Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Routledge Classics)

by C.G. Jung

This brings me back to the Freudian view, mentioned above, that for the purposes of therapy it is necessary for the patient to become conscious of the causal factors in his disturbance—a view that is little more than a survival of the old theory of the trauma.

The doctor must give his whole attention to the patient’s past; he must always ask: “Why?”and neglect the equally pertinent question: “What for?”

Nothing is unclear to the understanding; it is only when we fail to understand that things appear unintelligible and confused.

For the purposes of therapy, moreover, it is highly important for the analyst to admit his lack of understanding from time to time, for nothing is more unbearable for the patient than to be always understood.

Perhaps we may call the dream a façade, but we must remember that the fronts of most houses by no means trick or deceive us, but, on the contrary, follow the plan of the building and often betray its inner arrangement.

Dreams give information about the secrets of the inner life and reveal to the dreamer hidden factors of his personality. As long as these are undiscovered, they disturb his waking life and betray themselves only in the form of symptoms.

The psyche is a self-regulating system that maintains itself in equilibrium as the body does. Every process that goes too far immediately and inevitably calls forth a compensatory activity.

It is always helpful, when we set out to interpret a dream, to ask: What conscious attitude does it compensate?

This is why every dream is a source of information and a means of self-regulation, and why dreams are our most effective aids in the task of building up the personality.

It is of the first importance for the assimilation of dream-contents that no violence be done to the real values of the conscious personality. If the conscious personality is destroyed, or even crippled, there is no one left to do the assimilating.

The familiar word “mother” refers apparently to the best-known of mothers in particular—to “my mother”. But the mother symbol points to a darker meaning which eludes conceptual formulation and can only be vaguely apprehended as the hidden, nature-bound life of the body. Yet even this expression is too narrow, and excludes too many pertinent side-meanings. The psychic reality which underlies this symbol is so inconceivably complex that we can only discern it from afar off, and then but very dimly. It is such realities that call for symbolic expression.

The difficulty of gaining access to the mind is gradually borne in upon us, and the mind itself is seen to be, to use Nietzsche’s expression, a “horned” problem.

Be that as it may, I venture to arrange the sum-total of findings under the four heads of confession, explanation, education, and transformation.

the unconscious has contents peculiar to itself which, slowly growing upward from the depths, at last come into consciousness. We should therefore in no wise picture the unconscious psyche to ourselves as a mere receptacle for contents discarded by the conscious mind. All psychic contents which either approach the threshold of consciousness from below, or have sunk only slightly beneath it, have an effect upon our conscious activities. Since the content itself is not conscious, these effects are necessarily indirect.

Now another form of concealment is the act of “withholding”—it being usually emotions that are withheld. As in the case of secrets, so here also we must make a reservation: self-restraint is healthful and beneficial; it is even a virtue. This is why we find self-discipline to have been one of man’s earliest moral attainments. Among primitive peoples it has its place in the initiation ceremonies, chiefly in the forms of ascetic continence and the stoical endurance of pain and fear.

At any rate the hysterical subject, who is very free with his emotions, is most often the possessor of a secret, while the hardened psychasthenic suffers from inability to digest his emotions.

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.

even the name catharsis (or cleansing), which was given to the earliest method of treatment, comes from the Greek initiation rites.

there are many patients, for the most part complicated, highly conscious persons, who are so firmly anchored in consciousness that nothing can pry them loose. They often develop the most violent resistances whenever an attempt is made to push consciousness aside; they wish to talk with the physician of things about which they are fully conscious—to make their difficulties intelligible and to discuss them. They already have quite enough to confess, they say; they do not have to turn to the unconscious for that.

It is both curious and significant that there are cases where no attachment develops. The patient goes away apparently cured—but he is now so fascinated by the hinterland of his own mind that he continues to practise catharsis by himself at the expense of his adaptation to life. He is bound to the unconscious—to himself—not to the physician. He has obviously shared the experience of Theseus and his comrade Pirithous in their descent to Hades to bring back the goddess of the underworld. Tiring on the way, they sat down to rest for a while, only to find that they had grown to the rocks and could not rise.

No thoughtful person will deny that Salomon Reinach’s explanation of the Last Supper in terms of primitive totemism is fraught with meaning;

Nothing influences our conduct less than do intellectual ideas. But when an idea is the expression of psychic experience which bears fruit in regions as far separated and as free from historical relation as East and West, then we must look into the matter closely. For such ideas represent forces that are beyond logical justification and moral sanction; they are always stronger than man and his brain. Man believes indeed that he moulds these ideas, but in reality they mould him and make him their unwitting mouthpiece.

A normal adaptation and patience with his own shortcomings will become his guiding moral principles, and he will try to free himself from sentimentality and illusion. The inevitable result will be that he turns away from the unconscious as from a source of weakness and temptation—the field of moral and social defeat.

for people who have far more ability than the average, for whom it was never hard to gain successes and to accomplish their share of the world’s work—for them restriction to the normal signifies the bed of Procrustes, unbearable boredom,

The unconscious changes in the doctor which the patient thus brings about are well known to many psychotherapists; they are disturbances, or even injuries, peculiar to the profession, which illustrate in a striking way the patient’s almost “chemical” influence. One of the best known of them is the counter-transference which the transference evokes. But the effects are often more subtle, and their nature is best conveyed by the old idea of the demon of sickness. According to this a sufferer transmits his disease to a healthy person whose powers subdue the demon—but not without a negative influence upon the well-being of the healer.

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. Mere talk has always been considered hollow, and there is no trick, however cunning, by which one can evade this simple rule for long.

As a rule, the life of a young person is characterized by a general unfolding and a striving toward concrete ends; his neurosis, if he develops one, can be traced to his hesitation or his shrinking back from this necessity. But the life of an older person is marked by a contraction of forces, by the affirmation of what has been achieved, and the curtailment of further growth. His neurosis comes mainly from his clinging to a youthful attitude which is now out of season. Just as the youthful neurotic is afraid of life, so the older one shrinks back from death.

it is well known that we are susceptible only to those suggestions with which we are already secretly in accord. No harm is done if now and then one goes astray in this riddle-reading. Sooner or later the psyche rejects the mistake, much as an organism does a foreign body.

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.

This is important, for when something quite universal happens to a man and he supposes it to be an experience peculiar to himself, then his attitude is obviously wrong, that is, too personal, and it tends to exclude him from human society.

The enigmatic oneness of the living being has as its necessary corollary the fact that bodily traits are not merely physical, nor mental traits merely psychic. The continuity of nature knows nothing of those antithetical distinctions which the human intellect is forced to set up as helps to understanding.

so intimate is the intermingling of bodily and psychic traits that not only can we draw far-reaching inferences as to the constitution of the psyche from the constitution of the body, but we can also infer from psychic peculiarities the corresponding bodily characteristics. It is true that the latter process is more difficult; but this is surely not because there is a greater influence of the body over the mind than vice versa, but for quite another reason. In taking the mind as our starting-point we work our way from the relatively unknown to the known;