Carl Jung: When you get into a disagreeable situation where you see no opening...

When you get into a disagreeable situation where you see no opening, no direct path, you assume that you are quite alone with yourself.

Here again is a fact of which one is usually not aware: when you get into a disagreeable situation where you see no opening, no direct path, you assume that you are quite alone with yourself.

In a way it is a very good thing that you think so; otherwise you would never make up your mind, you would remain merely a child.

You must believe that you are practically alone.

But you may find yourself in a really tight place where you can’t get out, where you are helpless.

Then you recognize that you are not alone, because such an absolute impasse is an archetypal situation, and an archetypal figure becomes
constellated, a fact in your psychology, a potential, and so you are up to the situation.

This has repeated itself innumerable times in history, man has again and again passed through such situations and has a psychological method of adapting, the thing to do in such a case.

For by his consciousness alone, particularly the dim consciousness of early ages, man was quite unable to in- vent such a thing; to primitive man everything was revealed, he invented absolutely nothing, he could not think, it thought.

So it is the totality of the psyche that functions in that way; the psyche produces a double, it brings up an- other figure; that is a psychological fact.

The psychopompos is this second figure; you can call it the daimon [divine manifestation], or the shadow, or a god, or an ancestor
spirit; it does not matter what name you give it, it is simply a figure; it might even be an animal.

For in such a predicament we are dépossèdés [dispossessed], we lose the power of our ego, we lose our self- confidence.

Until that moment, we were willful or arbitrary, we had made our own choice, we had found out a way, we had proceeded as far as this particular place.

Then suddenly we are in an impasse, we lose faith in ourselves, and it is just as if all of our energy became regressive.

And then our psyche reacts by constellating that double, which has the effect of leading us out of the situation. Carl Jung, Visions Seminar, Page 385