Carl Jung: Hence I would not recommend anybody to wish to go beyond himself.

To Ewald Jung

Dear Ewald, 31 July 1935

Hearty thanks for your birthday congratulations!

What I call transformation is at bottom a question of fate.

Although we may wish to keep within our own limits, or to overstep them, it is never done by wishing but only by happening.

Only when it happens to us that we overstep our limits can we be sure that we have overstepped them and that it had to be so.

In the end there is no legitimate having-to-go-beyond-ourselves.

Hence I would not recommend anybody to wish to go beyond himself.

Moreover this expression is false; we cannot go beyond ourselves but only deeper into ourselves, and this self is not identical with the ego because in this self we appear wondrously strange to ourselves.

As for your question about the anima, it can be answered with yes and no.

It is really the same problem as that of the constitution.

For what we are stuck with we have a certain responsibility, namely for the way we act towards it, but not for the fact that it exists.

You are not responsible for your constitution but you are stuck with it, and so it is with the anima, which is likewise a constitutional factor one is stuck with.

At any rate we can never treat the anima with moral reprimands; instead of this we have, or there is, wisdom, which in our days seems to have passed into oblivion.

Please thank your wife and your sister for their kind wishes,

With best greetings,

CARL ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Pages 192-193