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object:1.08 - Psycho therapy Today
book class:The Practice of Psycho therapy
author class:Carl Jung
subject class:Psychology
class:chapter


VIII
PSYCHO THERAPY TODAY 1
[212]
It would be a rewarding task to examine in some detail the
relationship between psycho therapy and the state of mind in Europe today.
Yet probably no one would be blamed for shrinking from so bold a
venture, for who could guarantee that the picture he has formed of the
present psychological and spiritual plight of Europe is true to reality? Are
we, as contemporaries of and participants in these cataclysmic events, at
all capable of cool judgment and of seeing clearly amid the indescribable
political and ideological chaos of present-day Europe? Or should we
perhaps do better to narrow the field of psycho therapy and restrict our
science to a modest specialists corner, remaining indifferent to the ruin of
half the world? I fear that such a course, in spite of its commendable
modesty, would ill accord with the nature of psycho therapy, which is after
all the treatment of the soul. Indeed, the concept of psycho therapy,
however one may choose to interpret it, carries with it very great
pretensions: for the soul is the birth-place of all action and hence of
everything that happens by the will of man. It would be difficult, if not
impossible, to carve out an arbitrarily limited segment of the infinitely vast
realm of the psyche and call that the secluded theatre of psycho therapy.
Medicine, it is true, has found itself obliged to mark off a specific field,
that of the neuroses and psychoses, and this is both convenient and feasible
for the practical purpose of treatment. But the artificial restriction must be
broken down immediately psycho therapy understands its problems not
simply as those of a technique but as those of a science. Science qua
science has no boundaries, and there is no speciality whatever that can
boast of complete self-sufficiency. Any speciality is bound to spill over its
borders and to encroach on adjoining territory if it is to lay serious claim to
the status of a science. Even so highly specialized a technique as Freudian
psychoanalysis was unable, at the very outset, to avoid poaching on other, and sometimes exceedingly remote, scientific preserves. It is, in fact,
impossible to treat the psyche, and human personality in general,
sectionally. In all psychic disturbances it is becoming clearperhaps even
more so than in the case of physical illnesses that the psyche is a whole
in which everything hangs together. When the patient comes to us with a
neurosis, he does not bring a part but the whole of his psyche and with it
the fragment of world on which that psyche depends, and without which it
can never be properly understood. Psycho therapy is therefore less able
than any other specialized department of science to take refuge in the
sanctuary of a speciality which has no further connection with the world at
large. Try as we may to concentrate on the most personal of personal
problems, our therapy nevertheless stands or falls with the question: What
sort of world does our patient come from and to what sort of world has he
to adapt himself? The world is a supra-personal fact to which an
essentially personalistic psychology can never do justice. Such a
psychology only penetrates to the personal element in man. But in so far as
he is also a part of the world, he carries the world in himself, that is,
something at once impersonal and supra-personal. It includes his entire
physical and psychic basis, so far as this is given from the start.
Undoubtedly the personalities of father and mother form the first and
apparently the only world of man as an infant; and, if they continue to do
so for too long, he is on the surest road to neurosis, because the great world
he will have to enter as a whole person is no longer a world of fathers and
mothers, but a supra-personal fact. The child first begins to wean itself
from the childhood relation to father and mother through its relation to its
brothers and sisters. The elder brother is no longer the true father and the
elder sister no longer the true mother. Later, husb and and wife are
originally strangers to one another and come from different families with a
different history and often a different social background. When children
come, they complete the process by forcing the parents into the role of
father and mother, which the parents, in accordance with their infantile
attitude, formerly saw only in others, thereby trying to secure for
themselves all the advantages of the childhood role. Every more or less
normal life runs this enantiodromian course and compels a change of
attitude from the extreme of the child to the other extreme of the parent.
The change requires the recognition of objective facts and values which a
child can dismiss from his mind. School, however, inexorably instils intohim the idea of objective time, of duty and the fulfilment of duty, of
outside authority, no matter whether he likes or loathes the school and his
teacher. And with school and the relentless advance of time, one objective
fact after another increasingly forces its way into his personal life,
regardless of whether it is welcome or not and whether he has developed
any special attitude towards it. Meanwhile it is made overpoweringly clear
that any prolongation of the father-and-mother world beyond its allotted
span must be paid for dearly. All attempts to carry the infants personal
world over into the greater world are doomed to failure; even the
transference which occurs during the treatment of neurosis is at best only
an intermediate stage, giving the patient a chance to shed all the fragments
of egg-shell still adhering to him from his childhood days, and to withdraw
the projection of the parental imagos from external reality. This operation
is one of the most difficult tasks of modern psycho therapy. At one time it
was optimistically assumed that the parental imagos could be more or less
broken down and destroyed through analysis of their contents. But in
reality that is not the case: although the parental imagos can be released
from the state of projection and withdrawn from the external world, they
continue, like everything else acquired in early childhood, to retain their
original freshness. With the withdrawal of the projection they fall back
into the individual psyche, from which indeed they mainly originated.
2
[213]
Before we go into the question of what happens when the parental
imagos are no longer projected, let us turn to another question: Is this
problem, which has been brought to light by modern psycho therapy, a new
one in the sense that it was unknown to earlier ages which possessed no
scientific psychology as we understand it? How did this problem present
itself in the past?
[214]
In so far as earlier ages had in fact no knowledge of psycho therapy in
our sense of the word, we cannot possibly expect to find in history any
formulations similar to our own. But since the transformation of child into
parent has been going on everywhere from time immemorial and, with the
increase of consciousness, was also experienced subjectively as a difficult
process, we must conjecture the existence of various general
psycho therapeutic systems which enabled man to accomplish the difficult
transition-stages. And we do find, even at the most primitive level, certain
drastic measures at all those moments in life when psychic transitions haveto be effected. The most important of these are the initiations at puberty
and the rites pertaining to marriage, birth, and death. All these ceremonies,
which in primitive cultures still free from foreign influence are observed
with the utmost care and exactitude, are probably designed in the first
place to avert the psychic injuries liable to occur at such times; but they are
also intended to impart to the initi and the preparation and teaching needed
for life. The existence and prosperity of a primitive tribe are absolutely
bound up with the scrupulous and traditional performance of the
ceremonies. Wherever these customs fall into disuse through the influence
of the white man, au thentic tribal life ceases; the tribe loses its soul and
disintegrates. Opinion is very much divided about the influence of
Christian missionaries in this respect; what I myself saw in Africa led me
to take an extremely pessimistic view.
[215]
On a higher and more civilized level the same work is performed by
the great religions. There are the christening, confirmation, marriage, and
funeral ceremonies which, as is well known, are much closer to their
origins, more living and complete, in Catholic ritual than in Protestantism.
Here too we see how the father-mother world of the child is superseded by
a wealth of analogical symbols: a patriarchal order receives the adult into a
new filial relationship through spiritual generation and rebirth. The pope as
pater patrum and the ecclesia mater are the parents of a family that
embraces the whole of Christendom, except such parts of it as protest. Had
the parental imagos been destroyed in the course of development and thus
been rendered ineffective, an order of this kind would have lost not only its
raison dtre but the very possibility of its existence. As it is, however, a
place is found for the ever-active parental imagos as well as for that
ineradicable feeling of being a child, a feeling which finds meaning and
shelter in the bosom of the Church. In addition, a number of other
ecclesiastical institutions provide for the steady growth and constant
renewal of the bond. Among them I would mention in particular the mass
and the confessional. The Communion is, in the proper sense of the word,
the family table at which the members forega ther and partake of the meal
in the presence of God, following a sacred custom that goes far back into
pre-Christian times.
[216]
It is superfluous to describe these familiar things in greater detail. I
mention them only to show that the treatment of the psyche in times goneby had in view the same fundamental facts of human life as modern
psycho therapy. But how differently religion deals with the parental
imagos! It does not dream of breaking them down or destroying them; on
the contrary, it recognizes them as living realities which it would be
neither possible nor profitable to eliminate. Religion lets them live on in
changed and exalted form within the framework of a strictly traditional
patriarchal order, which keeps not merely decades but whole centuries in
living connection. Just as it nurtures and preserves the childhood psyche of
the individual, so also it has conserved numerous and still living vestiges
of the childhood psyche of humanity. In this way it guards against one of
the greatest psychic dangersloss of rootswhich is a disaster not only for
primitive tribes but for civilized man as well. The breakdown of a
tradition, necessary as this may be at times, is always a loss and a danger;
and it is a danger to the soul because the life of instinct the most
conservative element in manalways expresses itself in traditional usages.
Age-old convictions and customs are deeply rooted in the instincts. If they
get lost, the conscious mind becomes severed from the instincts and loses
its roots, while the instincts, unable to express themselves, fall back into
the unconscious and reinforce its energy, causing this in turn to overflow
into the existing contents of consciousness. It is then that the rootless
condition of consciousness becomes a real danger. This secret vis a tergo
results in a hybris of the conscious mind which manifests itself in the form
of exaggerated self-esteem or an inferiority complex. At all events a loss of
balance ensues, and this is the most fruitful soil for psychic injury.
[217]
If we look back over the thousand-odd years of our European
civilization, we shall see that the Western ideal of the education and care
of the soul has been, and for the most part still is, a patriarchal order based
on the recognition of parental imagos. Thus in dealing with the individual,
no matter how revolutionary his conscious attitude may be, we have to
reckon with a patriarchal or hierarchical orientation of the psyche which
causes it instinctively to seek and cling to this order. Any attempt to render
the parental imagos and the childhood psyche ineffective is therefore
doomed to failure from the outset.
[218]
At this point we come back to our earlier question of what happens
when the parental imagos are withdrawn from projection. The detachment
of these imagos from certain persons who carry the projection isundoubtedly possible and belongs to the stock in trade of
psycho therapeutic success. On the other hand the problem becomes more
difficult when there is a transference of the imagos to the doctor. In these
cases the detachment can develop into a crucial drama. For what is to
happen to the imagos if they are no longer attached to a human being? The
pope as supreme father of Christendom holds his office from God; he is
the servant of servants, and transference of the imagos to him is thus a
transference to the Father in heaven and to Mother Church on earth. But
how fares it with men and women who have been uprooted and torn out of
their tradition? Professor Murray of Harvard University has shown on the
basis of extensive statistical materialthus confirming my own previously
published experience that the incidence of complexes is, on the average,
highest among Jews; second come Protestants; and Catholics third. That a
mans philosophy of life is directly connected with the well-being of the
psyche can be seen from the fact that his mental attitude, his way of
looking at things, is of enormous importance to him and his mental health
so much so that we could almost say that things are less what they are than
how we see them. If we have a disagreeable view of a situation or thing,
our pleasure in it is spoiled, and then it does in fact usually disagree with
us. And, conversely, how many things become bearable and even
acceptable if we can give up certain prejudices and change our point of
view. Paracelsus, who was above all a physician of genius, emphasized
that nobody could be a doctor who did not understand the art of
theorizing. What he meant was that the doctor must induce, not only in
himself but also in his patient, a way of looking at the illness which would
enable the doctor to cure and the patient to recover, or at least to endure
being ill. That is why he says every illness is a purgatorial fire. He
consciously recognized and made full use of the healing power of a mans
mental attitude. When, therefore, I am treating practising Catholics, and
am faced with the transference problem, I can, by virtue of my office as a
doctor, step aside and lead the problem over to the Church. But if I am
treating a non-Catholic, that way out is debarred, and by virtue of my
office as a doctor I cannot step aside, for there is as a rule nobody there,
nothing towards which I could suitably lead the father-imago. I can, of
course, get the patient to recognize with his reason that I am not the father.
But by that very act I become the reasonable father and remain despite
everything the father. Not only nature, but the patient too, abhors a
3
4
5vacuum. He has an instinctive horror of allowing the parental imagos and
his childhood psyche to fall into nothingness, into a hopeless past that has
no future. His instinct tells him that, for the sake of his own wholeness,
these things must be kept alive in one form or another. He knows that a
complete withdrawal of the projection will be followed by an apparently
endless isolation within the ego, which is all the more burdensome because
he has so little love for it. He found it unbearable enough before, and he is
unlikely to bear it now simply out of sweet reasonableness. Therefore at
this juncture the Catholic who has been freed from an excessively personal
tie to his parents can return fairly easily to the mysteries of the Church,
which he is now in a position to understand better and more deeply. There
are also Protestants who can discover in one of the newer variants of
Protestantism a meaning which appeals to them, and so regain a genuine
religious attitude. All other casesunless there is a violent and sometimes
injurious solutionwill, as the saying goes, get stuck in the transference
relationship, thereby subjecting both themselves and the doctor to a severe
trial of patience. Probably this cannot be avoided, for a sudden fall into the
orphaned, parentless state may in certain casesnamely, where there is a
tendency to psychosishave dangerous consequences owing to the
equally sudden activation of the unconscious which always accompanies
it. Accordingly the projection can and should be withdrawn only step by
step. The integration of the contents split off in the parental imagos has an
activating effect on the unconscious, for these imagos are charged with all
the energy they originally possessed in childhood, thanks to which they
continued to exercise a fateful influence even on the adult. Their
integration therefore means a considerable afflux of energy to the
unconscious, which soon makes itself felt in the increasingly strong
coloration of the conscious mind by unconscious contents. Isolation in
pure ego-consciousness has the paradoxical consequence that there now
appear in dreams and fantasies impersonal, collective contents which are
the very material from which certain schizophrenic psychoses are
constructed. For this reason the situation is not without its dangers, since
the releasing of the ego from its ties with the projection and of these the
transference to the doctor plays the principal partinvolves the risk that
the ego, which was formerly dissolved in relationships to the personal
environment, may now be dissolved in the contents of the collective
unconscious. For, although the parents may be dead in the world ofexternal reality, they and their imagos have passed over into the other
world of the collective unconscious, where they continue to attract the
same ego-dissolving projections as before.
[219]
But at this point a healthful, compensatory operation comes into play
which each time seems to me like a miracle. Struggling against that
dangerous trend towards disintegration, there arises out of this same
collective unconscious a counteraction, characterized by symbols which
point unmistakably to a process of centring. This process creates nothing
less than a new centre of personality, which the symbols show from the
first to be superordinate to the ego and which later proves its superiority
empirically. The centre cannot therefore be classed with the ego, but must
be accorded a higher value. Nor can we continue to give it the name of
ego, for which reason I have called it the self. To experience and
realize this self is the ultimate aim of Indian yoga, and in considering the
psychology of the self we would do well to have recourse to the treasures
of Indian wisdom. In India, as with us, the experience of the self has
nothing to do with intellectualism; it is a vital happening which brings
about a fundamental transformation of personality. I have called the
process that leads to this experience the process of individuation. If I
recommend the study of classical yoga, it is not because I am one of those
who roll up their eyes in ecstasy when they hear such magic words as
dhyana or buddhi or mukti, but because psychologically we can learn a
great deal from yoga philosophy and turn it to practical account.
Furthermore, the material lies ready to hand, clearly formulated in the
Eastern books and the translations made of them. Here again my reason is
not that we have nothing equivalent in the West: I recommend yoga
merely because the Western knowledge which is akin to it is more or less
inaccessible except to specialists. It is esoteric, and it is distorted beyond
recognition by being formulated as an arcane discipline and by all the
rubbish that this draws in its wake. In alchemy there lies concealed a
Western system of yoga meditation, but it was kept a carefully guarded
secret from fear of heresy and its painful consequences. For the practising
psychologist, however, alchemy has one inestimable advantage over
Indian yogaits ideas are expressed almost entirely in an extraordinarily
rich symbolism, the very symbolism we still find in our patients today. The
help which alchemy affords us in understanding the symbols of the
individuation process is, in my opinion, of the utmost importance.
6[220]
Alchemy describes what I call the self as incorruptibile, that is, an
indissoluble substance, a One and Indivisible that cannot be reduced to
anything else and is at the same time a Universal, to which a sixteenth-
century alchemist even gave the name of filius macrocosmi. Modern
findings agree in principle with these formulations.
7
[221]
I had to mention all these things in order to get to the problem of
today. For if we perseveringly and consistently follow the way of natural
development, we arrive at the experience of the self, and at the state of
being simply what one is. This is expressed as an ethical demand by the
motto of Paracelsus, the four-hundredth anniversary of whose birth we
celebrated in the autumn of 1941: Alterius non sit, qui suus esse potest
(That man no other man shall own,/Who to himself belongs alone)a
motto both characteristically Swiss and characteristically alchemical. But
the way to this goal is toilsome and not for all to travel. Est longissima
via, say the alchemists. We are still only at the beginning of a
development whose origins lie in late antiquity, and which throughout the
Middle Ages led little more than a hole-and-corner existence, vegetating in
obscurity and represented by solitary eccentrics who were called, not
without reason, tenebriones. Nevertheless men like Albertus Magnus,
Roger Bacon, and Paracelsus were among the fathers of modern science,
and their spirit did much to shake the authority of the total Church. Our
modern psychology grew out of the spirit of natural science and, without
realizing it, is carrying on the work begun by the alchemists. These men
were convinced that the donum artis was given only to the few electis, and
today our experience shows us only too plainly how arduous is the work
with each patient and how few can attain the necessary knowledge and
experience. Meanwhile the disintegration and weakening of that salutary
institution, the Christian Church, goes on at an alarming rate, and the loss
of any firm authority is gradually leading to an intellectual, political, and
social anarchy which is repugnant to the soul of European man,
accustomed as he is to a patriarchal order. The present attempts to achieve
full individual consciousness and to mature the personality are, socially
speaking, still so feeble that they carry no weight at all in relation to our
historic needs. If our European social order is not to be shaken to its
foundations, authority must be restored at all costs.
[222]
This is probably one reason for the efforts now being made in Europeto replace the collectivity of the Church by the collectivity of the State.
And just as the Church was once absolute in its determination to make
theocracy a reality, so the State is now making an absolute bid for
totalitarianism. The mystique of the spirit has not been replaced by a
mystique either of nature or of the lumen naturae, as Paracelsus named it,
but by the total incorporation of the individual in a political collective
called the State. This offers a way out of the dilemma, for the parental
imagos can now be projected upon the State as the universal provider and
the authority responsible for all thinking and willing. The ends of science
are made to serve the social collective and are only valued for their
piactical utility to the collectives ends. The natural course of
psychological development is succeeded, not by a spiritual direction which
spans the centuries and keeps cultural values alive, but by a political
directorate which ministers to the power struggles of special groups and
promises economic benefits to the masses. In this way European mans
deep-seated longing for a patriarchal and hierarchical order finds an
appropriate concrete expression which accords only too well with the herd
instinct, but is fixed at such a low level as to be in every respect
detrimental to culture.
[223]
It is here that opinion is apt to be divided. In so far as psycho therapy
claims to stand on a scientific basis and thus by the principle of free
investigation, its declared aim is to educate people towards independence
and moral freedom in accordance with the knowledge arrived at by
unprejudiced scientific research. Whatever the conditions to which the
individual wishes to adapt himself, he should always do so consciously
and of his own free choice. But, in so far as political aims and the State are
to claim precedence, psycho therapy would inevitably become the
instrument of a particular political system, and it is to its aims that people
would have to be educated and at the same time seduced from their own
highest destiny. Against this conclusion it will undoubtedly be objected
that mans ultimate destiny lies not in his existence as an individual but in
the aspirations of human society, because without this the individual could
not exist at all. This objection is a weighty one and cannot be lightly
dismissed. It is an undoubted truth that the individual exists only by virtue
of society and has always so existed. That is why among primitive tribes
we find the custom of initiation into manhood, when, by means of a ritual
death, the individual is detached from his family and indeed from hiswhole previous identity, and is reborn as a member of the tribe. Or we find
early civilizations, such as the Egyptian and Babylonian, where all
individuality is concentrated in the person of the king, while the ordinary
person remains anonymous. Or again, we observe whole families in which
for generations the individuality of the name has compensated for the
nonentity of its bearers; or a long succession of Japanese artists who
discard their own name and adopt the name of a master, simply adding
after it a modest numeral. Nevertheless, it was the great and imperishable
achievement of Christianity that, in contrast to these archaic systems which
are all based on the original projection of psychic contents, it gave to each
individual man the dignity of an immortal soul, whereas in earlier times
this prerogative was reserved to the sole person of the king. It would lead
me too far to discuss here just how much this Christian innovation
represents an advance of human consciousness and of culture in general,
by putting an end to the projection of the highest values of the individual
soul upon the king or other dignitaries. The innate will to consciousness, to
moral freedom and culture, proved stronger than the brute compulsion of
projections which keep the individual permanently imprisoned in the dark
of unconsciousness and grind him down into nonentity. Certainly this
advance laid a cross upon him the torment of consciousness, of moral
conflict, and the uncertainty of his own thoughts. This task is so
immeasurably difficult that it can be accomplished, if at all, only by stages,
century by century, and it must be paid for by endless suffering and toil in
the struggle against all those powers which are incessantly at work
persuading us to take the apparently easier road of unconsciousness. Those
who go the way of unconsciousness imagine that the task can safely be left
to others or, ultimately, to the anonymous State. But who are these
others, these obvious supermen who pretend to be able to do what
everybody is only too ready to believe that he cannot do? They are men
just like ourselves, who think and feel as we do, except that they are past
masters in the art of passing the buck. Exactly who is the State?The
agglomeration of all the nonentities composing it. Could it be personified,
the result would be an individual, or rather a monster, intellectually and
ethically far below the level of most of the individuals in it, since it
represents mass psychology raised to the nth power. Therefore Christianity
in its best days never subscribed to a belief in the State, but set before man
a supramundane goal which should redeem him from the compulsive forceof his projections upon this world, whose ruler is the spirit of darkness.
And it gave him an immortal soul that he might have a fulcrum from
which to lift the world off its hinges, showing him that his goal lies not in
the mastery of this world but in the attainment of the Kingdom of God,
whose foundations are in his own heart.
[224]
If, then, man cannot exist without society, neither can he exist without
oxygen, water, albumen, fat, and so forth. Like these, society is one of the
necessary conditions of his existence. It would be ludicrous to maintain
that man lives in order to brea the air. It is equally ludicrous to say that the
individual exists for society. Society is nothing more than a term, a
concept for the symbiosis of a group of human beings. A concept is not a
carrier of life. The sole and natural carrier of life is the individual, and that
is so throughout nature. Society or State is an agglomeration of life-
carriers and at the same time, as an organized form of these, an important
condition of life. It is therefore not quite true to say that the individual can
exist only as a particle in society. At all events man can live very much
longer without the State than without air.
8
[225]
When the political aim predominates there can be no doubt that a
secondary thing has been made the primary thing. Then the individual is
cheated of his rightful destiny and two thousand years of Christian
civilization are wiped out. Consciousness, instead of being widened by the
withdrawal of projections, is narrowed, because society, a mere condition
of human existence, is set up as a goal. Society is the greatest temptation to
unconsciousness, for the mass infallibly swallows up the individualwho
has no security in himself and reduces him to a helpless particle. The
totalitarian State could not tolerate for one moment the right of
psycho therapy to help man fulfil his natural destiny. On the contrary, it
would be bound to insist that psycho therapy should be nothing but a tool
for the production of manpower useful to the State. In this way it would
become a mere technique tied to a single aim, that of increasing social
efficiency. The soul would forfeit all life of its own and become a function
to be used as the State saw fit. The science of psychology would be
degraded to a study of the ways and means to exploit the psychic
apparatus. As to its therapeutic aim, the complete and successful
incorporation of the patient into the State machine would be the criterion
of cure. Since this aim can best be achieved by making the individualcompletely soulless that is, as unconscious as possibleall methods
designed to increase consciousness would at one stroke become obsolete,
and the best thing would be to bring out of the lumber-rooms of the past all
the methods that have ever been devised to prevent man from becoming
conscious of his unconscious contents. Thus the art of psycho therapy
would be driven into a complete regression.
9
[226]
Such, in broad outline, is the alternative facing psycho therapy at this
present juncture. Future developments will decide whether Europe, which
fancied it had escaped the Middle Ages, is to be plunged for a second time
and for centuries into the darkness of an Inquisition. This will only happen
if the totalitarian claims of the State are forcibly carried through and
become a permanency. No intelligent person will deny that the
organization of society, which we call the State, not only feels a lively
need to extend its authority but is compelled by circumstances to do so. If
this comes about by free consent and the conscious choice of the public,
the results will leave nothing to be desired. But if it comes about for the
sake of convenience, in order to avoid tiresome decisions, or from lack of
consciousness, then the individual runs the certain risk of being blotted out
as a responsible human being. The State will then be no different from a
prison or an ant-heap.
[227]
Although the conscious achievement of individuality is consistent
with mans natural destiny, it is nevertheless not his whole aim. It cannot
possibly be the object of human education to create an anarchic
conglomeration of individual existences. That would be too much like the
unavowed ideal of extreme individualism, which is essentially no more
than a morbid reaction against an equally futile collectivism. In contrast to
all this, the natural process of individuation brings to birth a consciousness
of human community precisely because it makes us aware of the
unconscious, which unites and is common to all mankind. Individuation is
an at-one-ment with oneself and at the same time with humanity, since
oneself is a part of humanity. Once the individual is thus secured in
himself, there is some guarantee that the organized accumulation of
individuals in the Stateeven in one wielding greater authoritywill
result in the formation no longer of an anonymous mass but of a conscious
community. The indispensable condition for this is conscious freedom of
choice and individual decision. Without this freedom and self-determination there is no true community, and, it must be said, without
such community even the free and self-secured individual cannot in the
long run prosper. Moreover, the common weal is best served by
independent personalities. Whether man today possesses the maturity
needed for such a decision is another question. On the other hand,
solutions which violently forestall natural development and are forced on
mankind are equally questionable. The facts of nature cannot in the long
run be violated. Penetrating and seeping through everything like water,
they will undermine any system that fails to take account of them, and
sooner or later they will bring about its downfall. But an authority wise
enough in its statesmanship to give sufficient free play to natureof which
spirit is a partneed fear no premature decline. It is perhaps a humiliating
sign of spiritual immaturity that European man needs, and wants, a large
measure of authority. The fact has to be faced that countless millions in
Europewith the guilty complicity of reformers whose childishness is
only equalled by their lack of traditionhave escaped from the authority
of the Church and the patria potestas of kings and emperors only to fall
helpless and senseless victims to any power that cares to assume authority.
The immaturity of man is a fact that must enter into all our calculations.
10
[228]
We in Switzerl and are not living on a little planetoid revolving in
empty space, but on the same earth as the rest of Europe. We are right in
the middle of these problems, and if we are unconscious, we are just as
likely to succumb to them as the other nations. The most dangerous thing
would be for us to imagine that we are on a higher plane of consciousness
than our neighbours. There is no question of that. While it would be an
impropriety for a handful of psychologists and psycho therapists like
ourselves to take our importance too seriouslyor I might say, too
pompously I would nevertheless emphasize that just because we are
psychologists it is our first task and duty to understand the psychic
situation of our time and to see clearly the problems and challenges with
which it faces us. Even if our voice is too weak to make itself heard above
the tumult of political strife and fades away ineffectively, we may yet
comfort ourselves with the saying of the Chinese Master: When the
enlightened man is alone and thinks rightly, it can be heard a thousand
miles away.
[229]
All beginnings are small. Therefore we must not mind doing tedious but conscientious work on obscure individuals, even though the goal
towards which we strive seems unattainably far off. But one goal we can
attain, and that is to develop and bring to maturity individual personalities.
And inasmuch as we are convinced that the individual is the carrier of life,
we have served lifes purpose if one tree at least succeeds in bearing fruit,
though a thousand others remain barren. Anyone who proposed to bring all
growing things to the highest pitch of luxuriance would soon find the
weedsthose hardiest of perennialswaving above his head. I therefore
consider it the prime task of psycho therapy today to pursue with singleness
of purpose the goal of individual development. So doing, our efforts will
follow natures own striving to bring life to the fullest possible fruition in
each individual, for only in the individual can life fulfil its meaningnot
in the bird that sits in a gilded cage.




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