Carl Jung: intellect is a great sorcerer: it can make even itself disappear.

To J. Allen Gilbert

My dear Gilbert, 8 January 1934

I have just finished reading your MS1 from the first to the last letter.

I must say I enjoyed it unreservedly.

It is a most savage onslaught of intellect on itself.

Building up and pulling down again-what has happened after all?

Oh, I quite agree with you, intellect is a great sorcerer: it can make even itself disappear.

The chapters about psychology, religion, and philosophy are splendid.

The bit of personal biography you produce in the sociological chapter is enormously to the point.

I guess they liked you all right for your candidness.

But I say you would be a perfect model of a Nazi if you were in Germany, where they are going to castrate about 400,000 individuals.

That's what you call a thrust?

But why the devil are you still so intellectual?

Your critique is exceedingly logical and intellectual, not less your fair recognition of what belongs and what does not belong to the jurisdiction of the intellect.

Nowhere do I find you kicking your intellect about a bit, juggling, shifting, moulding, tricking and that sort of thing, which life seems to do so often.

You were most faithfully intellectual.

Surely you would not let that lazy beggar starve to death, would you?

No, you would feed him and tomorrow you would kick him in the bottom.

That's life, isn't it?

And he was made for it, otherwise he never could have grown a bottom.

Life is marvellously inconsistent.

It even wants some sympathy with the poor old Harlequin Intellect.

Isn't that delight-maker life's useful instrument in its attempts at tricking the human mind into the belief in so-called reality?

Isn't it remarkable that it's just you who make such a bad case for the intellect?

You sit at the microscope and see it as a very black thing indeed.

Would you say, black for yourself?

I would.

Sorry that I have kept you waiting so long, but I wanted to read your book.

And I have enjoyed it profoundly.

Cordially yours,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 134

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Great Sites to visit:

1. Jenna Lilla's Path of the Soul http://jennalilla.org/

2. Steve Jung-Hearted Parker's Jung Currents http://jungcurrents.com/

3. Frith Luton's Jungian Dream Analysis and Psychotherapy: http://frithluton.com/articles/

4. Lance S. Owens The Gnosis Archives http://gnosis.org/welcome.html