapter 6, Demian)
• I have grown accustomed to my inner life, resigned to the fact that I had lost my feeling for the outside world and that the loss of its bright colors was an inseparable part of the loss of childhood and that one must to some extent pay for the freedom and maturity of the soul with the renunciation of those pure gleams of light. (Chapter 6, Demian)

Demian by Hermann Hesse

The cornerstone of Jung’s psychology is the theory of the collective unconscious. A rough understanding of it – if not more! – is very important for understanding introversion. In my opinion, the fact that people have apparently forgotten it, that no one discusses it on internet typology communities, has caused a lot of confusion and misunderstanding. So, strap in for this one.

Jung’s predecessor and mentor, Freud, first viewed the unconscious as a receptacle (read: trash can) of thoughts, feelings, memories, and above all sexual and aggressive impulses, that people repressed in order to function in civilised society and keep up their peace of mind (or the illusion of it). Jung thought that was just one part of the picture. He thought up a deeper, older, and more fundamental part of the mind; he called it the collective unconscious, and said it was made up of archetypes.

You can picture it something like this: Just as everyone has a body that’s basically the same as every other human body (four limbs, one head, a liver, a heart), so does the mind have a basic substructure common to all of us. Our bodies and psyches are only different on a surface level. That’s why Jung called this part of the unconscious “collective”, in that it’s shared by everyone – not as a single, amorphous “psychic” blob that everyone can access, but as a structure that is born again in every individual. Some parts of it might be as old as the psyche itself, in the same way that parts of our bodies are so old that we share them with other mammals, and even reptiles.

The collective unconscious houses the archetypes. These are typical patterns of thought or cognition, the logical result of all of us having the same nervous system. Some of these structures seem to show up in our imaginations in the same way, time and time again, in specific symbols or archetypal images. Jung called them the “self-portraits of the instincts”. And, in fact, there is a lot of overlap between the concepts of instinctandarchetype: Just as we think of instincts as fixed, automatic, and inborn patterns of behaviour, an archetype is a fixed, inborn pattern of mental activity. Archetypes are tied up with a myriad of facts of human existence, since they’ve developed over millions of years of human and pre-human life. We find the corresponding archetypal images in every culture, in all mythologies and religions, and also in our own spontaneous dreams and fantasies.

For any of our psychological functions, the influence of the outside world is the same as the influence of the collective unconscious, the “inner world”. Extroversion and introversion are where our energy goes, where we direct our interest: Whether we’re trying to grasp, shape, and benefit from something in the outer world, or if we’re trying to do the same with an inner archetype. Introverts do this through their favoured function – Thinking builds theories with the help of the archetypal substructure; Feeling finds powerful, universal values in them. Sensation understands that the things it sees have meaning, pattern, and form; Intuition gets impressions straight from the unconscious imagination. 

Remember that while introverted functions are influenced by the archetypes, we don’t experience them directly. The archetypes themselves are just pattern and form; they’re tendency, not content. They still have to be “filled up” by our personal experiences. Once we’ve “brought one to life” with carefully (but organically!) organised facts, thoughts, and feelings, we can see the archetypal form beneath it all.

We can find an example of this in modern physics’ quest to find a unifying theory of the universe – a “Theory of Everything”. This is a perfect example of Thinking basing itself on an archetype (which would make it IntrovertedThinking). Namely, it’s the archetype of wholeness or unity – what Jung calls the self–  which is often drawn as a mandala: Everything is contained within a circle. Nothing is left out. The physicists build a theory around the archetype, in a way that clearly shows just how compelling it is to them. On the other hand, an Extroverted Thinker might think that kind of project is pointless or even boring, unless he finds himself in an environment where it’s really needed (like a physics academy dominated by Introverts).

To recap: The collective unconscious is an ancient, inherited part of our minds. It’s made up of archetypes, which are fixed patterns of thought and imagination, the mental counterpart to instincts. Archetypes have evolved over millions of years, so they represent many facts of life in abstract forms. Introversion focuses interest and energy on these archetypes, so that any function, when it’s introverted, is drawn to their universal forms.