Carl Jung: "Americans Must Say No"

Americans Must Say “No"
Interview with Carl Jung (1875 - 1961) in 1931 for The Sun (a New York newspaper published from 1833 - 1950)

1 The tempo of America is being taken as a norm to which life should be directed. In the world today America stands on one side, with its often enviable "standard of living" slogan before its eyes, and Russia on the other side, also uniformly conscious of a present "standard of poverty."

2 Both countries are today's great forces. It is, of course, quite impossible to think that these two diverse natures of America and Russia could merge, or would merge: they would fight out their differences to the death. Europe stands between Russia and America as a refuge of that individualism which is necessary to the leading of a happy life, an individualism more or less different in each case, but an individualism opposed to the uniformity of both Russia and America, and an individualism necessary if we are to satisfy our great unconscious and primary mind which warns us of our misdirections and, finally, to save us, fosters neuroses.

3 New York is only one glaring example of what the prevailing notions in America do to the general nature of people. In other States, like California, where not so much attention is paid to people's foolishness, the insane are not so easily separated, and throughout America there are thousands suffering from sick souls who are never quite hospital cases. What America needs in the face of the tremendous urge toward uniformity, desire of things, the desire for complications in life, for being like one's neighbors, for making records (instructor’s note-- by “making records,” here Jung means breaking records, like being the first to do something, setting speed records, etc. and wanting to be famous just for the sake of fame), et cetera, is one great; healthy ability to say "No." To rest a minute and realize that many of the things being sought are unnecessary to a happy life, and that trying to live exactly like one's successful neighbor is not following the essentially different dictates, possibly, of a widely different underlying personality which a person may possess and yet consciously try to rid himself of, the conflict always resulting in some form, sooner or later, of a neurosis, sickness, or insanity.

4 We are awakening a little to the feeling that something is wrong in the world, that our modern prejudice of overestimating the importance of the intellect and the conscious mind might be false. We want simplicity. We are suffering, in our cities, from a need of simple things. We would like to see our great railroad terminals deserted, the streets deserted, a great peace descend upon us.

5 These things are being expressed in thousands of dreams. Women's dreams, men's dreams, the dreams of human beings, all having much the same collective primal unconscious mind—the same in the central African Negro I have lived among and the New York stockbroker—and it is in our dreams that the body makes itself aware to our mind. The dream is in large part a warning of something to come. The dream is the body's best expression, in the best possible symbol it can express, that something is going wrong. The dream calls our mind's attention to the body's instinctive feeling.

6 If man doesn't pay attention to these symbolic warnings his body he pays in other ways. A neurosis is merely the body's taking control, regardless of the conscious mind. We have a splitting headache, we say, when a boring society forces us to quit it and we haven't the courage to do so with full freedom. Our head actually aches. We leave.

7 When whole countries avoid these warnings, and fill their asylums, become uniformly neurotic, we are in great danger. The last war, I thought, had taught us something. Seemingly not. Our unconscious wish for deserted places, quiet, inactivity, which now and then is being expressed in the heart of our great cities by a lyrical outbreak of some poet or madman, may project us, against our conscious wills, into another catastrophe from which we may never recover. We may gas our lives out (instructor’s note: meaning die from poisonous gas), and then will we have deserted refuges and none of us left to sit, and dream, in the sun. ~Carl Jung [1931] found in C.G. Jung Speaking; Pages 47-49.