Jung first describes the significance of the products of your subconscious. You consciously suppress the importance of your dreams, but they offer you different kinds of information that can be very powerful.
“Dreams may give expression to ineluctable truths, to philosophical pronouncements, illusions, wild fantasies, memories, plans, anticipations, irrational experiences, even telepathic visions, and heaven knows what besides.”Modern Man’s Search for a Soul, Carl Jung
The Mother Symbol
Jung considers the archetypal symbol of the mother. It refers to your birthplace, nature, passive creation. It represents the unconscious, the natural and instinctive life, and your physical body. The mother is also the vessel that carries and nourishes – and it is the yin concept in Chinese philosophy.
When man became aware of sin, he became capable of repression. Secrets are created – since anything that is concealed is a secret. But secrets are difficult to deal with. If you hold too many, they will destroy you, but to maintain sanity and differentiate yourself as an individual, you need to hold on to some. Jung stipulated that some kinds of neurosis arose from too many secrets, while others from too little.
Repenting is a rite of passage. Men who refuse to do so, and instead defend their pride, will face an impenetrable wall that will shut them out from living properly among other men. As was foretold by the Greeks, “Give up what thou hast, and then thou wilt receive.”
Jung then takes us through some of the fundamental problems of psychotherapy.
It is necessary but difficult to acknowledge that radiant works of beauty do not have pure origins. He explains, “No thoughtful person will deny that Salomon Reinach’s explanation of the Last Supper in terms of primitive totemism is fraught with meaning; nor will he object to the incest-theme being pointed out in the myths of the Greek divinities.
It is painful there is no denying it-to interpret radiant things from the shadow-side, and thus in a measure reduce them to their origins in dreary filth. But it seems to me to be an imperfection in things of beauty, and a weakness in man, if an explanation from the shadow-side has a destructive effect.”
Some choose to rebel against Freud’s ideas about repression, because we naively and childishly believe that “there can be heights without corresponding depths, and which blinds us to the really” final” truth that, when carried to extremes, opposites meet.” The other mistake, that even Freud himself has made, was to think that because works of beauty had shadow origins – that they were any less radiant.“ Yet the shadow belongs to the light as the evil belongs to the good, and vice versa.”
The Pleasure Principle
Jung thinks that most people who find it easy to integrate socially are tortured by their desires (the pleasure principle) – such as the older brother who “follows in the footsteps of his father and attains a commanding position.” But the young brother who feels repressed and overshadowed by his brother and father, may be “goaded by ambition or the craving of respect.” He may even be so driven by his passion – that nothing else matters to him.
People who are unsuccessful – those who have failed to socially – long to be “normal.” But people who have above average ability who have never found it challenging to fit in, “normal” for them “signifies [the bed of Procrustes](The Bed of Procrustes), unbearable boredom, infernal sterility and hopelessness.” You can only become satisfied and fulfilled by what you do not yet have. And you cannot be satisfied by what you have in abundance. “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.”
Freud and Jung both believed that psychiatrists should practice what they preached. “One doctor believes in overcoming infantilism-and therefore he must have overcome his own infantilism. Another believes in the abreaction of all emotion-and so he must have abreacted all his own emotions.”
Jung believed that – in addition to a present day, personal consciousness, we need a suprapersonal consciousness, in other words – a collective consciousness that predates the individual human being and is “open to a sense of historical continuity.” Many neuroses are caused by people’s childish pursuit of rational enlightenment and ignore their “own religious promptings.” The issue goes beyond dogma and creed. “A religious attitude is an element in psychic life whose importance can hardly be overrated.”
Jung emphasizes the importance of thinking about life in stages. When you are young, it is important to learn the necessary skills that will allow you to become socially useful. Since you haven’t achieved anything yet, it is important for you to shape your conscious ego as well as you can. It is unlikely to feel anything that is active within yourself that is different from your will. You must feel that you are a man of will, and get rid of everything else within yourself, or think of it as succumbing to your will. You will not be able to socially integrate properly without convincing yourself of this illusion.
According to Jung, achievement is a good surrogate goal, but is limited. When you are young it is useful to focus on achievement, than to wander around contemplating complex metaphysical ideas, but ultimately, achievement will be unable to provide you with something you crave more deeply. Your achievements** “**may be our lode-stars in the adventure of extending and solidifying our psychic existences- they may help us in striking our roots in the world; but they cannot guide us in the development of that wider consciousness to which we give the name of culture.”
As you get older, a deeper spiritual understanding becomes necessary. You don’t need to educate your conscious will. You don’t care about being socially useful anymore. You are now more interested in investigating the meaning of your life, and it would be possible to do so by learning to experience your “own inner being.”
“To the psychotherapist an old man who cannot bid farewell to life appears as feeble and sickly as a young man who is unable to embrace it.”
Jung relates “passing through stages” to the story of Adam and Eve – the symbolic fall of man in the Bible. The birth place of tragedy for man is marked by his escape from his primitive unconscious state to a conscious one. And similarly, human beings, when going through different stages of life will have made the transition from unconscious, joyful youth to conscious, guilt-ridden adults.
The Necessity of Difficulty
“Every one of us gladly turns away from his problems; if possible, they must not be mentioned, or, better still, their existence denied. 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.”Modern Man’s Search for a Soul, Carl Jung
Jung emphasizes the importance of challenging ourselves and encountering the unknown. One of his observations is that people who have had to struggle for their existence do not seem to have psychological problems. These are much more common in those who have had a comfortable upbringing. And such problems do not seem to be detectable externally, as it is possible to excel in the external world and yet experience a strained inner life. These problems may relate to sex or inferiority complexes.
However, Jung emphasizes that these complexes need not be so destructive. While they do represent inferiority, they do not necessarily indicate inferiority. They only point to an unresolved conflict, but can be the stimulus you need to exert greater effort, and potentially achieve more than you would have otherwise. In that sense, you wouldn’t want to do away with complexes.
If people didn’t have them, psychic life would come to a “fatal standstill.” Complexes indicate “the unresolved problems of the individual, the points at which he has suffered a defeat, at least for the time being, and where there is something he cannot evade or overcome-his weak spots in every sense of the word.”
Indeed, Jung thinks that the point of life isn’t to resolve every problem, but to embark on an uphill battle. “If *it *should for once appear that they (problems) are, this is the sign that something has been lost. The meaning and design of a problem seem not to lie in its solution, but in our working at it incessantly.”
As the individual transitions from youth to adulthood, he is given a reality check. His presuppositions about the world are challenged. If “the individual is sufficiently well prepared, the transition to a professional career may take place smoothly. But if he clings to illusions that contradict reality, then problems will surely arise.” The individual may have unrealistic expectations of the future, and a radical underestimation of the difficulties he will face. It may be the case that people who have been given this reality check earlier in life – by being raised in harsh circumstances – are more likely to circumvent delayed disillusionment.
A part of us wants to stay young and remain in our monistic phase – where we can only identify with our ego. This is a narrower level of consciousness of the dualistic stage – where the individual can come to terms with what is alien and strange. He can accept that he has a contradictory nature – his “also I.”
“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.”Modern Man’s Search for a Soul, Carl Jung
But the reality of the inner man is undeniable, and we will need to eventually discover him. We will need to descend into the depths of our psyche and discover that part of us that has contradictory goals to our conscious self and is strange and hostile to us. But do not expect to get rewarded for these efforts by society. Achievement and not personality is rewarded. However, a stronger inner life is the most important precursor to success in the external world.
“Ideas spring from a source that is not contained within one man’s personal life. We do not create them; they create us. Knowledge rests not upon truth alone, but upon error also.”Modern Man’s Search for a Soul, Carl Jung
He criticizes Freud and the modern, rational man for treating the issue of God too frivolously. Jung maintains that even the idea of faith to the modern man is a misconception.
“The strange thing is that man will not learn that God is his father.” That is what Freud would never learn, and what all those who share his outlook forbid themselves to learn. At least, they never find the key to this knowledge. Theology does not help those who are looking for the key, because theology demands faith, and faith cannot be made: it is in the truest sense a gift of grace.
“We have now discovered that it was intellectually unjustified presumption on our forefathers’ part to assume that man has a soul; that that soul has substance, is of divine nature and therefore immortal; that there is a power inherent in it which builds up the body, supports its life, heals its ills and enables the soul to live independently of the body; that there are incorporeal spirits with which the soul associates; and that beyond our empirical present there is a spiritual world from which the soul receives knowledge of spiritual things whose origins cannot be discovered in this visible world.”Modern Man’s Search for a Soul, Carl Jung