Modern Man in Search of a Soul

by C.G. Jung

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.

All these guiding principles in therapy confront the doctor with important ethical duties which can be summed up in the single rule: be the man through whom you wish to influence others.

The creative activity of the imagination frees man from his bondage to the “nothing but” and liberates in him the spirit of play. As Schiller says, man is completely human only when he is playing.

Many of my more advanced patients, then, begin to paint. I can well understand that everyone will consider this as an utterly futile sort of dilettantism. However, it must be remembered that we are speaking not of people who have still to prove their social usefulness, but of those who can no longer find significance in their value to society, and who have come upon the deeper and more dangerous question of the meaning of their individual lives. To be a particle in a mass has meaning and charm only for the man who has not yet advanced to that stage, but none for the man who has experienced it to satiety. The importance of individual life may always be denied by the “educator” whose pride it is to breed mass-men. But any other person will sooner or later be driven to find this meaning for himself.

I might, perhaps, content myself by referring to Columbus, who, by using subjective assumptions, a false hypothesis, and a route abandoned by modern navigation, nevertheless discovered America.

Here we should speak of “sensation” when the sense organs are involved, and of intuition if we are dealing with a kind of perception which cannot be traced directly to conscious sensory experience. I have therefore defined sensation as perception through conscious sensory processes, and intuition as perception by way of unconscious contents and connections.

When we must deal with problems, we instinctively refuse to try the way that leads through darkness and obscurity. We wish to hear only of unequivocal results, and completely forget that these results can only be brought about when we have ventured into and emerged again from the darkness.

This outcome would be ideal if it could be brought about in the second stage of life—but here is the rub. For one thing, nature cares nothing whatsoever about a higher level of consciousness; quite the contrary. And then society does not value these feats of the psyche very highly; its prizes are always given for achievement and not for personality—the latter being rewarded, for the most part, posthumously.

For this reason we suppose them to be eternally valid, and make a virtue of unchangeably clinging to them. We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality.

The wine of youth does not always clear with advancing years; oftentimes it grows turbid. All the manifestations mentioned above can be most clearly seen in rather one-sided people, turning up sometimes sooner and sometimes later. In my opinion, their appearance is often delayed by the fact that a person’s parents are still alive. It is then as if the period of youth were unduly continued. I have seen this especially in the cases of men whose fathers were long-lived. The death of the father then has the effect of an overhurried—an almost catastrophic—ripening.

This transformation weighs more heavily still in the psychic realm than in the physical. How often it happens that a man of forty or fifty years winds up his business, and that his wife then dons the trousers and opens a little shop where he sometimes performs the duties of handyman.

The worst of it all is that intelligent and cultivated people have these leanings without even knowing of the possibility of such transformations. Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world and of life?

I said just now that we have no schools for forty-year-olds. That is not quite true. Our religions were always such schools in the past, but how many people regard them as such today? How many of us older persons have really been brought up in such a school and prepared for the second half of life, for old age, death and eternity?

But when this purpose has been attained—and even more than attained—shall the earning of money, the extension of conquests and the expansion of life go steadily on beyond the bounds of all reason and sense? Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning—that is, the aims of nature—must pay for so doing with damage to his soul just as surely as a growing youth who tries to salvage his childish egoism must pay for this mistake with social failure. Moneymaking, social existence, family and posterity are nothing but plain nature—not culture. Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature. Could by any chance culture be the meaning and purpose of the second half of life?

I have observed that a directed life is in general better, richer and healthier than an aimless one, and that it is better to go forwards with the stream of time than backwards against it.

It is being caught in the old resentments against parents and relations and in the boring emotional tangles of the family situation which most often brings about the damming-up of the energies of life.

It cannot be denied that primitive people are capable of concentrating upon things that interest them. If we try to give our attention to uninteresting matters, we soon notice how feeble our powers of concentration are. We ourselves, like them, are dependent upon emotional undercurrents.

If we consider the matter, we might as well say that the causal connection of events according to general laws is a theory which is borne out about half the time, while for the rest the demon of chance has his way.

“He who goes there is our father. You can see him. From him comes all light, all life—there is nothing that he has not made.” He became greatly excited, struggled for words, and finally exclaimed: “Even a man in the mountains who goes alone cannot make his fire without him.” The archaic standpoint can hardly be more beautifully expressed than by these words. The power that rules us comes from the external world, and through it alone are we permitted to live.

A very curious, but by no means rare, primitive conception identifies the soul with the name. The name of an individual is his soul, and hence arises the custom of using the ancestor’s name to reincarnate the ancestral soul in the new-born child.

When we were once speaking confidentially about the white man, he said to me: “We don’t understand the whites; they are always wanting something—always restless—always looking for something. What is it? We don’t know. We can’t understand them. They have such sharp noses, such thin, cruel lips, such lines in their faces. We think they are all crazy.”

Neurosis is an inner cleavage—the state of being at war with oneself. Everything that accentuates this cleavage makes the patient worse, and everything that mitigates it tends to heal the patient. What drives people to war with themselves is the intuition or the knowledge that they consist of two persons in opposition to one another. The conflict may be between the sensual and the spiritual man, or between the ego and the shadow. It is what Faust means when he says “Two souls, alas, dwell in my breast apart.” A neurosis is a dissociation of personality.

However wretched this state may be, it also stands him in good stead, for in this way alone can he take his own measure and learn what an invaluable treasure is the love of his fellow-beings. It is, moreover, only in the state of complete abandonment and loneliness that we experience the helpful powers of our own natures.