Modern Man in Search of a Soul

“I do not, of course, deny that many neuroses have a traumatic origin; I simply contest the notion that all neuroses are of this nature and arise without exception from some crucial experience of childhood.”

Jung differs from his mentor, Sigmund Freud, by asserting that not all mental health issues arise from childhood traumas. He also states that dreams don’t always point to the cause of a troubling issue, and that focusing exclusively on the search for a traumatic cause overlooks the power of dreams to forecast future behavior and offer solutions to problems.

“The unconscious is not a demonic monster, but a thing of nature that is perfectly neutral as far as moral sense, æsthetic taste and intellectual judgement go. It is dangerous only when our conscious attitude towards it becomes hopelessly false. And this danger grows in the measure that we practise repressions.”

A major break between Jung and his Freudian predecessors is his belief that the unconscious isn’t a dark morass but the inner workings of a mind that manifests itself through conscious awareness. The purpose of Jungian therapy therefore involves aligning the energies of conscious and unconscious impulses rather than helping the conscious mind stage-manage its unconscious underpinnings.

“Consciousness all too easily departs from the law of nature; but it can be brought again into harmony with the latter by the assimilation of unconscious contents. By fostering this process we lead the patient to the rediscovery of the law of his own being.”

In his departure from the Freudian idea of the unconscious, Jung posits that the unconscious contains deep urges meant to advance and protect the body. Overly intellectual people ignore those urges to their regret, but they can realign their lives by respecting their more basic needs.

“[W]hat 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.”

The point of Jungian therapy is to make peace with the parts of our psyche that we reject. These parts seem bad because they may cause us to be shunned by others; in fact, some parts may be strengths we haven’t yet acknowledged. The ongoing project of therapy is for the patient to come to terms with those parts and find a place for them in a full life.

“The end-product of the Freudian method of explanation is a detailed elaboration of man’s shadow-side such as had never been carried out before. It is the most effective antidote imaginable to all idealistic illusions about the nature of man; and it is therefore no wonder that there arose on all sides the most violent opposition to Freud and his school.”

People don’t want to hear that they’re capable of bad behavior; they want to believe that most humans are good and only some of them go down the wrong path. Freudian and Jungian analysis reveals the dark impulses within everyone and proposes that such an inventory, though painful, brings an opportunity to resolve patients’ struggles with their conflicting longings. Still, the very idea that anti-social thoughts well up from the depths of the human mind makes most people, especially those devoted to the betterment of humanity, turn away, arguing instead that focusing on the bad side will only enhance it.

“Our world is so exceedingly rich in delusions that a truth is priceless, and no one will let it slip because of a few exceptions with which it cannot be brought into accord. Whoever doubts this truth is of course looked upon as a faithless reprobate, while a note of fanaticism and intolerance creeps into the discussion on all sides.”

In an uncertain world, people cling to beliefs and won’t let go of them, even when they learn of something that contradicts those ideas. This can cause quarrels between different factions of a system of thought, such as the one that underlies psychoanalysis. The less certain are the facts about any such system, the more fanatical will be its adherents.

“The physician may no longer slip out of his own difficulties by treating the difficulties of others. He will remember that a man who suffers from a running abscess is not fit to perform a surgical operation.”

The therapist may influence the patient, but the patient also influences the therapist. Doctors who resist this fact, and the truth of their own built-in biases, will be generally unsuccessful; those who analyze their clients without analyzing themselves may even do harm.

“Not only have we as yet no generally valid psychology, but what is more, the variety of psychic constitutions is untold, and there also exist more or less individual psyches which refuse to fit into any general scheme.”

Jung prefers the modesty of the scientific attitude over the authoritative confidence of those who are sure their psychological theories explain everything in human consciousness. Clinical evidence suggests to Jung that, while there are definite trends among patients and their symptoms—the younger ones tending to express either an urge for pleasure or power—humanity is filled with exceptions, and no two individuals are the same. It’s vital, then, for therapists to keep open minds and not cling to simplistic theories.

“To the psychologist there is nothing more stupid than the standpoint of the missionary who pronounces the gods of the ‘poor heathen’ to be illusions. But unfortunately we keep blundering along in the same dogmatic way, as if what we call the real were not equally full of illusion.”

People the world over have beliefs about gods and the spiritual aspect of life, and though none of these beliefs have scientific support, each group defends zealously their version. One group will disdain another’s beliefs as childish illusions, while, to the outsider, both groups’ ideas seem childishly naive. What’s important about these beliefs is that they arise from a universal urge to know something of the spirit, a possible dimension just out of reach yet tantalizingly close; in that sense, there’s truth to all these beliefs, and in that sense we ought humbly to respect other’s views even if we disagree with them.

“Heretofore it has been thought that psychology could dispense with empirical data and be created as it were by decree—a prejudice under which we are still labouring.”

Psychotherapy deals with the most complex thing known to science, the human mind; getting a scientific handle on this subject is difficult at best, and early practitioners sometimes were more like charlatans than researchers. Jung wants to bring a more serious and orderly approach to psychoanalysis; this also is a subtle dig at Freud, whose theories often could be arbitrary and lacking in evidence.

“An intelligent man will make his adaptation to the world through his intelligence, and not in the manner of a sixth-rate pugilist, even though now and then, in a fit of rage, he may make use of his fists. In the struggle for existence and adaptation everyone instinctively uses his most developed function, which thus becomes the criterion of his habitual reactions.”

People are born with certain strengths and weaknesses, and they gravitate toward their strengths but also must sometimes use their weaker abilities, depending on the situation. In this way, people define their personalities and choose paths different from others. Jung believes it’s thus possible to classify people by personality type.

“The total result of my work in this field up to the present is the presentation of two general types covering the attitudes which I call extraversion and introversion. Besides these, I have worked out a fourfold classification corresponding to the functions of thinking, feeling, sensation and intuition. Each of these functions varies according to the general attitude, and thus eight variants are produced […] Sensation establishes what is actually given, thinking enables us to recognize its meaning, feeling tells us its value, and finally intuition points to the possibilities of the whence and whither that lie within the immediate facts.”

In these few sentences, Jung summarizes his basic theory of personality types. People tend toward extraversion and introversion in the way they use the four functions of consciousness—thinking, feeling, sensation, and intuition—and the ways in which they vary their use of each function determines their personalities. Extraverted functions tend to be well developed, conscious, and overt in a personality; introverted, or poorly used, functions often are driven into the unconscious, and people must depend on others for help in those areas.

“We wish to make our lives simple, certain and smooth—and for that reason problems are tabu. 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. The artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction; on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is called for to give us the certainty and clarity we need.”

In our search for certainty and safety, we adopt absolute beliefs that, we hope, will protect us from doubt. These beliefs are, of course, flawed, and problems leak through. We plug up those leaks with denial: We’re fine, there’s nothing wrong, everything is ok. This can only work for a while before a crisis erupts; a new certainty can patch things up, but, again, only for a while. Instead, a counter-intuitive perspective is called for, one that confronts problems directly.

“But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”

As people grow older, not only do their bodies change, but so do their aspirations. Youthful ideals and ambitions get replaced by a different set of wants and needs, and to insist on pursuing the earlier goals after the later ones have arrived is to swim upstream against the current of one’s life.

“I have never refused the bitter-sweet drink of philosophical criticism, but have taken it with caution, a little at a time. All too little, my opponents will say; almost too much, my own feeling tells me. All too easily does self-criticism poison one’s naïveté, that priceless possession, or rather gift, which no creative man can be without.”

A sense of intellectual humility pervades Jung’s writings. He may disagree with, for example, Freud’s beliefs about the unsoundness of most human minds, but he also absorbs with interest those ideas and finds ways to adapt them to his own viewpoint. Critics attack Jung relentlessly, yet he listens with the goal of improving his own research, though not so much as to restrict his own thinking or lose heart.

“The sexuality which Freud describes is unmistakably that sexual obsession which shows itself whenever a patient has reached the point where he needs to be forced or tempted out of a wrong attitude or situation. […] 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. And it is this stoppage which shows itself unfailingly in that kind of sexuality which is called ‘infantile.’ It is really not sexuality proper, but an unnatural discharge of tensions that belong to quite another province of life.”

Where Freud sees sexuality as a driver of neuroses, Jung sees misplaced energy caught in the tangles of family dynamics, energy that finds outlet in mindless sexual activity. The problem thus isn’t to control sexual urges but to re-align and harmonize other forces that, when trapped, emerge as inappropriate behavior. Sex is a symptom, not a cause, of the problem; if so, then Freud’s edifice of unconscious urges dominated by sex comes tumbling down.

“[E]very civilized human being, whatever his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche.”

The study of the unconscious reveals the basic urges humans have at birth and throughout their lives; these drives are the same for modern people as they were thousands of years ago. Today’s sophisticated world prides itself on its advancement, yet in their feelings people are as conflicted, violent, grasping, hopeful, inspired, and visionary as ever. In this respect, modern and pre-industrial societies are essentially the same.

“One must imagine the velvety blue of a tropical night, the overhanging black masses of gigantic trees standing in a virgin forest, the mysterious voices of the nocturnal spaces, a lonely fire with loaded rifles stacked beside it, mosquito-nets, boiled swamp-water to drink […] There man is not king; it is rather nature—the animals, plants and microbes. Given the mood that goes with the place, one understands how it is that we found a dawning significance in things that anywhere else would provoke a smile.”

It’s easy for those who live under the shelter of modern, urban society to dismiss the superstitions of those who live deep in the wilds of nature. In those places, though, a misstep can be fatal, and any mental habit that inspires caution will protect locals from disaster.

“Do we delude ourselves in thinking that we possess and command our own souls? And is that which science calls the ‘psyche’ not merely a question mark arbitrarily confined within the skull, but rather a door that opens upon the human world from a world beyond, now and again allowing strange and unseizable potencies to act upon man and to remove him, as if upon the wings of the night, from the level of common humanity to that of a more than personal vocation?”

When psychotherapy regards visionary art as a mere symptom of neurosis, it denies the immeasurable power of the unconscious mind and misses the opportunity to respect and learn from the deep insights of the psyche, however disturbing or frightening they may be. For Jung, the power of the unconscious isn’t something dangerous to be controlled but a realm of primordial knowledge to be heard and respected.

“[W]e strive to construct a conscious world that is safe and manageable in that natural law holds in it the place of statute law in a commonwealth. Yet, even in our midst, the poet now and then catches sight of the figures that people the night-world—the spirits, demons and gods.”

Freudian therapists can reduce a work of art to a set of neurotic symptoms, but in doing so they becomes foot soldiers in modern civilization’s attempt to cover up our unease over the mysteries that loom around us. We try to comfort ourselves with the belief that we have figured out the universe, yet artists keep presenting to us the haunted parts of our world.

“We only believe that we are masters in our own house because we like to flatter ourselves. Actually, however, we are dependent to a startling degree upon the proper functioning of the unconscious psyche, and must trust that it does not fail us.”

Science teaches that the mind is an artifact of the body, and that the unconscious is mythical, or at best a name for automatic processes. In fact, powerful unconscious activities affect us all day long, and our egotistical belief in personal control is the illusion. Even our sense of ourselves as separate individuals wells up from the unconscious. Our conscious minds ride atop vast, invisible psychic forces that serve us well unless we resist them.

“While man still lives as a herd-being he has no ‘things of the spirit’ of his own; nor does he need any, save the usual belief in the immortality of the soul. But as soon as he has outgrown whatever local form of religion he was born to—as soon as this religion can no longer embrace his life in all its fullness—then the psyche becomes something which cannot be dealt with by the measures of the Church alone.”

Once, religions provided beliefs and rituals for disturbances within the psyche, but modern people no longer believe wholeheartedly in those practices, and they struggle to thrive in a world where major institutions fail them or, worse, lead to war and destruction. Psychotherapy is an attempt to answer that need and assist patients to come to terms with their estrangement with the old pillars of society and their need to face the emptiness of the old rules and beliefs. It’s a chance to come to terms with our deepest needs for self-expression, not as members of some hierarchy but as individuals.

“The patient is looking for something that will take possession of him and give meaning and form to the confusion of his neurotic mind. Is the doctor equal to this task? […] As a doctor he is not required to have a finished outlook on life, and his professional conscience does not demand it of him. But what will he do when he sees only too clearly why his patient is ill; when he sees that it arises from his having no love, but only sexuality; no faith, because he is afraid to grope in the dark; no hope, because he is disillusioned by the world and by life; and no understanding, because he has failed to read the meaning of his own existence?”

Jung’s system of therapy pays attention, not so much to patients’ sexual and social needs but to their overarching desire for meaning and purpose. Just as a vaccine rids the body of symptoms by curing the disease, psychoanalysis solves neuroses by addressing the deepest source of the problem, spiritual ennui.