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The Soul of Carl Jung

Modern Man in Search of a Soul

How Therapists Should Handle the Psychic Challenge of Aging

By Carl Jung

In Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Carl Jung addresses the psychic challenges of aging and how the denial of age is rooted in a patient’s spiritual problem:

Just as a childish person shrinks back from the unknown in the world and in human existence, so the grown man shrinks back from the second half of life. It is as if unknown and dangerous tasks were expected of him; or as if he were threatened with sacrifices and losses which he does not wish to accept; or as if his life up to now seemed to him so fair and so precious that he could not do without it.

Is it perhaps at bottom the fear of death? That does not seem to me very probable, because as a rule death is still far in the distance, and is therefore regarded somewhat in the light of an abstraction. Experience shows us rather that the basis and cause of all the difficulties of this transition are to be found in a deep-seated and peculiar change within the psyche. In order to characterize it I must take for comparison the daily course of the sun—but a sun that is endowed with human feeling and man’s limited consciousness.

In the morning it arises from the nocturnal sea of unconsciousness and looks upon the wide, bright world which lies before it in an expanse that steadily widens the higher it climbs in the firmament. In this extension of its field of action caused by its own rising, the sun will discover its significance; it will see the attainment of the greatest possible height—the widest possible dissemination of its blessings—as its goal. In this conviction the sun pursues its unforeseen course to the zenith; unforeseen, because its career is unique and individual, and its culminating point could not be calculated in advance. At the stroke of noon the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning. The sun falls into contradiction with itself. It is as though it should draw in its rays, instead of emitting them. Light and warmth decline and are at last extinguished.

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. I have given psychological treatment to too many people of advancing years, and have looked too often into the secret chambers of their souls, not to be moved by this fundamental truth.

The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning. The significance of the morning undoubtedly lies in the development of the individual, our entrenchment in the outer world, the propagation of our kind and the care of our children. This is the obvious purpose of nature. But when this purpose has been attained—and even more than attained—shall the earning of money, the extension of conquests and the expansion of life go steadily on beyond the bounds of all reason and sense? Whoever carries over into the afternoon the law of the morning—that is, the aims of nature—must pay for so doing with damage to his soul just as surely as a growing youth who tries to salvage his childish egoism must pay for this mistake with social failure. Moneymaking, social existence, family and posterity are nothing but plain nature—not culture. Culture lies beyond the purpose of nature. Could by any chance culture be the meaning and purpose of the second half of life?

Excerpt from the C.G. Jung ebook, Modern Man in Search of a Soul

Filed Under: Carl Jung

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JUNGIAN TERMINOLOGY

Active imagination: A method of assimilating unconscious contents through some form of self-expression.

Anima: The inner feminine side of a man.

Animus: The inner masculine side of a woman.

Archetype: Primordial, structural elements of the human psyche.

Assimilation: The process of integrating outer objects and unconscious contents into consciousness.

Collective Unconscious: A structural layer of the human psyche containing inherited elements, distinct from the personal unconscious.

Consciousness: The function or activity which maintains the relation of psychic contents to the ego.

Ego: The central complex in the field of consciousness.

Enantiodromia: The emergence of the unconscious opposite in the course of time.

Individuation: A process of psychological differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality.

Inflation: A state of mind characterized by an exaggerated sense of self-importance, often compensated by feelings of inferiority.

Jungian Analysis: A form of therapy aimed at bringing unconscious contents to consciousness.

Myth: An involuntary collective statement based on an unconscious psychic experience.

Neurosis: A psychological crisis due to a state of disunity with oneself.

Projection: An automatic process whereby contents of one’s own unconscious are perceived to be in others.

Psyche: The totality of all psychological processes, both conscious and unconscious.

Psychosis. An extreme dissociation of the personality due to the activity of unconscious complexes that are completely disconnected from consciousness.

Self: The archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the psyche.

Shadow: Hidden or unconscious aspects of oneself which the ego has either repressed or never recognized.

Spirit: An archetype and a functional complex, often personified and experienced as enlivening.

Symbol: The best possible expression for something unknown.

Synchronicity: A phenomenon where an event in the outside world coincides meaningfully with a psychological state of mind.

Transcendent function: A psychic function that arises from the tension between consciousness and the unconscious and supports their union.

Unconscious: The totality of all psychic phenomena that lack the quality of consciousness.

Wholeness. A state in which consciousness and the unconscious work together in harmony.

From Daryl Sharp’s Jung Lexicon

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