Modern Man in Search of a Soul (Routledge Classics)

by C.G. Jung

true that much of the evil in the world is due to the fact that man in general is hopelessly unconscious, as it is also true that with increasing insight we can combat this evil at its source in ourselves. As science enables us to deal with injuries inflicted from without, so it helps us to treat those arising from within.

For every piece of conscious life that loses its importance and value—so runs the law—there arises a compensation in the unconscious.

The doctor’s words, to be sure, are “only” vibrations in the air, yet they constitute a particular set of vibrations corresponding to a particular psychic state in the doctor. The words are effective only in so far as they convey a meaning or have significance. It is their meaning which is effective. But “meaning” is something mental or spiritual. Call it a fiction if you like. None the less it enables us to influence the course of the disease in a far more effective way than with chemical preparations.

Nothing is surely more intangible and unreal than fictions, illusions and opinions; and yet nothing is more effective in the psychic and even the psychophysical realm.

A psycho-neurosis must be understood as the suffering of a human being who has not discovered what life means for him.

The patient is looking for something that will take possession of him and give meaning and form to the confusion of his neurotic mind.

This is quite similar to what people expect when they come looking for religions.

Human thought cannot conceive any system or final truth that could give the patient what he needs in order to live: that is, faith, hope, love and insight.

But how is the patient, before he has come to experience, to obtain that which only experience can give him?

It seems to me, that, side by side with the decline of religious life, the neuroses grow noticeably more frequent.

We can get in touch with another person only by an attitude of unprejudiced objectivity.

It is a human quality—a kind of deep respect for facts and events and for the person who suffers from them—a respect for the secret of such a human life.

It is a moral achievement on the part of the doctor, who ought not to let himself be repelled by illness and corruption. We cannot change anything unless we accept it.

But if the doctor wishes to help a human being he must be able to accept him as he is. And he can do this in reality only when he has already seen and accepted himself as he is.

Only he who has fully accepted himself has “unprejudiced objectivity”.

Neurosis is an inner cleavage—the state of being at war with oneself.

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.

The psychotherapist who takes his work seriously must come to grips with this question. He must decide in every single case whether or not he is willing to stand by a human being with counsel and help upon what may be a daring misadventure.

The opening up of the unconscious always means the outbreak of intense spiritual suffering; it is as when a flourishing civilization is abandoned to invading hordes of barbarians, or when fertile fields are exposed by the bursting of a dam to a raging torrent.