"Oddly, it is only the maladjusted who are able to stand the passages." – Past Master, Chapter 2
"Man, what a reversal in polarity!" – Chapter 2
A discussion point in Past Master is why only the maladjusted can withstand Hopp-Equation travel, which enables instantaneous space travel—but with extreme psychological and physical consequences. Most readers recognize the link between Hopp-Equation space and Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, which Lafferty externalizes by turning it inside out. But other Jungian ideas—specifically enantiodromia (the sudden reversal of psychological states into their opposites under extreme conditions) and the principle of compensation (the psyche’s tendency to self-correct imbalance)—are also twisted satirically into literal, physical phenomena.
In Jung’s analytical psychology, enantiodromia usually operates subtly. It influences dreams, fantasies, and minor behavioral shifts, although under intense psychic pressure, it can abruptly trigger dramatic reversals in identity or worldview. In Past Master, the Hopp-Equation violently forces reversals of polarity: Paul suddenly becomes left-handed, Thomas More a soprano. The maladjusted withstand Hopp-Equation travel precisely because they're already psychologically unstable. Their existing wobbliness allows them to absorb violent reversals without shattering. The well-adjusted, however, crack precisely because their carefully maintained psychic balance leaves them vulnerable to abrupt inversion.
This is where Lafferty’s satire of Jung is sharpest. Instead of enantiodromia being a subtle psychological mechanism—as it presumably is outside Hopp-Equation Space—here, it becomes a harsh physical law, brutally imposed from the outside, regardless of whether travelers can handle it. Why? Because in Hopp Space, the collective unconscious itself has been exteriorized, stripped of subtlety, and inverted into an external cosmic reality.
If you've read Space Chantey (1968), you know Lafferty often plays conceptual games of this sort. There, he externalizes a philosophical idea when he makes George Berkeley’s subjective idealism a physical law through Atlas's booth.
The final piece of Hopp-Equation Space satire is how Lafferty inflates Jung's cherished principle of compensation into pulp SF absurdity. This really is going for the throat. In analytical psychology, it’s the psyche’s built-in self-regulation, but Lafferty warps it into the Conservation of Psychic Totality—a cosmic law instead of a mental process. By capitalizing it, he shows just how ridiculous he finds it.
Here is a typical passage from Jung's Man and His Symbols (1964), a book that popularized Jung's ideas and was everywhere when Lafferty was writing his novel: "But how can a human being stand the tension of feeling himself at one with the whole universe, while at the same time he is only a miserable earthly human creature? If, on the one hand, I despise myself as merely a statistical cipher, my life has no meaning and is not worth living. But if, on the other hand, I feel myself to be part of something much greater, how am I to keep my feet on the ground? It is very difficult indeed to keep these inner opposites united within oneself without toppling over into one or the other extreme."
So there you have it: in Hopp-Equation Space, the collective unconscious—along with its archetypes and mechanisms—are Laffertianized.
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