Carl Jung: There are things which are simply incomprehensible to the tough brains of our race and time.

To J. B. Rhine

Dear Dr. Rhine, 20 May 1925

I was glad to be able to contribute to your researches, but being of a less optimistic outlook than you Americans I never put my experiences on show.

I have learned too much from the past in that respect.

There are things which are simply incomprehensible to the tough brains of our race and time.

One simply risks being taken for crazy or insincere, and I have received so much of either that I learned to be careful in keeping quiet.

I would ask it as a favour from every psychologist in Europe not to put that photograph on the wall, but since North Carolina is very far away from Europe, so far away, indeed, that probably very few are even aware of the existence of a Duke University, I shall not object.

I have found that there are very few people who are interested in such things from healthy motives and fewer still who are able to think about such and similar matters, and so in the course of the years I arrived at the conviction that the main difficulty doesn't consist in the question how to tell, but rather in how not to tell it.

Man's horror now is so great that in order not to lose his modest brain capacity he always prefers to treat the fellow who disturbed him as crazy.

If you are really serious in teaching people something good, you must do your best to avoid such prejudices.

Those are the reasons why I prefer not to communicate too many of my experiences.

They would confront the scientific world with too upsetting problems.

Sincerely yours,

C.G. Jung ~Carl Jung, Letters Vol. I, Page 190