WHAT’S SO GOOD ABOUT TRYING TO BE PERFECT? Not much, according to the highly influential Jungian analyst, Erich Neumann. In 1949, Neumann published Depth Psychology and the New Ethic, arguing that the “old ethic” of perfection was doing so much damage to individual well-being and human survival, that it had to give way to new values and a new ethical ideal.
“Saintly perfection” has been the Western ethical ideal for millennia. Based in part on the words of Jesus — “Be perfect … as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5:48) — the ideal calls us to resist every evil temptation and overcome every inclination to bad behavior. As any saint will tell you, however, “saintly perfection” is impossible for any human to achieve. Ascetic discipline and rigorous spiritual practice might help, but only God’s grace will make perfection possible. (The Lord’s Prayer also makes this point in its petitions.)
Even so, many still believe that a little more personal effort just might make the difference, but if not, one day, on the last day, evil will be destroyed and perfect good will prevail, forever. Perfection, though impossible to attain, remains the cultural ideal.
As Neumann correctly recognized, the collective ideal pulling us toward perfection leads to the repression of everything in human nature judged to be imperfect (and thus, evil). To repress so much of human being requires humans, both individually and collectively, to deny and split off natural parts of the personality.
Creating an abyssal split in the psyche between an ego struggling to be always good and an unconscious seen to be full of evil darkness causes us to live as “partial personalities” suffering from serious psychic illnesses. What Jungian’s call the shadow, grows with each repression, remaining unconscious but always being experienced in unfair projections that distort and destroy our relations with so many other people. On the collective level, shadow projections fuel social conflicts, ethnic tensions, religious inquisitions, and too many wars to count — with no end in sight.
The old ethic of perfection, thus, could be called “evil” at least as justifiably as it could be called “good.” The new ethic, on the other hand, values human wholeness rather than human perfection, and wholeness is a real human possibility.
Ironically, if “Be perfect … as your heavenly Father is perfect” is understood properly, the exhortation actually urges us to seek and value wholeness.
When I looked up the adjective “perfect” in my trusty, old “Funk & Wagnall’s” dictionary, I discovered that the first meaning isn’t the “without evil or fault” understanding that’s at the heart of the old ethic. Instead, the primary meaning is “complete.” The same is true of the Greek word behind the translation of the verse in Matthew. The primary meaning of the Greek adjective teleios is also “complete” or in some contexts “mature.” It describes something that has fulfilled its purpose, and it is cognate with a verb meaning “to complete, finish, accomplish.”
So, here the insight of modern depth psychology lines up with a correct understanding of the wisdom of Jesus — and both suggest that the contours of our traditional campaign to eradicate evil are misguided. The ideal for which we should aim isn’t a one-sided “perfection” entirely free of “sin” and “evil,” but instead should be human wholeness or “perfection” understood as the fulfillment of our purpose, or becoming whole. Achieving wholeness is the process of “reaching one through addition” rather than through subtraction. It’s about becoming more conscious, more integrated, more unified, more fully human — and more fully divine, too.
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