Modern Man in Search of a Soul

by C.G. Jung

nothing is more unbearable for the patient than to be always understood.

It is in applied psychology, if anywhere, that today we should be modest and grant validity to a number of apparently contradictory opinions; for we are still far from having anything like a thorough knowledge of the human psyche, that most challenging field of scientific enquiry.

However far-fetched it may sound, experience shows that many neuroses are caused by the fact that people blind themselves to their own religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational enlightenment.

We might perhaps call this a new illusion—but what is illusion? By what criterion do we judge something to be an illusion? Does there exist for the psyche anything which we may call "illusion"? What we are pleased to call such may be for the psyche a most important factor of life—something as indispensable as oxygen for the organism—a psychic actuality of prime importance. Presumably the psyche does not trouble itself about our categories of reality, and it would therefore be the better part of wisdom for us to say: everything that acts is actual.

The materialistic views of our day have a tendency which we can discern in archaic thought. Both lead to the conclusion that the individual is a mere resultant; in the first case, he is the resultant of natural causes, and in the second, of chance occurrences. According to both accounts, human individuality is nothing in its own right, but rather the accidental product of forces contained in the objective environment. This is through and through the archaic conception of the world according to which the single human being is never considered unique, but always interchangeable with any other and easily dispensable. By way of a narrow view of causality, modern materialism has returned to the standpoint of archaic man.

Every period has its bias, its particular prejudice and its psychic ailment. An epoch is like an individual; it has its own limitations of conscious outlook, and therefore requires a compensatory adjustment.

The gods whom we are called to dethrone are the idolized values of our conscious world.

Whenever relativism is taken as a fundamental and final principle it has a destructive effect.

there is a good story about the American president, "silent Cal" Coolidge. When he returned after an absence one Sunday morning his wife asked him where he had been. "To church", he replied. "What did the minister say?" "He talked about sin." "And what did he say about sin?" "He was against it."