Modern Man in Search of a Soul

by C.G. Jung

As soon as man was capable of conceiving the idea of sin, he had recourse to psychic concealment—or, to put it in analytical language, repressions arose. Anything that is concealed is a secret. The maintenance of secrets acts like a psychic poison which alienates their possessor from the community. In small doses, this poison may actually be a priceless remedy, even an essential preliminary to the differentiation of the individual.

it has its place in the initiation ceremonies, chiefly in the forms of ascetic continence and the stoical endurance of pain and fear. Self-restraint, however, is here practised within the secret society as something undertaken in company with others. But if self-restraint is only a private matter, and perhaps devoid of any religious aspect, then it may be as harmful as the personal secret. From this kind of self-restraint come our well-known ugly moods and the irritability of the over-virtuous. The emotion withheld is also something we conceal—something which we can hide even from ourselves—an

an art in which men particularly excel, while women, with very few exceptions, are by nature averse to doing such violence to their emotions. When emotion is withheld it tends to isolate and disturb us quite as much as an unconscious secret, and is equally guilt-laden. Just as nature bears us ill-will, as it were, if we possess a secret to which mankind has not attained, so also has she a grudge against us if we withhold our emotions from our fellow-men. Nature decidedly abhors a vacuum in this respect, in the long run nothing is more unbearable than a tepid harmony in personal relations brought about by withholding emotion.

The repressed emotions are often of a kind we wish to keep secret. But more often there is no secret worthy of the name; there are merely quite avowable emotions which, from being withheld at some important juncture, have become unconscious. It is probable that one form of neurosis is conditioned by the predominance of secrets, and another by the predominance of restrained emotions. At any rate the hysterical subject,...

To cherish secrets and to restrain emotions are psychic misdemeanours for which nature finally visits us with sickness—that is, wh...

It seems to be a sin in the eyes of nature to hide our insufficiency—just as much as to live entirely on our inferior side. There appears to be a conscience in mankind which severely punishes the man who does not somehow and at some time, at whatever cost to his pride, cease to defend and assert himself, and instead confess himself fallible and human. Until he can do this, an impenetrable wall shuts him out from the living experience of feeling himself a man among men. Here we find a key to the great significance of true, unstereotyped confession—a significance known

in all the initiation and mystery cults of the ancient world, as is shown by a saying from the Greek mysteries: “Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive.”

putting the patient, with or without hypnotic aid, in touch with the hinterland of his mind—that is to say, into that state which the Eastern yoga systems describe as meditation or contemplation. In contrast to the meditation found in yoga practice, the psychoanalytic aim is to observe the shadowy presentations—whether in the form of images or of feelings—that are spontaneously evolved in the unconscious psyche and appear without his bidding to the man who looks within. In this way we find once more things that we have repressed or forgotten. Painful though it may be, this is in itself a gain—for what is inferior or even worthless belongs to me as my shadow and gives me substance and mass.

How can I be substantial if I fail to cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also if I am to be whole; and inasmuch as I become conscious of my shadow I also remember that I am a human being like any other. In any case, when I keep

The goal of treatment by catharsis is full confession—no merely intellectual acknowledgement of the facts, but their confirmation by the heart and the actual release of the suppressed emotions.

“transference.”

Man believes indeed that he moulds these ideas, but in reality they mould him and make him their unwitting mouthpiece. To return again

A man can hope for satisfaction and fulfillment only in what he does not yet possess; he cannot find pleasure in something of which he has already had too

much. To be a socially adapted being has no charms for one to whom to be so is mere child’s play. Always to do what is right becomes a bore for the man who knows how, whereas the eternal bungler cherishes the secret longing to be right for once in some distant future. The needs and necessities of individuals

What sets one free is for another...

for instance normality and adaptation. Although it is a biological dictum that man is a herd animal and is only healthy when he lives...

About a third of my cases are suffering from no clinically definable

neurosis, but from the senselessness and emptiness of their lives. It seems to me, however, that this can well be described as the general neurosis of our time. Fully two-thirds of my patients have passed middle age. It is difficult to treat patients of this particular kind by rational methods, because they are in the main socially well-adapted individuals of considerable ability, to whom normalization means nothing. As for so-called normal people, I am even worse off in their regard, for I have no ready-made life-philosophy to hand out to them. In the majority of my cases, the resources of consciousness have been exhausted; the ordinary expression for this situation is: “I am stuck.” It is chiefly this fact that forces me to look for hidden possibilities. For I do not know what to say to

the patient when he asks me: “What do you advise? What shall I do?” I do not know any better than he. I know only one thing: that when to my conscious outlook there is no possible way of going ahead, and I am therefore “stu...

hand, I know that if we meditate on a dream sufficiently long and thoroughly—if we take it about with us and turn it over and over—something almost always comes of it. This

The least of things with a meaning is worth more in life than the greatest of things without it.

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.

My aim is to bring about a psychic state in which my patient begins to experiment with his own nature—a state of fluidity, change and growth, in which there is no longer any...

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.

It is otherwise with the patient in the second half of life who no longer needs to educate

his conscious will, but who, to understand the meaning of his individual life, must learn to experience his own inner being. Social usefulness is no longer an aim for him, although he does not question its desirability. Fully aware as he is of the social unimportance of his creative activity, he looks upon it as a way of working out his own development and thus benefiting himself. This activity likewise frees him progressively from a morbid dependence, and he thus wins an inner firmness and a new trust in himself. These last achievements in turn serve to further the patient in his social existence. For an inwardly sound and self-confident person will be more adequate to his social tasks than one who is not on good terms with his unconscious.

The existence of a parental complex therefore tells us little or nothing about the peculiar constitution of the individual. Practical experience soon teaches us that the crux of the matter does not lie in the presence of a parental complex, but rather in the special way in which the complex works itself out in the life of the individual. As to this we observe the most striking variations, and only a very small number can be attributed to the special traits of parental influence. There are often several children who are exposed to the same influence, and yet each reacts to it in a totally different way.

recognized. Why, in a neurotic family, does one child react with hysteria, another with a compulsion neurosis, the third with a psychosis, and the fourth apparently not at all?

This problem of the “choice of the neurosis”, with which Freud also was confronted, robs the parental complex as such of all ætiological meaning, and shifts the enquiry to the reacting individual and his special disposition. Although Freud’s attempts to solve this problem leave me entirely unsatisfied, I am myself unable to answer the question. Indeed, I think the time is not yet ripe for raising this question of the choice of the neurosis. Before we take up this extremely difficult problem, we must know a great deal more about the way in which the individual reacts.

Opinions differ very widely as to what this apparatus is like. It is certain only that every individual has his accustomed way of meeting decisions and of dealing with difficulties. One person will say he jumped the brook for the fun of the thing; another that it was because there was no alternative; a third that every obstacle he meets challenges him to overcome it. A fourth person did not jump the brook because he hates useless effort, and a fifth refrained because he saw no urgent necessity for crossing to the other side.

It is the growth of consciousness which we must thank for the existence of problems; they are the dubious gift of civilization. It is just man’s turning away from instinct—his opposing himself to instinct—that creates consciousness. Instinct is nature and seeks to perpetuate nature; while consciousness can only seek culture or its denial. Even when we turn back to nature, inspired by a Rousseauesque longing, we “cultivate” nature.

Every problem, therefore, brings the possibility of a widening of consciousness—but also the

necessity of saying goodbye to childlike unconsciousness and trust in nature. This necessity is a psychic fact of such importance

the merely natural man—of the unconscious, ingenuous being whose tragic career began with the eating of the apple in Paradise. The biblical fall of man presents the dawn of consciousness as a curse. And as a matter of fact it is in this light that we first look upon every problem that

We choose to have certainties and no doubts—results and no experiments—without even seeing that certainties can arise only through doubt, and results through experiment.

There are no problems without consciousness.

We must therefore put the question in another way:

In what way does consciousness arise? Nobody can say with certainty; but we can observe small childr...

conscious. Every parent can see it, if he pays attention. And this is what we are able to observe: when the child recognizes someone or something—when he “knows” a person or a thing—then we feel that the child has consciousness. That, no doubt, is also why in...

diastole,

Psychology teaches us that, in a certain sense, there is nothing in the psyche that is old; nothing that can really, definitively die away. Even Paul was left with a sting in his flesh. Whoever protects himself against what is new and strange and thereby regresses to the past, falls into the same neurotic condition as the man who identifies himself with the new and runs away from the past. The only difference is that the one has estranged himself from the past,

and the other from the future. In principle both are doing the same thing; they are salvaging a narrow state of consciousness. The alternative is to shatter it with the tension inherent in the play of opposites—in the dualistic stage—and thereby to build up a state of wider and higher consciousness.

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. This being so, a particular solution of the difficulty

aptitudes,

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.

Si jeunesse savait, si vieillesse pouvait.

But beyond that there is a thinking in primordial images—in symbols which are older than historical man; which have been ingrained in him from earliest times, and, eternally living, outlasting all generations, still make up the groundwork of the human psyche. It is only possible to live the fullest life when we are in harmony with these symbols; wisdom is a return to them. It is neither a question of belief nor of knowledge, but of the agreement of our thinking with the primordial images of the unconscious.

ephemeral

Is not every experience, even in the best of circumstances, to a large extent subjective interpretation? On the other hand, the subject also is an objective fact, a piece of the world. What issues from it comes, after all, from the universal soil, just as the rarest and strangest organism is none the less supported and nourished by the earth which we all share in common. It is precisely the most subjective