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object:1.04 - The Aims of Psycho therapy
book class:The Practice of Psycho therapy
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
class:chapter


IV
THE AIMS OF PSYCHO THERAPY 1
[66]
It is generally agreed today that neuroses are functional psychic
disturbances and are therefore to be cured preferably by psychological
treatment. But when we come to the question of the structure of the
neuroses and the principles of therapy, all agreement ends, and we have to
acknowledge that we have as yet no fully satisfactory conception of the
nature of the neuroses or of the principles of treatment. While it is true that
two currents or schools of thought have gained a special hearing, they by
no means exhaust the number of divergent opinions that actually exist.
There are also numerous non-partisans who, amid the general conflict of
opinion, have their own special views. If, therefore, we wanted to paint a
comprehensive picture of this diversity, we should have to mix upon our
palette all the hues and shadings of the rainbow. I would gladly paint such a
picture if it lay within my power, for I have always felt the need for a
conspectus of the many viewpoints. I have never succeeded in the long run
in not giving divergent opinions their due. Such opinions could never arise,
much less secure a following, if they did not correspond to some special
disposition, some special character, some fundamental psychological fact
that is more or less universal. Were we to exclude one such opinion as
simply wrong and worthless, we should be rejecting this particular
disposition or this particular fact as a misinterpretationin other words, we
should be doing violence to our own empirical material. The wide approval
which greeted Freuds explanation of neurosis in terms of sexual causation
and his view that the happenings in the psyche turn essentially upon
infantile pleasure and its satisfaction should be instructive to the
psychologist. It shows him that this manner of thinking and feeling
coincides with a fairly widespread trend or spiritual current which,
independently of Freuds theory, has made itself felt in other places, in
other circumstances, in other minds, and in other forms. I should call it amanifestation of the collective psyche. Let me remind you here of the
works of Havelock Ellis and August Forel and the contri butors to
Anthropophyteia; then of the changed attitude to sex in Anglo-Saxon
countries during the post-Victorian period, and the broad discussion of
sexual matters in literature, which had already started with the French
realists. Freud is one of the exponents of a contemporary psychological fact
which has a special history of its own; but for obvious reasons we cannot
go into that here.
2
[67]
The acclaim which Adler, like Freud, has met with on both sides of the
Atlantic points similarly to the undeniable fact that, for a great many
people, the need for self-assertion arising from a sense of inferiority is a
plausible basis of explanation. Nor can it be disputed that this view
accounts for psychic actualities which are not given their due in the
Freudian system. I need hardly mention in detail the collective
psychological forces and social factors that favour the Adlerian view and
make it their theoretical exponent. These matters are sufficiently obvious.
[68]
It would be an unpardonable error to overlook the element of truth in
both the Freudian and the Adlerian viewpoints, but it would be no less
unpardonable to take either of them as the sole truth. Both truths
correspond to psychic realities. There are in fact some cases which by and
large can best be described and explained by the one theory, and some by
the other.
[69]
I can accuse neither of these two investigators of any fundamental
error; on the contrary, I endeavour to apply both hypotheses as far as
possible because I fully recognize their relative rightness. It would certainly
never have occurred to me to depart from Freuds path had I not stumbled
upon facts which forced me into modifications. And the same is true of my
relation to the Adlerian viewpoint.
[70]
After what has been said it seems hardly necessary to add that I hold
the truth of my own deviationist views to be equally relative, and feel
myself so very much the mere exponent of another disposition that I could
almost say with Coleridge: I believe in the one and only saving Church, of
which at present I am the only member.
3
[71]
It is in applied psychology, if anywhere, that we must be modest today
and bear with an apparent plurality of contradictory opinions; for we arestill far from having anything like a thorough knowledge of the human
psyche, that most challenging field of scientific inquiry. At present we have
merely more or less plausible opinions that cannot be squared with one
another.
[72]
If, therefore, I undertake to say something about my views I hope I
shall not be misunderstood. I am not advertising a novel truth, still less am I
announcing a final gospel. I can only speak of attempts to throw light on
psychic facts that are obscure to me, or of efforts to overcome therapeutic
difficulties.
[73]
And it is just with this last point that I should like to begin, for here lies
the most pressing need for modifications. As is well known, one can get
along for quite a time with an inadequate theory, but not with inadequate
therapeutic methods. In my psycho therapeutic practice of nearly thirty
years I have met with a fair number of failures which made a far deeper
impression on me than my successes. Anybody can have successes in
psycho therapy, starting with the primitive medicine-man and faith-healer.
The psycho therapist learns little or nothing from his successes, for they
chiefly confirm him in his mistakes. But failures are priceless experiences
because they not only open the way to a better truth but force us to modify
our views and methods.
[74]
I certainly recognize how much my work has been furthered first by
Freud and then by Adler, and in practice I try to acknowledge this debt by
making use of their views, whenever possible, in the treatment of my
patients. Nevertheless I must insist that I have experienced failures which, I
felt, might have been avoided had I considered the facts that subsequently
forced me to modify their views.
[75]
To describe all the situations I came up against is almost impossible, so
I must content myself with singling out a few typical cases. It was with
older patients that I had the greatest difficulties, that is, with persons over
forty. In handling younger people I generally get along with the familiar
viewpoints of Freud and Adler, for these tend to bring the patient to a
certain level of adaptation and normality. Both views are eminently
applicable to the young, apparently without leaving any disturbing after-
effects. In my experience this is not so often the case with older people. It
seems to me that the basic facts of the psyche undergo a very markedalteration in the course of life, so much so that we could almost speak of a
psychology of lifes morning and a psychology of its afternoon. As a rule,
the life of a young person is characterized by a general expansion and a
striving towards concrete ends; and his neurosis seems mainly to rest on his
hesitation or shrinking back from this necessity. But the life of an older
person is characterized by a contraction of forces, by the affirmation of
what has been achieved, and by 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 young neurotic is afraid of life, so the older
one shrinks back from death. What was a normal goal for the young man
becomes a neurotic hindrance to the oldjust as, through his hesitation to
face the world, the young neurotics originally normal dependence on his
parents grows into an incest-relationship that is inimical to life. It is natural
that neurosis, resistance, repression, transference, guiding fictions, and so
forth should have one meaning in the young person and quite another in the
old, despite apparent similarities. The aims of therapy should undoubtedly
be modified to meet this fact. Hence the age of the patient seems to me a
most important indicium.
[76]
But there are various indicia also within the youthful phase of life.
Thus, in my estimation, it is a technical blunder to apply the Freudian
viewpoint to a patient with the Adlerian type of psychology, that is, an
unsuccessful person with an infantile need to assert himself. Conversely, it
would be a gross misunderstanding to force the Adlerian viewpoint on a
successful man with a pronounced pleasure-principle psychology. When in
a quandary the resistances of the patient may be valuable signposts. I am
inclined to take deep-seated resistances seriously at first, paradoxical as this
may sound, for I am convinced that the doctor does not necessarily know
better than the patients own psychic constitution, of which the patient
himself may be quite unconscious. This modesty on the part of the doctor is
altogether becoming in view of the fact that there is not only no generally
valid psychology today but rather an untold variety of temperaments and of
more or less individual psyches that refuse to fit into any scheme.
[77]
You know that in this matter of temperament I postulate two different
basic attitudes in accordance with the typical differences already suspected
by many students of human naturenamely, the extraverted and the
introverted attitudes. These attitudes, too, I take to be important indicia, andlikewise the predominance of one particular psychic function over the
others.
4
[78]
The extraordinary diversity of individual life necessitates constant
modifications of theory which are often applied quite unconsciously by the
doctor himself, although in principle they may not accord at all with his
theoretical creed.
[79]
While we are on this question of temperament I should not omit to
mention that there are some people whose attitude is essentially spiritual
and others whose attitude is essentially materialistic. It must not be
imagined that such an attitude is acquired accidentally or springs from mere
misunderstanding. Very often they are ingrained passions which no
criticism and no persuasion can stamp out; there are even cases where an
apparently outspoken materialism has its source in a denial of religious
temperament. Cases of the reverse type are more easily credited today,
although they are not more frequent than the others. This too is an indicium
which in my opinion ought not to be overlooked.
[80]
When we use the word indicium it might appear to mean, as is usual in
medical parlance, that this or that treatment is indicated. Perhaps this
should be the case, but psycho therapy has at present reached no such
degree of certainty for which reason our indicia are unfortunately not
much more than warnings against one-sidedness.
[81]
The human psyche is a thing of enormous ambiguity. In every single
case we have to ask ourselves whether an attitude or a so-called habitus is
au thentic, or whether it may not be just a compensation for its opposite. I
must confess that I have so often been deceived in this matter that in any
concrete case I am at pains to avoid all theoretical presuppositions about
the structure of the neurosis and about what the patient can and ought to do.
As far as possible I let pure experience decide the therapeutic aims. This
may perhaps seem strange, because it is commonly supposed that the
therapist has an aim. But in psycho therapy it seems to me positively
advisable for the doctor not to have too fixed an aim. He can hardly know
better than the nature and will to live of the patient. The great decisions in
human life usually have far more to do with the instincts and other
mysterious unconscious factors than with conscious will and well-meaning
reasonableness. The shoe that fits one person pinches another; there is nouniversal recipe for living. Each of us carries his own life-form within him
an irrational form which no other can outbid.
[82]
All this naturally does not prevent us from doing our utmost to make
the patient normal and reasonable. If the therapeutic results are satisfactory,
we can probably let it go at that. If not, then for better or worse the therapist
must be guided by the patients own irrationalities. Here we must follow
nature as a guide, and what the doctor then does is less a question of
treatment than of developing the creative possibilities latent in the patient
himself.
[83]
What I have to say begins where the treatment leaves off and this
development sets in. Thus my contri bution to psycho therapy confines itself
to those cases where rational treatment does not yield satisfactory results.
The clinical material at my disposal is of a peculiar composition: new cases
are decidedly in the minority. Most of them already have some form of
psycho therapeutic treatment behind them, with partial or negative results.
About a third of my cases are not suffering from any clinically definable
neurosis, but from the senselessness and aimlessness of their lives. I should
not object if this were called the general neurosis of our age. Fully two
thirds of my patients are in the second half of life.
[84]
This peculiar material sets up a special resistance to rational methods
of treatment, probably because most of my patients are socially well-
adapted individuals, often of outstanding ability, to whom normalization
means nothing. As for so-called normal people, there I really am in a fix,
for I have no ready made philosophy of life to hand out to them. In the
majority of my cases the resources of the conscious mind are exhausted (or,
in ordinary English, they are 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 dont know
either. I only know one thing: when my conscious mind no longer sees any
possible road ahead and consequently gets stuck, my unconscious psyche
will react to the unbearable standstill.
[85]
This getting stuck is a psychic occurrence so often repeated during
the course of human history that it has become the theme of many myths
and fairytales. We are told of the Open sesame! to the locked door, or of
some helpful animal who finds the hidden way. In other words, gettingstuck is a typical event which, in the course of time, has evoked typical
reactions and compensations. We may therefore expect with some
probability that something similar will appear in the reactions of the
unconscious, as, for example, in dreams.
[86]
In such cases, then, my attention is directed more particularly to
dreams. This is not because I am tied to the notion that dreams must always
be called to the rescue, or because I possess a mysterious dream-theory
which tells me how everything must shape itself; but quite simply from
perplexity. I do not know where else to go for help, and so I try to find it in
dreams. These at least present us with images pointing to something or
other, and that is better than nothing. I have no theory about dreams, I do
not know how dreams arise. And I am not at all sure that my way of
handling dreams even deserves the name of a method. I share all your
prejudices against dream-interpretation as the quintessence of uncertainty
and arbitrariness. On the other hand, I know that if we meditate on a dream
sufficiently long and thoroughly, if we carry it around with us and turn it
over and over, something almost always comes of it. This something is not
of course a scientific result to be boasted about or rationalized; but it is an
important practical hint which shows the patient what the unconscious is
aiming at. Indeed, it ought not to matter to me whether the result of my
musings on the dream is scientifically verifiable or tenable, otherwise I am
pursuing an ulterior and therefore autoeroticaim. I must content myself
wholly with the fact that the result means something to the patient and sets
his life in motion again. I may allow myself only one criterion for the result
of my labours: Does it work? As for my scientific hobbymy desire to
know why it worksthis I must reserve for my spare time.
[87]
Infinitely varied are the contents of the initial dreams, that is, the
dreams that come at the outset of the treatment. In many cases they point
directly to the past and recall things lost and forgotten. For very often the
standstill and disorientation arise when life has become one-sided, and this
may, in psychological terms, cause a sudden loss of libido. All our previous
activities become uninteresting, even senseless, and our aims suddenly no
longer worth striving for. What in one person is merely a passing mood
may in another become a chronic condition. In these cases it often happens
that other possibilities for developing the personality lie buried somewhere
or other in the past, unknown to anybody, not even to the patient. But thedream may reveal the clue.
[88]
In other cases the dream points to present facts, for example marriage
or social position, which the conscious mind has never accepted as sources
of problems or conflicts.
[89]
Both possibilities come within the sphere of the rational, and I daresay
I would have no difficulty in making such initial dreams seem plausible.
The real difficulty begins when the dreams do not point to anything
tangible, and this they do often enough, especially when they hold
anticipations of the future. I do not mean that such dreams are necessarily
prophetic, merely that they feel the way, they reconnoitre. These dreams
contain inklings of possibilities and for that reason can never be made
plausible to an outsider. Sometimes they are not plausible even to me, and
then I usually say to the patient, I dont believe it, but follow up the clue.
As I have said, the sole criterion is the stimulating effect, but it is by no
means necessary for me to understand why such an effect takes place.
[90]
This is particularly true of dreams that contain something like an
unconscious metaphysics, by which I mean mythological analogies that
are sometimes incredibly strange and baffling.
[91]
Now, you will certainly protest: How on earth can I know that the
dreams contain anything like an unconscious metaphysics? And here I must
confess that I do not really know. I know far too little about dreams for that.
I see only the effect on the patient, of which I would like to give you a little
example.
[92]
In a long initial dream of one of my normal patients, the illness of his
sisters child played an important part. She was a little girl of two.
[93]
Some time before, this sister had in fact lost a boy through illness, but
otherwise none of her children was ill. The occurrence of the sick child in
the dream at first proved baffling to the dreamer, probably because it failed
to fit the facts. Since there was no direct and intimate connection between
the dreamer and his sister, he could feel in this image little that was
personal to him. Then he suddenly remembered that two years earlier he
had taken up the study of occultism, in the course of which he also
discovered psychology. So the child evidently represented his interest in the
psychean idea I should never have arrived at of my own accord. Seenpurely theoretically, this dream image can mean anything or nothing. For
that matter, does a thing or a fact ever mean anything in itself? The only
certainty is that it is always man who interprets, who assigns meaning. And
that is the gist of the matter for psychology. It impressed the dreamer as a
novel and interesting idea that the study of occultism might have something
sickly about it. Somehow the thought struck home. And this is the decisive
point: the interpretation works, however we may elect to account for its
working. For the dreamer the thought was an implied criticism, and through
it a certain change of attitude was brought about. By such slight changes,
which one could never think up rationally, things are set in motion and the
dead point is overcome, at least in principle.
[94]
From this example I could say figuratively that the dream meant that
there was something sickly about the dreamers occult studies, and in this
sensesince the dream brought him to such an idea I can also speak of
unconscious metaphysics.
[95]
But I go still further: Not only do I give the patient an opportunity to
find associations to his dreams, I give myself the same opportunity.
Further, I present him with my ideas and opinions. If, in so doing, I open
the door to suggestion, I see no occasion for regret; for 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 will reject the mistake, much as
the organism rejects a foreign body. I do not need to prove that my
interpretation of the dream is right (a pretty hopeless undertaking anyway),
but must simply try to discover, with the patient, what acts for him I am
almost tempted to say, what is actual.
[96]
For this reason it is particularly important for me to know as much as
possible about primitive psychology, mythology, archaeology, and
comparative religion, because these fields offer me invaluable analogies
with which I can enrich the associations of my patients. Together, we can
then find meaning in apparent irrelevancies and thus vastly increase the
effectiveness of the dream. For the layman who has done his utmost in the
personal and rational sphere of life and yet has found no meaning and no
satisfaction there, it is enormously important to be able to enter a sphere of
irrational experience. In this way, too, the habitual and the commonplace
come to wear an altered countenance, and can even acquire a new glamour.For it all depends on how we look at things, and not on how they are in
themselves. The least of things with a meaning is always worth more in life
than the greatest of things without it.
[97]
I do not think I underestimate the risk of this undertaking. It is as if one
began to build a bridge out into space. Indeed, the ironist might even allege
and has often done so that in following this procedure both doctor and
patient are indulging in mere fantasy-spinning.
[98]
This objection is no counter-argument, but is very much to the point. I
even make an effort to second the patient in his fantasies. Truth to tell, I
have no small opinion of fantasy. To me, it is the maternally creative side
of the masculine mind. When all is said and done, we can never rise above
fantasy. It is true that there are unprofitable, futile, morbid, and unsatisfying
fantasies whose sterile nature is immediately recognized by every person
endowed with common sense; but the faulty performance proves nothing
against the normal performance. All the works of man have their origin in
creative imagination. What right, then, have we to disparage fantasy? In the
normal course of things, fantasy does not easily go astray; it is too deep for
that, and too closely bound up with the tap-root of human and animal
instinct. It has a surprising way of always coming out right in the end. The
creative activity of imagination frees man from his bondage to the nothing
but and raises him to the status of one who plays. As Schiller says, man is
completely human only when he is at play.
5
[99]
My aim is to bring about a psychic state in which my patient begins to
experiment with his own naturea state of fluidity, change, and growth
where nothing is eternally fixed and hopelessly petrified. I can here of
course adumbrate only the principles of my technique. Those of you who
happen to be acquainted with my works can easily imagine the necessary
parallels. I would only like to emphasize that you should not think of my
procedure as entirely without aim or limit. In handling a dream or fantasy I
make it a rule never to go beyond the meaning which is effective for the
patient; I merely try to make him as fully conscious of this meaning as
possible, so that he shall also become aware of its supra-personal
connections. For, when something happens to a man and he supposes it to
be personal only to himself, whereas in reality it is a quite universal
experience, then his attitude is obviously wrong, that is, too personal, and it
tends to exclude him from human society. By the same token we need tohave not only a personal, contemporary consciousness, but also a supra-
personal consciousness with a sense of historical continuity. However
abstract this may sound, practical experience shows that many neuroses are
caused primarily by the fact that people blind themselves to their own
religious promptings because of a childish passion for rational
enlightenment. It is high time the psychologist of today recognized that we
are no longer dealing with dogmas and creeds but with the religious attitude
per se, whose importance as a psychic function can hardly be overrated.
And it is precisely for the religious function that the sense of historical
continuity is indispensable.
[100]
Coming back to the question of my technique, I ask myself how far I
am indebted to Freud for its existence. At all events I learned it from
Freuds method of free association, and I regard it as a direct extension of
that.
[101]
So long as I help the patient to discover the effective elements in his
dreams, and so long as I try to get him to see the general meaning of his
symbols, he is still, psychologically speaking, in a state of childhood. For
the time being he is dependent on his dreams and is always asking himself
whether the next dream will give him new light or not. Moreover, he is
dependent on my having ideas about his dreams and on my ability to
increase his insight through my knowledge. Thus he is still in an
undesirably passive condition where everything is rather uncertain and
questionable; neither he nor I know the journeys end. Often it is not much
more than a groping about in Egyptian darkness. In this condition we must
not expect any very startling results the uncertainty is too great for that.
Besides which there is always the risk that what we have woven by day the
night will unravel. The danger is that nothing permanent is achieved, that
nothing remains fixed. It not infrequently happens in these situations that
the patient has a particularly vivid or curious dream, and says to me, Do
you know, if only I were a painter I would make a picture of it. Or the
dreams are about photographs, paintings, drawings, or illuminated
manuscripts, or even about the films.
[102]
I have turned these hints to practical account, urging my patients at
such times to paint in reality what they have seen in dream or fantasy. As a
rule I am met with the objection, But I am not a painter! To this I usually
reply that neither are modern painters, and that consequently modernpainting is free for all, and that anyhow it is not a question of beauty but
only of the trouble one takes with the picture. How true this is I saw
recently in the case of a talented professional portraitist; she had to begin
my way of painting all over again with pitiably childish efforts, literally as
if she had never held a brush in her hand. To paint what we see before us is
a different art from painting what we see within.
[103]
Many of my more advanced patients, then, begin to paint. I can well
understand that everyone will be profoundly impressed with the utter
futility of this sort of dilettantism. Do not forget, however, that we are
speaking not of people who still have to prove their social usefulness, but
of those who can no longer see any sense in being socially useful and who
have come upon the deeper and more dangerous question of the meaning
of their own individual lives. To be a particle in the mass has meaning and
charm only for the man who has not yet reached that stage, but none for
the man who is sick to death of being a particle. The importance of what
life means to the individual may be denied by those who are socially below
the general level of adaptation, and is invariably denied by the educator
whose ambition it is to breed mass-men. But those who belong to neither
category will sooner or later come up against this painful question.
[104]
Although my patients occasionally produce artistically beautiful
things that might very well be shown in modern art exhibitions, I
nevertheless treat them as completely worthless when judged by the
canons of real art. As a matter of fact, it is essential that they should be
considered worthless, otherwise my patients might imagine themselves to
be artists, and the whole point of the exercise would be missed. It is not a
question of art at allor rather, it should not be a question of art but of
something more and other than mere art, namely the living effect upon the
patient himself. The meaning of individual life, whose importance from
the social standpoint is negligible, stands here at its highest, and for its
sake the patient struggles to give form, however crude and childish, to the
inexpressible.
[105]
But why do I encourage patients, when they arrive at a certain stage in
their development, to express themselves by means of brush, pencil, or pen
at all?
[106]
Here again my prime purpose is to produce an effect. In the state ofpsychological childhood described above, the patient remains passive; but
now he begins to play an active part. To start off with, he puts down on
paper what he has passively seen, thereby turning it into a deliberate act.
He not only talks about it, he is actually doing something about it.
Psychologically speaking, it makes a vast difference whether a man has an
interesting conversation with his doctor two or three times a week, the
results of which are left hanging in mid air, or whether he has to struggle
for hours with refractory brush and colours, only to produce in the end
something which, taken at its face value, is perfectly senseless. If it were
really senseless to him, the effort to paint it would be so repugnant that he
could scarcely be brought to perform this exercise a second time. But
because his fantasy does not strike him as entirely senseless, his busying
himself with it only increases its effect upon him. Moreover, the concrete
shaping of the image enforces a continuous study of it in all its parts, so
that it can develop its effects to the full. This invests the bare fantasy with
an element of reality, which lends it greater weight and greater driving
power. And these rough-and-ready pictures do indeed produce effects
which, I must admit, are rather difficult to describe. For instance, a patient
needs only to have seen once or twice how much he is freed from a
wretched state of mind by working at a symbolical picture, and he will
always turn to this means of release whenever things go badly with him. In
this way something of inestimable importance is won the beginning of
independence, a step towards psychological maturity. The patient can
make himself creatively independent through this method, if I may call it
such. He is no longer dependent on his dreams or on his doctors
knowledge; instead, by painting himself he gives shape to himself. For
what he paints are active fantasies that which is active within him. And
that which is active within is himself, but no longer in the guise of his
previous error, when he mistook the personal ego for the self; it is himself
in a new and hitherto alien sense, for his ego now appears as the object of
that which works within him. In countless pictures he strives to catch this
interior agent, only to discover in the end that it is eternally unknown and
alien, the hidden foundation of psychic life.
[107]
It is impossible for me to describe the extent to which this discovery
changes the patients standpoint and values, and how it shifts the centre of
gravity of his personality. It is as though the earth had suddenly discovered
that the sun was the centre of the planetary orbits and of its own earthlyorbit as well.
[108]
But have we not always known this to be so? I myself believe that we
have always known it. But I may know something with my head which the
other man in me is far from knowing, for indeed and in truth I live as
though I did not know it. Most of my patients knew the deeper truth, but
did not live it. And why did they not live it? Because of that bias which
makes us all live from the ego, a bias which comes from overvaluation of
the conscious mind.
[109]
It is of the greatest importance for the young person, who is still
unadapted and has as yet achieved nothing, to shape his conscious ego as
effectively as possible, that is, to educate his will. Unless he is a positive
genius he cannot, indeed he should not, believe in anything active within
him that is not identical with his will. He must feel himself a man of will,
and may safely depreciate everything else in him and deem it subject to his
will, for without this illusion he could not succeed in adapting himself
socially.
[110]
It is otherwise with a person 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, needs to experience his own inner being. Social
usefulness is no longer an aim for him, although he does not deny its
desirability. Fully aware as he is of the social unimportance of his creative
activity, he feels it more as a way of working at himself to his own benefit.
Increasingly, too, this activity frees him from morbid dependence, and he
thus acquires an inner stability and a new trust in himself. These last
achievements now redound to the good of the patients social existence;
for an inwardly stable and self-confident person will prove more adequate
to his social tasks than one who is on a bad footing with his unconscious.
[111]
I have purposely avoided loading my lecture with theory, hence much
must remain obscure and unexplained. But, in order to make the pictures
produced by my patients intelligible, certain theoretical points must at least
receive mention. A feature common to all these pictures is a primitive
symbolism which is conspicuous both in the drawing and in the colouring.
The colours are as a rule quite barbaric in their intensity. Often an
unmistakable archaic quality is present. These peculiarities point to the
nature of the underlying creative forces. They are irrational, symbolisticcurrents that run through the whole history of mankind, and are so archaic
in character that it is not difficult to find their parallels in archaeology and
comparative religion. We may therefore take it that our pictures spring
chiefly from those regions of the psyche which I have termed the
collective unconscious. By this I understand an unconscious psychic
functioning common to all men, the source not only of our modern
symbolical pictures but of all similar products in the past. Such pictures
spring from, and satisfy, a natural need. It is as if a part of the psyche that
reaches far back into the primitive past were expressing itself in these
pictures and finding it possible to function in harmony with our alien
conscious mind. This collaboration satisfies and thus mitigates the
psyches disturbing demands upon the latter. It must, however, be added
that the mere execution of the pictures is not enough. Over and above that,
an intellectual and emotional understanding is needed; they require to be
not only rationally integrated with the conscious mind, but morally
assimilated. They still have to be subjected to a work of synthetic
interpretation. Although I have travelled this path with individual patients
many times, I have never yet succeeded in making all the details of the
process clear enough for publication. So far this has been fragmentary
only. The truth is, we are here moving in absolutely new territory, and a
ripening of experience is the first requisite. For very important reasons I
am anxious to avoid hasty conclusions. We are dealing with a process of
psychic life outside consciousness, and our observation of it is indirect. As
yet we do not know to what depths our vision will plumb. It would seem to
be some kind of centring process, for a great many pictures which the
patients themselves feel to be decisive point in this direction. During this
centring process what we call the ego appears to take up a peripheral
position. The change is apparently brought about by an emergence of the
historical part of the psyche. Exactly what is the purpose of this process
remains at first sight obscure. We can only remark its important effect on
the conscious personality. From the fact that the change heightens the
feeling for life and maintains the flow of life, we must conclude that it is
animated by a peculiar purposefulness. We might perhaps call this a new
illusion. But what is illusion? By what criterion do we judge something
to be an illusion? Does anything exist for the psyche that we are entitled to
call illusion? What we are pleased to call illusion may be for the psyche an
extremely important life-factor, something as indispensable as oxygen for
6the bodya psychic actuality of over-whelming significance. Presumably
the psyche does not trouble itself about our categories of reality; for it,
everything that works is real. The investigator of the psyche must not
confuse it with his consciousness, else he veils from his sight the object of
his investigation. On the contrary, to recognize it at all, he must learn to
see how different it is from consciousness. Nothing is more probable than
that what we call illusion is very real for the psyche for which reason we
cannot take psychic reality to be commensurable with conscious reality. To
the psychologist there is nothing more fatuous than the attitude of the
missionary who pronounces the gods of the poor hea then to be mere
illusion. Unfortunately we still go blundering along in the same dogmatic
way, as though our so-called reality were not equally full of illusion. In
psychic life, as everywhere in our experience, all things that work are
reality, regardless of the names man chooses to bestow on them. To take
these realities for what they arenot foisting other names on them that is
our business. To the psyche, spirit is no less spirit for being named
sexuality.
[112]
I must repeat that these designations and the changes rung upon them
never even remotely touch the essence of the process we have described. It
cannot be compassed by the rational concepts of the conscious mind, any
more than life itself; and it is for this reason that my patients consistently
turn to the representation and interpretation of symbols as the more
adequate and effective course.
[113]
With this I have said pretty well everything I can say about my
therapeutic aims and intentions within the broad framework of a lecture. It
can be no more than an incentive to thought, and I shall be quite content if
such it has been.



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